Blast from the Past: Apple Lisa

One of the things I find fascinating is that when you look at the business market, they really weren't very impressed with all of this. Neither Xerox or Apple. In my opinion GUI's didn't really catch on till Apple suggested that people use them for things like drawing and paste-up and layout. While Xerox was suggesting that GUI's be used in business.

On the historical note, Xerox is often given undue credit for originating many of the fundamental modern computing ideas - mouse, windows, menus, etc.

In actual fact, Xerox PARC got its ideas from the earlier work done by Doug Engelbart - it was his team that was employed by Xerox when research funding dried up at Stanford.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Career_and_accomplishments

It's sort of like General Electric and Thomas Edison, except that the latter is a household name, while poor Douglas doesn't get his fair share of the credit.

(The difference being that Edison started GE, while Xerox simply employed Engelbart's former researchers.)

Ups ... forgot the link to the XEROX.

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/movies/digibarn-tv/gui-movies/xerox/index.html

And in fact Steve "borrowed" the ideas from the XEROX alto. But look at the Star. It really was Science-Fiction back then. The even had Networks Servers which exchanged files via dial-up connection several times a day, so you could in fact work in teams spread over several cities... just like working together cia Internet today ... really great stuff.

My advise for everybody: Watch the video about the XEROX Star GUI instead. It's way more interesting and it was, in my opinion, far more advanced that the Lisa.

It's where Steve and Bill stole everything from.

The Networking abilities of the XEROX where so amazing. Really, watch it.

Another blast from the past (with cat and mouse): http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgangkuhnle/326349563/

Loved it. I see it's pretty much the same thing today.

And I totally agree with Henri. What a scary host.

I think the voice of the interviewer has been the inspiration for the voice of Agnes in Apple's speech software :)

The video is 20 minutes but worth the nostalgia. You can skip the first couple minutes as it's quite dull. You'll know when to watch as you'll be back in the 80s.

It's interesting to see taht so many things we have taken for granted in computers were so alien just 2 decades prior.

My soon to be delivered 24" iMac is going to be called Lisa - to go with Sydney (Powerbook) and Veronica (Mac Mini). I like TV. This is of no real relevance to this post of course.