Smith The Past Present And Future Of The Macintosh Desktop Semaphore Signal

The Past, Present, and Future of the Macintosh Desktop Dan Smith Interview, Semaphore Signal March, 1986 To a first-time user, perhaps the most striking thing about the Macintosh is its use of the desktop metaphor: the folders and other icons intended to help make the Macintosh a user-friendly machine. For a perspective on where those ideas came from, how they were further developed by Apple, and what they might lead to in the future,we interviewed Dan Smith, an Apple Principal Software Engineer. Signal: Give us a brief history of your career at Apple. Smith: I've been at Apple for a little over five years now. I initially signed on to the Lisa project to work on what we called the Desktop Manager, essentially the equivalent of the Finder on the Macintosh. I worked on that for about two years,until the whole Lisa project was near completion. Then I became User Interface Coordinator for the Lisa project, then switched to a consulting role for theMacintosh, since Mac picked up about halfway into the Lisa development stage. I took some time off from the Macintosh and Lisa to start working on some future projects, did that for about nine months, then got pressed back into service to do a program development environment for the Macintosh, which is what I'm working on right now. Signal: Were you the desktop programmer? What was the organization responsible for the desktop and the other Lisa software? Smith: The effort was split up into a couple of different groups. There was the desktop group. Two of us actually did the implementation. I programmed the user interface portion, and Frank Ludolph did a fair amount of the lower level implementation. Then there was the applications group, and that was split up into essentially the different applications that came out: LisaDraw, LisaWrite, and so on. There was also an operating system group, which did the much lower level software. Signal: How did the ideas for the desktop originate, and how were they incorporated into your design? Smith: That's a pretty interesting story. When I started at Apple, the idea of the desktop hadn't really quite been born. In fact, it was thought we'd do something fairly simple, and it would be a one-person job for a couple of months and it would be over. It was a little later in the project that we realized the desktop was going to be a central part of the entire system. The idea of an iconic form didn't come along until quite late into the development of the product. We started off with something that was pretty Smalltalk-like. There was a notion of a thing called a browser, which is essentially a table you could flip through, listing the documents you had in a hierarchical fashion. But the whole initial desktop was essentially technically oriented. We went through iteration after iteration. I remember doing prototype after prototype, and trying them on several groups of people, getting it to be more and more useable. But a number of us were not happy with what we were gettin…