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Bill Atkinson: Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI

Computer History Museum

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Bill Atkinson, designer of the Lisa GUI

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

12K views1 year ago1 recommendation

History and cultureSoftware designHistory of computingPeople who shaped computing

Bill Atkinson presents a binder of Polaroid photos documenting the step-by-step design and evolution of the Apple Lisa graphical user interface.

[Recorded on December 12, 2022] Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroid photos which he took during the development of the Lisa, documenting the evolution of its graphical user interface. Catalog number: 102809056 Acquisition number: 2022.0174

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1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended for its historical insight into early GUI design decisions and the extensive user testing that shaped Apple's desktop environment.

Rochuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Bill Atkinson reviews the Lisa source code”

Very interesting. Here are the two other videos in the series: link to this video Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI link Bill Atkinson Interview for Lisa’s 40th Anniversary The videos were recorded in 2022, even before CHM published the source code. If you want to navigate the source code which Bill refers to in the video, here is a tool to do so: link .
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al_borlandon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

…use movements. The reason for this dates back to the original design of the Lisa. Bill Atkinson explains it in this video. It's a trade off between having issues with menus when windows are small, and having to move more. I believe this is why they added mouse acceleration, so no matter where you were, you could get up to the menus fairly quickly. link to this video > There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button. They're starting to get better on this. The full screen button has a menu to do many things, and one of them is to maximize (they call it Fill). You can also just drag the window to the top edge to maximize it, like Aerosnap on Windows. > If you manage to get a window off-scr…
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RodgerTheGreaton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models”

Lisa and early MacOS are tremendously different in their details than the Alto operating system. While there was clearly a transfer of inspiration, Apple engineers like Bill Atkinson made countless small and large innovations to simplify the Xerox GUI model and improve its usability based on extensive in-house R&D and user testing (and in some cases implement features that the Apple team presumed Xerox had but actually didn't exist on the Alto). It is simply ahistoric to build narratives around Apple stealing Xerox ideas wholesale. For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: link to this video
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