Two years ago, CHM celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa, an innovative computer that brought the graphical user interface to a mass market for the first time. Apple insiders shared their insights and reminiscences with an enthusiastic audience in-person and online. Read all about it.
At the same time, CHM released the source code to the Lisa’s OS and applications software, which you can read more about here and here and access here.
As part of this celebration, CHM recorded a series of three interviews with Bill Atkinson, a software engineer who developed key portions of the Lisa’s software, especially its QuickDraw graphics library, as well as important aspects of the Lisa’s user interface.
The first interview, conducted by CHM’s Marguerite Gong Hancock, asked Bill Atkinson about technical challenges, eureka moments, team dynamics, and the Lisa’s significance. Atkinson discusses crucial decisions that made the Lisa what it became:
Atkinson also recounts how he was recruited to Apple by Steve Jobs to help “change the world.” An important aspect of Atkinson’s work on Lisa was his collaboration with the late Larry Tesler, a former PARC engineer who was in charge of the Lisa’s applications team and was an advocate for user testing for making the interface more accessible to everyday people.
A common misconception Atkinson wanted to clear up was that Apple merely copied the GUI from Xerox PARC. Instead, his team improved on the interface far beyond what they had seen during that fateful visit to PARC in 1979. Many of these refinements were informed by user testing and were later inherited by the Macintosh. Without the Lisa, says Atkinson, there would be no Macintosh, the machine which ultimately brought the GUI to the rest of us.
While two excerpts of this interview were shown during the CHM Live Lisa 40th anniversary event, Something Special and Catcher's Mitt, we are pleased to offer the full interview below.
Bill Atkinson interview, part 1.
A second interview was conducted by CHM curator Hansen Hsu. For that session, Bill Atkinson brought a binder of Polaroid photographs which he took during the development of the Lisa, providing a personal, narrated tour of the stages of development of the UI.
Through these photographs, one can trace the evolution of the Lisa user interface through its earliest iteration with softkeys, through the addition of overlapping windows and pulldown menus, to its final form with icons on a desktop. Atkinson also discusses a prototype graphics editor that later evolved into MacPaint, and the halftone dithering algorithm he created for displaying scanned photographs on a black and white screen.
Watch the full Session 2 video below.
Bill Atkinson traces the evolution of the Lisa GUI.
The story of this evolution as documented through these Polaroids has previously been written about by Macintosh software engineer Andy Hertzfeld at this page at Folklore.org, which is now being hosted by CHM.
A third interview was conducted with Bill Atkinson by Hansen Hsu on the Lisa source code, which was released by CHM to coincide with the Lisa’s 40th anniversary.
In this interview, Atkinson goes over particular portions of the Lisa source code that he worked on, focusing especially on QuickDraw and the Window Manager. A key innovation was his development of “Regions,” which identified portions of the screen that were obscured by windows on top of them and therefore did not need to be drawn, saving time. He also remarks on the implementation of Rounded Rectangles, the importance of which he was convinced of by Steve Jobs.
Other topics Atkinson discusses include:
Several excerpts of this interview were previously posted on CHM’s social media channels.
Now, you can view the interview in its entirety.
Bill Atkinson: Lisa Source Code
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