Tesler The Legacy Of The Lisa Macworld

Note Pad: Larry Tesler The Legacy of the Lisa A member of the Lisa development team reflects on how the Lisa changed personal computing On April 29 Appl announced char ic would cease production of che Macintosh XL computer, formerly known as che Lisa. As a member of ch group that helped create che Lisa, I c uldn'c help but feel a pang w hen I heard the news. Yer my verriding fe ling is one of gratifi cation. In its brief product cycle, the Lisa changed people's expectaci ns of a personal computer. A mong Apple products, che Lisa spawned not only the Macintosh but also che MouseText opti n on che Apple II (see "The Lisa·s Influence'} Even I BM PC pro ducts were heavil y influenc d by che cechnology, including VisiCor p's Visi On, Microsoji \'(lfndows, Digital Research's GEM, As hron Tace·s Frameu ork, and IBM 's Top View. The user interface wa the most publiciz d characterist ic of the Lisa. Ir introduced a host of ideas thac have been w idely emulated, ranging from how column s are wid ned in a spreadsheet ro how people are notified of mistakes and problems. When the Lisa developm nt team d signed the user interface, we I arrowed good ideas from wherever we could find them. For example, the Lisa borrowed pop-up menus and overlapping w indows from Smalltalk, status lines from VisiCalc, and automatic remova l of extra spaces afc r text deletion from Douglas Engelban's research at RI I mernacional. But the Lisa user inter face was not a copy of any chat preceded it; it was distinctive. It was ch firsc to feature the nowfarn ili ar menu bar, the onebutton mouse, the Clipboard, and che TJ·ash can . Although the Xerox tar had icons, the Lisa was the first prod uct to lee you drag them w ith the mouse, open them by double-clicking, and watch them zoom into overlapping w indows. Tu minimize the time it would take people to learn to use che Li a, Apple technical writer., programmer , and marketers struggled for two years to find suitable termi nology to appear in menus, dialogs, alerts, and manuals. Our foreign-language translaror spent months more choosing the corresponding terms in French Ita lian, German , Spanish, and other languages. It may come as a suq ri se that terms like Revert, Plain Text, Align Le.ft, Clipboa rd, and Panel we re difficult to coin and even more difficult to agree upon. When we stud ied VisiCa/c, we discovered chat people had trouble imerpreting the term General Format, which means that a number ryped into a spreadsheet cell is right justified, w hile texc is left justified. After extensive brainstorming and testing of LisaCalc, we cho e Words left, numbers rigbt, which was sel fexplanator y if a bit verbose. Much has been made of the high cost and five-year develop ment time of the Lisa. True, the development was expensive, but it did not take five years. The first Lisa was shipped in May 1983. Five years earlier, in 1978, Apple had launched a project code-nam ed "Lisa," bur that project's goal was quite different from w ha…