[HN Gopher] Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)
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Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)
Author : easeout
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-03-02 22:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
| jbullock35 wrote:
| Good interview. It includes insightful commentary on how Xerox
| did and didn't influence the project, starting with this:
|
| > BYTE: Do you have a Xerox Star here that you work with?
| WillAdams wrote:
| For more of this sort of thing see:
|
| https://folklore.org/0-index.html
|
| though I still think about what might have been when I read:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
|
| and wish there was something readily available and well-supported
| along those lines now.
| musicale wrote:
| Shame that Bill Gates was able to force Apple to kill MacBasic.
|
| I wonder if Apple would have included it in the box, or if it
| would have been popular, and if the Mac would have attracted
| more hobbyist programmers like the Apple II did?
|
| On the other hand, a couple of years later Apple introduced
| HyperCard, which really was a kind of end-user programming
| revolution, even if it largely became an evolutionary dead end
| (though HyperTalk influenced AppleScript and probably other
| languages as well.) Perhaps if HyperCard had been networked
| then it might have survived longer into the web/JavaScript era.
| WillAdams wrote:
| HyperCard was late to the show, and confused by not being
| released as a programming/development tool (usually you had
| to make a special change to enable that), and it was weird,
| and it made "Stacks", not programs/applications.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Originally, there was no separate "player" version of
| Hypercard, so the stack editing/development tools were
| universally available. The Hypercard player appeared as a
| separate thing after Clarus took over as Apple's software
| distribution arm.
|
| Typing "magic" in the message box of the Hypercard player
| converted it into a full version of Hypercard.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Myst was created in HyperCard (I think?), one of the most
| popular computer games of all time (and recreated like 5
| times now!).
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yes, and before that there was _The Manhole_ which was
| described as "Where Alice would have gone if Alice had
| had Hypercard".
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The Mac was priced too far out of the hobbyist snack bracket.
| And Steve Jobs deliberately sealed it off to be un-expandable
| and mostly unfriendly to tinkerers.
| justin66 wrote:
| One can read the entirety of Byte's US magazine output, without
| the blogspam:
|
| https://vintageapple.org/byte/
|
| (I have no idea if the foreign language editions and so on made
| it online)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Nice. Found the article on pages 90-114 of this 536 page PDF.
| Fewer typos/errors, and tons of nostalgic ads... but takes a
| while to load:
|
| https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198302_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
| justin66 wrote:
| If you're into the ads, Jason Scott has a project going to
| scan all the old Computer Shopper magazines. I haven't looked
| to see exactly where things stand with that.
|
| http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543
|
| I recently started looking at ads in the old Byte magazines
| and among the things I was reminded of was how long the Z80
| held on among the Byte crowd. And how much money (more
| apparent if you adjust for inflation) hobbyists and aspiring
| professionals were willing to spend on their hardware and
| software toys in the eighties. Having grown up in that time
| makes things like (a timely example) some people whinging
| about the cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 feel so irritating and
| inexplicable.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There was a much smaller difference between high and median
| incomes in the early 80s, so the original Mac would have
| been around 1 month's salary - not trivial, but not an
| impossible reach for many people.
|
| Lisa was far out of that bracket. But business S-100
| systems had been selling for $2k to $20k and up since the
| 70s, so $10k for Lisa's advanced features would have seemed
| realistic.
|
| Today most people are paying far more in student debt,
| health insurance, and housing costs. So although nominal
| income is three times higher, free disposable income hasn't
| kept pace.
|
| It's true that hardware today is commoditised and much,
| much cheaper. But at the low end, those old II/Mac systems
| were still more affordable to middle class families than a
| straight inflation conversion suggests.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| One months salary is still an awful lot for something
| that no middle class family ever needed. If the goal is
| educational and/or recreational (games), then a 6502
| machine could be had at a fraction of the cost and with a
| community. In the UK, the Macintosh basically didn't
| exist as far as I remember, my first 68000 machine was an
| Atari ST in 1986/7, still a fraction of the price of a
| Mac. I didn't see a Mac until the early nineties and it
| was by then nothing new or interesting (the OS was
| already considered technically obsolete).
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep, same here in Canada. My mother was a teacher and my
| father a sometimes-unemployed machinist, so on the upper
| side of working class, really, and big exciting family
| expenditures in the early & mid 80s were things like a
| microwave or a dishwasher which we could afford maybe
| once a year at tax return time. It was a big expenditure
| for them to get me the VIC-20, which I ran off an older
| B&W 9" TV. Saved my own allowance money & money from
| bottle recycle returns to get a used Atari 520ST in 1987.
|
| They had a single Macintosh at the school, which I
| sometimes got to play with. Even the Apple II was priced
| out of the "home" market possibilities. Family friends
| had one, but it was like a luxury product like their hi-
| fi system or boats.
|
| Maybe the US was a different story. But here a Mac was
| way out of the reach out of people on a typical income.
|
| Also people didn't typically take on debt like they do
| now. Interest rates were double-digits.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There was a recent post about restoring a different
| Motorola 68k machine, an early 80's $25,000 HP Series 200
| 9836C.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2023/06/20/repairing-a-25000-hp-
| worksta...
|
| People forget how ruinously expensive RAM was in the
| early 80's, and that HP machine had a very large amount
| for the time.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| An interesting interview with Dan Smith, who was the User
| Interface Coordinator for the Lisa, and then switched to the Mac
| project, is at https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" Tesler: Each engineer set his or her own schedule. Some
| engineers work something like Monday through Friday from nine to
| five. Others work all day at the office, then go home and work
| all night there. And what an individual engineer does may vary
| from time to time.
|
| Daniels: These people have pride. They set their own milestones
| and they want to meet them, so they'll put in extra work to do
| that.
|
| Tesler: We decided a long time ago that since the project would
| obviously go on for more than a few months -- a couple of years
| -- we couldn't have this constant pressure on everybody, because
| people would just crack. _"
|
| This is great managerial wisdom right here.
|
| From everything I've read, Larry Tesler really was someone great.
| RIP
| icemanind wrote:
| "The 'mouse' pointing device is about the size of a package of
| cigarettes and has one button on top". God bless the 80s!
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| And you'd have to pop the ball out every now and then to clean
| the crud that had built up on the x & y rollers that otherwise
| made the on-screen pointer stick and skip. Good times.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| And even though we're well into the future of optical mice,
| when my Bluetooth mouse disconnects for a few seconds, the
| habit of thunking it on the desk a couple times persists...
| (to unstick the ball)
| wisemang wrote:
| > We had a couple of real beauties where the users couldn't use
| any of the versions that were given to them and they would
| immediately say, "Why don't you just do it this way?" and that
| was obviously the way to do it. So sometimes we got the ideas
| from our user tests, and as soon as we heard the idea we all
| thought, "Why didn't we think of that?" Then we did it that way.
|
| I'd love to hear some specific examples of this. Things that we
| probably take totally for granted now but weren't at all obvious
| during the initial design and implementation phases.
|
| This isn't the kind of shit you get from A/B testing.
| CharlesW wrote:
| You might find the example in section 4.2 of this interesting:
| https://www.applefritter.com/content/enlisting-user-help-sof...
| rahkiin wrote:
| Interesting, thank you! I believe they are describing the
| invention of the clipboard: two-step cut-and-paste instead of
| defining a selection and a destination and then executing a
| move command.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| This type of interview, with such detailed technical questions
| and answers, with actual engineers (not product spokespeople),
| would be impossible these days.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Not impossible, but it would likely be relegated to a video on
| some obscure YouTube channel with no transcript and a few
| hundred views. Though for the biggest orgs (Microsoft and Apple
| of today), there are too many layers of red tape and lawyers,
| so in that case I'd fully agree.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| One of my favorite interviews in recent years was the Chris
| Lattner interview by the three guys on the Accidental Tech
| Podcast
|
| https://atp.fm/371
|
| All of the hosts are very technical.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Wayne Rosing is still working on technical problems at Las
| Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara. Absolute legend of an
| engineer. There is a LISA in the conference room there :)
| lisper wrote:
| "Rosing: ... We felt it was worth risking a theft to gain the
| increased productivity of people working at home."
|
| This is so ironic because Wayne was the one who shut down WFH
| at Google when he took over from Urs Holzle back in 2001. That
| was one the things that caused me to leave.
| GoofballJones wrote:
| Man, I really miss Byte. Subscribed to it for years. Loved that
| it covered a wide variety of topics.
| zabzonk wrote:
| and loved the covers!
| Lio wrote:
| Byte was great. I've the discussion of the NEC 7220 here.
|
| It was widely available here in the UK and in a pre-world wide
| web age it was one of the most important ways of knowing what
| was going in the US market. Well for a young me anyway.
|
| I loved it. I remember the issue detail the NeXT Cube
| particularly.
| lapcat wrote:
| > In software, we drew mostly experienced people from other
| companies and very few people straight out of school. Even the
| ones we took out of school generally had lots of job experience.
| In fact, one time I surveyed the applications group and found an
| average of nine years' work experience in software. When we
| looked at resumes, we tried to find people with several years of
| experience in development. We made exceptions if someone had
| specialized in something we were interested in or was a top
| student who also had good summer experience. We wanted an
| experienced team because what we've been doing is a very major
| software effort. It's very complex, and there's such a large body
| of software to crank out and make reliable that it takes
| experienced people.
|
| The remarks about team-building were very interesting too.
| cebert wrote:
| > When did you do the hiring?
|
| It's crazy to think Apple Lisa devs were hired without needing to
| solve several Leetcode problems.
| coldcode wrote:
| I had a Lisa on my desk in late 1983, along with an Apple II and
| Apple III and later a PC/XT (not sure if that appeared before
| they took the Lisa away). The Lisa was for evaluation, so I wrote
| some reports with it but didn't get to write any code. It was
| ridiculously expensive, but I could tell that it represented the
| future of personal computing. Explaining to my friends how it
| worked was difficult; even the concept of a mouse, much less
| fonts and a bit-mapped display, was foreign to them. None of my
| friends even owned any kind PC so they had little to compare my
| description to.
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