[HN Gopher] At IT School with Apple Lisa
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At IT School with Apple Lisa
Author : fabiojava
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-11-27 18:14 UTC (8 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blisscast.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blisscast.wordpress.com)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Something missed out of that great article is that the Lisa
| efforts contributed to Clascal and the creation of Object Pascal
| with Nitklaus Wirth blessing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal
|
| Which eventually got adopted by Borland, giving great projection
| to one of their engineers, which not only took Object Pascal
| beyond Apple's original design, ended up creating Delphi,
| contributing to J++, creation of C#, TypeScript, and influencing
| other programming languages whose authors got inspired by his
| work.
|
| Anders Hejlsberg contributions to the computing industry,
| probably would have taken a different path had Apple Lisa never
| come to be.
|
| Kind of interesting how these kind of events are all interwined.
| blisscast wrote:
| I'm not an expert on programming languages, but maybe I can see
| about talking about that one day.
| MrAureliusR wrote:
| There's something in this article that all the reading and
| research I have done contradicts: "For this reason, the
| researchers at PARC were, understandably, extremely impressed by
| Jobs's desire to finally use that technology, therefore, on the
| Team's second visit, they were shown even more of PARC's new and
| exciting discoveries, alongside another look at Smalltalk."
|
| This, from what I can tell, was at least mostly untrue. The woman
| who helped create most of the technologies, Adele Goldberg,
| stated on film more than once that she _strongly_ opposed showing
| the Apple team anything, as she knew they would just take the
| technology (in return for giving Xerox the _opportunity_ to
| invest in Apple, wow, what an incredible deal /s). She
| specifically said that she would NOT give the tour unless ordered
| to in writing, and her boss did indeed write that order.
|
| So she and her team very reluctantly gave the entire GUI desktop
| concept away for free. Not to mention they also demonstrated
| object-oriented programming and a networked office, things that
| Apple (and NeXT) would capitalize on later as well.
|
| In later years, Jobs even admitted as much -- he said Xerox could
| have been IBM or Microsoft. They had everything needed to start
| the home computer revolution but squandered it. While it's true
| that Xerox execs didn't want to market the research done at PARC,
| and they wanted to focus on their very lucrative copier business,
| that doesn't mean they had to give the technology away!
| Rochus wrote:
| > _Not to mention they also demonstrated object-oriented
| programming_
|
| Since 2023 we can study the source code of Lisa (see e.g.
| https://github.com/rochus-keller/lisapascal). Lisa's system and
| applications were written mostly in Lisa Pascal (a compiled
| Pascal descendant) with some 68000 assembly; these compilers
| and their runtime bear no resemblance to the Smalltalk VM and
| bytecode system used on the Alto. The object-oriented language
| Clascal was later created, as an "object-oriented variant of
| Pascal", and used for the Lisa Toolkit; it later evolved into
| Object Pascal; both are statically compiled Algol-family
| languages with Pascal syntax and a Simula-style object model,
| not dynamically typed message-sending systems like Smalltalk.
| Apple did not copy Smalltalk's implementation or its language
| surface form for Lisa nor the Mac; there is barely any
| resemblance. What Apple mainly took from PARC were GUI
| interaction ideas (windows, menus, modeless mouse-driven
| editing, later the desktop metaphor). While the December 1979
| demos convinced Jobs of the direction, the specific knowledge
| arrived later primarily through the subsequent move of Xerox
| PARC personnel to Apple.
| fzzzy wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the comment you are replying to?
| They are saying that PARC demonstrated OOP to the Apple team,
| not that the Lisa implemented it.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Implementing it would have to wait till NeXT and Objective
| C, which was quite (but not entirely) Smalltalk-like.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In the book "Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing", shows a bit more
| nuanced point of view.
|
| She might have been against, but apparently many on the team
| were pretty much in favour, as Xerox already had a sharing
| culture with Standford people that would drop by, even without
| permission, which lead to drastic changes in Xerox PARC
| security.
| blisscast wrote:
| I still need to read that, as the episode about NeXT is
| coming soon.
| MrAureliusR wrote:
| Interesting, I'll have to check that out. Can you reference
| any particular chapters/pages?
| macintux wrote:
| > ...that doesn't mean they had to give the technology away!
|
| Xerox made ~$9 million off the visit(s), so not nothing. Had
| they held onto that stock, they might have made billions.
|
| (Update: looks like the stock today would be worth 10-20x
| Xerox's current market capitalization.)
| ndiddy wrote:
| Apple took the basic concept of a GUI and mouse-driven
| interface from Xerox, but the Lisa/Mac are far from a direct
| copy of what was demoed at PARC. Smalltalk didn't have a file
| browser, didn't have pull-down menus, didn't have desktop
| icons. It didn't even have window controls. If you wanted to
| move a window, you had to click on the window title, then
| select "move" from the pop-up menu, then click where you wanted
| the window to move to.
|
| Besides just the graphical UI, Apple also implemented a lot of
| novel technical concepts. For example, Smalltalk windows
| couldn't redraw themselves when they were partially obscured.
| Apple didn't know this restriction existed, so Bill Atkinson in
| their Lisa group invented regions as a way to let partially
| obscured windows only repaint portions of themselves. Meanwhile
| Xerox's own solution for this restriction for the Star (their
| commercialized version of the GUI research) was to ban windows
| from overlapping at all.
|
| Overall modern desktop GUIs have much more in common with the
| Lisa/Mac than the Lisa/Mac have in common with Smalltalk.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Note that from my bitsaver readings, I think Interlisp-D,
| Mesa, and Mesa/Cedar systems didn't suffer from this.
| linguae wrote:
| This is a good video comparing the Apple Lisa to the Xerox
| Star:
|
| https://youtu.be/pBiWtJJN5zk
| electroly wrote:
| > in return for giving Xerox the _opportunity_ to invest in
| Apple, wow
|
| You're being sarcastic but this would have been the most
| lucrative thing Xerox ever did in its entire corporate life, by
| far, if it had held onto the stock. This was a really good deal
| in hindsight. Indeed, it would have been better to liquidate
| Xerox and put all the proceeds into Apple stock; I don't think
| anybody argues that Xerox could have made as much hay as Apple
| did with the technology, even in the best of scenarios. It
| couldn't have known that at the time, of course.
| MrAureliusR wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20 -- at the time it must have seemed like a
| slap in the face to the researchers who opposed the demo. Not
| only do we have to show them the tech, they want money from
| us too?
| pjmlp wrote:
| By the way Apple was going on the late 1990's, Xerox would
| have sold their stocks by then.
|
| My graduation thesis was porting a NeXTSTEP visualisation
| framework into Windows, because my supervisor wanted to get
| rid of his Cube.
|
| It might seem great now, but in those days, Apple and NeXT
| future wasn't looking rosy.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Essay on this at
| https://www.folklore.org/On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.html
|
| My wife's aunt ran one of the largest installation of Xerox Alto
| machines and her budget was very glad of the chance to switch to
| the Mac (the Lisa was _not_ a competitive option).
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