Inside the flop that changed Apple forever 

What other forgotten-but-influential tech deserves more recognition?

If I recall correctly, in Steve Jobs’ biography, there was a passage about how after the team returned from their trip to Xerox and attempted to recreate the technology they saw, Bill Atkinson tried to implement the window multitasking features, not knowing that the people at xerox didn’t know how to do multiple windows that overlap and stack on top of each other and that could be switched with a mouse click, all they had done was give windows some backdrop shadows to give the impression of depth, but it wasn’t functional. So Atkinson figured out how to do actual multitasking between windows because he didn’t know that it was impossible

I was very fortunate to work with a Lisa back in the day. It was the "front end" for AT&T's Tech Publications department photo typesetter. Being an early and avid computer hobbyist, with my start building S100 buss computers (IMSAI 8080, CP/M OS) I was blown away by the Lisa UI. I instantly bought the Mac 128 when it came out and used 3rd party hardware upgrades to bring it up to a Mac 512. The interface was indeed revolutionary, but the product too expensive, and lacked speed and sophistication. Those issues were later solved by the Amiga (full color, faster) and incorporating internal hard drives. All fond memories. Thx for posting. The Lisa deserves far more recognition, and its appearance is still amazingly cool.

1984, I was a senior in high school. I went to the local computer store to check out the Lisa. Wow, I was amazed. Two years later after, I joined the Air force, I bought a Mac Plus. HyperCard was incredible.

I've always loved how humble Bill Atkinson is in interviews. He was a major part of so many incredible developments, and yet to hear him speak everything was inevitable. What a legend

The coolest thing about the Lisa was Lisa Simpson having one. Ready for the documentary though!

I really like this new direction of the Verge. Keep it up!

I worked for Digital Equipment's Terminals Business Unit when the Lisa came out. We ordered one immediately. When we took it out of the box I was awestruck as I got to use a mouse for the first time. When the Macintosh came out we bought one of those. It came fully assembled which was a refreshing contrast to our own PCs which arrived in about 5 separate boxes, each of which contained a piece of 8.5x11 inch paper containing the headline "READ ME FIRST" in big bold letters. To assemble our PC one build a literal tower of daughter boards of ever decreasing size, connected by tiny, flimsy ribbon cables that you had to insert yourself. Good times!

Bill Atkinson is as much interface designer as Nilay Patel is a blog writer. The guy was not only majorly involved in the programming of MacPaint, the poster-child application to demonstrate all the pixel prowess of the Mac's graphical user interface, but pretty much single-handedly wrote QuickDraw (the graphics library that made all this possible), as well as HyperCard.

Menu bar at the top is my favorite thing about Mac OS. It's so easy to just move the mouse all the way up there instead of having to fiddle with the menu if it's attached to the window. It's a tiny little thing but it makes a difference

Congrats to the whole crew. Love these new formats and I can't wait to see the upcoming Lisa documentary. This is what truly sets you guys apart from the competition. Very well done!

To me, the most revolutionary change in OS navigation is search. On a Mac or Windows machine, I just hit the spotlight shortcut or the windows key and type. I rarely mouse around and browse to anything.

I was one of the few Lisa developers outside of Apple back in the early 80s. Getting dev tools from Apple was like pulling teeth. I was building a few custom apps for ComputerLand / BusinessLand, who were a Lisa reseller. They got agreement from Apple to give them a dev system so I could write a couple extensions. I think this should have told the Lisa team something... at least they should have figured out that custom apps were a thing. Even if they kept the "stationary" metaphor, opening it up to developers might have helped the Lisa. The early Mac team on the other hand were notorious for "seeking forgiveness instead of permission" with respect to the developer community. There's a story that Guy Kawasaki was trying to get an early Mac developer some docs and instead of waiting for Inside Macintosh to be finished, he just photocopied what they had and shipped them out. That's ABSOLUTELY the opposite of the Lisa team.

I was 12 when I saw Lisa on display for the first time a year before Macintosh. I asked my father if we could get one, and he looked at the price tag of $10,000 (about $30,000 adjusted). That day was the first time I had heard my father spewing the F-bombs and saying, "who in the f-cking mind would spend that much money on this useless sh-t!" Well, my father got me IBM PCjr. on the cheap: "penny wise, pound foolish" would be what I described my experience with the PCjr.

That “and its afterlife” tease has me excited, the Macintosh XL is pretty underrated and strange

Really enjoyed watching this one. I also don't think that the desktop will go anywhere anytime soon. No matter if AI advances to the point that it organises and does everything, sometimes we'll still want to be quiet and do things ourselves. Like to sit down and watch photos or read a document together, thus some kind of interface will persist and I believe the base UI of a "desktop" will always exist, even in VR/AR.

So The Verge is working on a documentary about the Lisa, the story of Nike and the Air Jordan is coming soon, there's a movie about the Blackberry's rise and fall and the backstory of Tetris just debuted on Apple TV+. This is the year of the "back in the day."

I did a lot of my college work on the Lisa in the 80s. Thought it was amazing and liked it more than the Mac. The first two engineering jobs I had were at companies that had mainframes and I did not use Windows until the early 90s. The first thought in my head when using Windows was that it was just like a Lisa, but in color.

Great video, filming setup and archive images are perfect. Thank you !

Oh my gosh! More of this! I love this digital archeology.

I don't see the visual desktop style UI going away any time soon. The simplified UIs on mobile devices make sense, but just become limiting when used on a desktop with multiple screens. I kind of realised this the first time I opened the Calculator 'app' on a Windows 10 (iirc) laptop and it filled the screen.

Great video. The Lisa was not forgotten! Well-known to those who love the history of personal computing. I never used one growing up, but I certainly knew about them. I appreciate that this video reminds us of Apple's strength: taking existing ideas, improving them, then delivering them to the world in a shiny package. The Lisa is case-in-point. So is the iPad. Both were invented by others. Steve Jobs famously claimed the FingerWorks technology was Apple's, but it was not. Apple saw the value in multi-touch and grabbed it. Then they changed the world with it. Outstanding video and a cool trip down memory lane for [at least] this Gen-Xer.

What a great summary of the Lisa! I'm glad I was able to help with this production :) For anyone wondering, the laugh is me after I tried to run Microsoft Excel, and open a document on another disk, with only one floppy drive. It took 25 disk swaps!

I quite liked my Lisa 2 at the time… 5MB disk + floppy. It cost a small fortune, but i think i recovered the price over a couple of years - then traded it for an XT clone with the NEC V20 chip, and kept running! It was used to write printed user guides for DOS programs, and I used three of them on-screen in tv commercials - pretending to be CAD stations. No frame bars or other problems, ut a lot of long days! It’s certainly hard to think back to those days!

Excellent video! I would love to see more on retro tech!

January 1983 my store’s owner/principal sent me to the Lisa roll-out. I became the Lisa Product Manager. I packed the Lisa, an Electrohome projector and an Apple Dot Matrix Printer into the back of my Subaru wagon and demoed Lisa to industries up and down the Mississippi. What fun days.

This was brilliant! More like this please. What about one on the Microsoft Courier or the entire WebOS phone/tablet ecosystem? Ooh I got one: HD DVD, the superior “next-gen” format that lost out to Blu Ray.

I love this kind of videos!!! I wonder if there´s a Doc about the BBS times...

The Lisa was definitely easier to use than the 1980 IBM home. computer, but one of the biggest problems with my Lisa was that it crashed all the time, and had to be restored using the system disks. Trying to save data on a 256 floppy was incredibly time consuming, as you had to save nearly every minute. You had to keep a floppy disk installed, and change it often. as it filled up quickly - so doing a document meant you had a stack of floppies sitting around that you hope you kept them in order. When the ubiquitous "cherry bomb" showed up on your screen, the computer died and you had to reinstall the disk OS from floppies, and then install each working floppy again. It makes nice press to talk about how great the Lisa was, but it weighed almost 50 pounds, and required many trips to computer gurus to keep it running. It also cost around 10K. After a few hard years, I moved to the Mac SE which still cost almost 3K. I have owned many macs over the years, and still use Macs, My newest computer being a Mac Air 2018, my oldest functioning are 2 white Macbook 2010, and several iMacs 2010. Without Macs, I would never leaned to use a computer - thanks Steve Jobs

To quote my father, "Bill Atkinson was a genius, and I don't use that word lightly". At the time of this quote, my father was very deep in HyperCard stack development, but also knew Atkinson was responsible for a lot more than that. I emailed Bill thanking him for making my Dad's life better, as I was a kid and didn't know to not waste people's time like that. He replied thanking me for the email - Such a nice guy!

1:40 Xerox PARC, Alto. 2:32 Lisa UI/UX 5:51 1981 Xerox Star 6:16 Lisa led to consumer Mac 8:20 1985 Microsoft Windows 9:44 Lisa documentary in the works

I love these little tech documentaries that the verge does

I loved the Lisa, we sold a bunch of them to a gold mining company in North Queensland. About the only painful aspect was an odd RS232 interface used for printers.

I am blown away by how good this video is! Kudos!

Absolutely wonderful video. Interesting all the way through. Keep it up!

Definitely interested in more Lisa.

I'm here for information like this !!! This was awesome

Just like the command prompt hasn't completely disappeared, the desktop metaphor will not completely disappear either.

Great video Verge team! I learned something new.

Kinda wild just how skeumorphic all elements of PC UI design are. Right down to the fundamentals

This is a second generation Lisa. The first generation Lisa had two "Twiggy" 5.25" 800k floppy drives (which were mechanically problematic).

Really good work on this one. It's great to see the ideas of Engelbart's team included in the story, and Bill Atkinson is such a legend.

I really don't think AR / VR is actually the interface of the future. Maybe for gaming, but for work it's much harder to do anything with a headset on then it is with a keyboard and mouse.

I really love Bill's comment at around 9:37: "there were ideas in the air and someone raises up a catcher's mitt and catches it." It definitely felt that way. As an engineer / developer, it was hard to understand why people would want to use an Apple II when a Mac was available (this was a time frame when I never had to buy my own development systems.) Watching NeXT develop over the late 80s was a treat since it seemed like they were doing everything right (and now their work is the basis of all iProducts.) One thing I give Apple credit for is understanding what features typical consumers like. They didn't invent the personal computer, but the Apple II was a great microcomputer at just the right time. They didn't invent an office automation system, but the Lisa was MUCH more affordable than the Xerox Star. They didn't invent the laser printer (or even PostScript) but they understood how ground-breaking desktop publishing would eventually become so made sure the LaserWriter, PostScript and PageMaker/Quark/etc were available on the Mac. iPod? Definitely not the first MP3 player, but maybe the first "good" MP3 player. iPhone? not the first smart phone, but definitely a GOOD smartphone. It always seemed that Apple could see which way the tech winds were blowing and took the time to figure out what HAD to be added to a product to make it compelling. Of course they're now struggling with services. It just doesn't seem to be in their DNA. I sort of think they're releasing the VR goggles 'cause they feel they have to release SOMETHING new. But at least they're not pushing a ChatGPT "solution" on us. Siri is great for what it is, but it seems that Apple figured out long ago that it's not the be-all / end-all solution for everyone's problems. Maybe Apple could get into internet search now that bing and google have abandoned it for... whatever the heck they're doing now.

Unfortunately I have been the owner of many things with a half life of months rather than years -I have been the owner of a Borgward Isabella auto, a Ducati 90 dirt bike, a Vespa moped, as well as the Lisa. Every one of these items was so frustrating to own, that they ended up in the discard pile. I did give the Lisa to a friend for safe keeping when I had to move, and found out later that he sold it. Money has never been my sole object in life, and I have been fortunate to live a life full of unusual things, and experiences.

I thought, the RU-vid Channel of The Verge was dead, because it was flooded with audio podcast videos and boring videos. This is classic. Classic background story, classic best, classic The Verge. Please do more of this. And of course, no more audio podcast records.

Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset will probably be seen at the Lisa of 2023. It’s bulky, expensive, and few people will probably use it. But I have confidence that it will lead the way in what AR/VR software becomes

Please, more stuff like this. Thanks.

the sound mixing in this video is fantastic

Amazing video, thank you. I will wait for that documentory on LISA.

I want to see the other documentary!❤

Imagine the power you could fit in one of those Lisas with today's hardware. So much space!

Mac also didn't sell well. Xerox provided far more than just the mouse, as Alan Kay references. Ethernet, laserjet printing, OO programming. Jobs also said he failed to see how big these were because he was blinded by the mouse. Also, Atkinson wasn't a programmer when he joined Apple. He was a neurochemist. Crazy. Oh also, the Lisa, later called the Mac XL, was cancelled hundreds were buried in a desert.

I loved this video. Super interesting and insightful

I went to a computer camp at Virginia Tech in the 1980s. They had one Lisa computer in their lab, and it had a combat game in black-and-white. I remember the background music for the game was Flight of the Valkyries. I can’t remember much about the game other than that I thought it was a good game.

This was fantastic. Nicely done.

More of this please!

Lisa was my dream machine, but I couldn't afford it so next year I "settled" for an original mac, which I still have.

Can’t wait for the documentary!

“Today, it can be hard to imagine computers turning out any other way.” In the broader sense, this summarizes one of the big problems in studying history.

In the mid '80s, my grandfather got us two Lisas on loan from the University of Michigan that had been converted to run the Mac operating system. They had cost over $10,000 each but since they were so bad Apple had given the school their money back.

Great video!

The basic desktop metaphor will live on because of so many people are handling both physical and digital documents, messages, deals, pictures, maps, database acquired information and archives at work and when organising private life. Because it works. We still keep archives, libraries, use note books and store important documents, like wills, deeds or contracts in safe places. The digital desktop is a logical extension of this. For many specific work related tasks, for entertainment, SoMe and so on, very different GUs will evolve. They will all exist side-by-side a long time.

Kind of hilarious that at around 5:01, you can see "Note from Jef" and "Letter to Jef". That's Jef Raskin whose storied career at Apple supposedly came to an end when Jobs got kicked off the Lisa project and horned in on Jef's Macintosh project.

I had no idea about the Lisa! Very interesting history.

I love these videos on retro computing, it makes me feel grateful for what we have today. Great work!

BIG fan of your work, thanks a lot for an excellent content! Greetings from Denmark ❤❤❤❤

As a person in IT I don't care about the desktop. As a office worker, this is the life changing experience in computer desktop

Really good video!

Loved this! More like this please.

Great content!

Fascinating! They got so many things right. Forty years on the most intuitive Linux desktop environments such as XFCE and Cinnamon have many similarities to the Lisa and Mac.

This was interesting Verge!!

My first programming job - for my university’s writing workshop, during the summer - was on the Lisa. Nostalgia…

What's up with the showing of your background and lightning setup? I see it everywhere now.

2:18 This was at the MIT Media Lab. Its director was a guy named Nicholas Negroponte. Among other things, he went on to mastermind the “One Laptop Per Child” project -- you know, the ultracheap, virtually childproof machine that ran Linux, that Microsoft was so determined to kill.

The Lisa turned into the macintosh XL running the macintosh operating system, didn’t sell great either though... Such a shame, revolutionary systems!

I remember our lab at work had an Apple Lisa. Consider that in early 1980’s the spreadsheet was functional.

This was a fkin awesome video! Well done folks!

In fact, Lisas focus on task (instead on app) might be the future, mobile phone UIs are going towards :D

It's cool exploring ideas that flopped in the end but still influenced the world today. But with Lisa being just one piece in a whole industry moving in the same direction, it's hard to argue that it was really revolutionary or why it stood out amongst other similar Desktops at the time. Especially with its stand-out features (i.e. multitasking) not being unique to it at the time. I guess it was just an early example of "apple didn't do it first, but did it well" (so that's why we remember it).

Regardless of how good a GUI design becomes, anyone who wants to be proficient using a computer needs to learn how to use a few commands at the command line. Knowing only 10 or 12 useful commands will make a huge difference, whether using a Mac (which has something like BSD Unix underneath) or a Windows PC (which has something like the old DOS commands underneath).

Apple targeted the Lisa at Corporate America. The Macintosh was targeted at Higher Education. (Apple II was mainly focused on K12). Of course, the Lisa suffered from two main problems. 1) Steve Jobs had taken over the Macintosh Project and tried to kill off the Lisa by starving it of resources and 2) The Lisa cost $10K plus another $5K for a ProFile. The Macintosh's popularity didn't really take off until the LaserWriter printer and AppleTalk both of which were initially only available on the Mac. The early days of Apple were quite interesting as well as pretty chaotic with lots of infighting, politics, and other issues that afflict easy stage companies 😐

“Sometimes there are ideas in the air, and somebody puts up a catcher’s mitt and catches it. And if they didn’t, somebody else would have caught it.” - Bill Atkinson My mom, who was born in 1932, talked about this exact idea in the ‘70s. She had come up with the idea of making smaller vinyl records with just one song on a side, and 45RPM singles came out shortly after. So she “caught” the idea around the same time as someone else, but they had the ability to make it real.

What a nice little piece of history.

Man. This one gave me goosebumps

I love videos like this!

3:55 I think subtitle meant to use the word “took pains”?

3:42 Sounds like the Stationary Pad feature still found in macOS today.

Everything is so literal! I love things that are literal!

Bill Atkinson's humble last words will stay with me for the ages. They made it happen but today those ideas are so common place that even he sees them as inevitable.

Android smartphones still use folders quite prominently. For all of iOS's pros, its folder system (or lack of) drives me nuts. I always feel like I have to jump through loops and menus just to get a file from one app to open with another. And for all of Android's cons, I like how I can put things in ANY folder and if I open another app, I can just simply navigate to that folder to open those files.

Does anyone remember the Macintosh had a training program, that showed you how to use a Mac just like you would use your desk in your office?

One of the reasons that the Lisa failed other than it's extreme was that Steve Jobs refused to allow the engineers to install a fan and as a result it ran extremely hot and burned out components and so its reliability suffered greatly.

Love Verge ❤️

One thing I don’t understand what Apple didn’t use when developing a computer with a graphical user interface was the Xerox computer had a portrait oriented monitor, which makes sense if you’re working in an office, and you’re producing documents that most likely will be printed out in a portrait oriented format. Today, most people use tablet devices and can easily choose between portrait and landscape orientation by turning the device left or right 90 degrees, but that wasn’t the case with desktop computers then.

When I first saw a mac's gui I was blown away, and started figuring how to use the sprites on my Atari XL and my touch tablet to make pointer/icon/menu driven programs. It was fun, and fairly successful in its own way. =o)

8:39 - when everybody's Siri goes off...

More of this stuff, Verge.

When?