A true sales flop that stayed on the shelves for a short time, the Apple Lisa today it is widely recognized as the computer that introduced the concept of the graphical user interface to the world—although the macintosh is who has reaped the laurels of the concept of this indispensable technology in current systems.
Both were the subject of a video report by the The Verge commanded by the reporter Adi Robertson. She had the unique pleasure of interacting with both computers and their respective operating systems in the middle of 2023, and had testimonials from Bill Atkinsonone of the designers responsible for the graphical interfaces of the machines.
In the article, it is possible to see that the GUI provided unprecedented situations in the world of computing, such as the need to explain to users how things like folders and the recycle bin work — concepts beyond banal in virtually all desktop operating systems today.
Some things, according to Atkinson, were discovered and improved by the development teams through trial and error. A series of Polaroid photos show various stages in the development of simple things like the layout of folders and tabs.
Another thing that changed during development was the behavior of the menu bar. At first it was at the top of every window — as it still is in the Windows —but Lisa’s developers realized that depending on the position of the window, titles or items within each title could be hidden. To solve this problem, they positioned the menu bar at the top of the screen – as it is maintained by Apple to this day in macOS.
But this decision brought up another problem: the mouse movements to take the cursor to the top were somewhat time-consuming — which ended up making it difficult for users to access the menu. This led the developers to make cursor movements larger when the mouse was moved faster — another behavior that still persists today.
Some differences between Lisa and Macintosh were also addressed, such as the fact that the former has a multitasking system and the latter does not. Most likely the greater refinement of the first computer was one of the factors that influenced its price to be much higher than that of the Macintosh, which was also much faster.
The rest, of course, is history.