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audible apple lisa podcast - meh

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stepleton:
Is there a way I can find out more about the "A, B, C" player speech?

I know very little about personal stories about "what it was like" to develop the Lisa, outside from the scraps on folklore.org and the like. This situation feels like a corollary to the "success has many parents" adage.

rayarachelian:
Jobs has this quote where "A Players hire A Players, B players hire C players"


* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTgQ2PBiz-g
* https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Leave_Of_Absence.txt
* https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=How_to_Hire_Insanely_Great_Employees.txt

Al Kossow:
Unfortunately Larry Tesler didn't agree to be interviewed for it in time, and so his stories and views about it were permanently lost to history outside of what was already published.

--

Larry and Chris Espinosa gave a talk on the development of Lisa at CHM just before Larry resigned as Apple's chief scientist, a video exists of that one.
I was at an internal version of that talk, and asked LOTS of questions. I keep hoping it was taped and wound up in Stanford's collection when the Apple
Library was closed. Other than Rich Page, I haven't been able to get anyone from the Lisa team to talk to me about the project in the past 10 years.
I think David Craig's historical material is going to end up being the best surviving generally available history of the project.

rayarachelian:

--- Quote from: Al Kossow on April 20, 2021, 01:26:12 pm ---I think David Craig's historical material is going to end up being the best surviving generally available history of the project.

--- End quote ---

Funnily enough, DTC's materials were the first I saw, and they are the most extensive. But, they're mostly memos, internal docs, etc. There's no day to day war stories and anecdotes, like you see off folklore.org like "Too Big For His Britches" or the one about mustaches and managers.

From Tesler, I would have liked to know and understand how the Xerox PARC projects morphed into the Lisa, how that flowed from one project to the other, what decisions were made and how, what was the thinking process behind those decisions, was it something at the team level or was it individual sparks of inspiration and what caused those... There's probably a ton of stuff there that the public doesn't know that could be useful to learn from. I'm sure some of it is documented, and much is lost.

I mentioned this elsewhere on here, but Dan Kotke mentioned in "Valley of Genius" that the Lisa was named "Lisa" as a snub to Steve Jobs, and so that explains why once kicked off the Lisa team, he went all Bender "I'm going to go build my own theme park, with blackjack and hookers," in the form of the Mac as revenge. It also explains why in "Small Fry" when Lisa Jobs asked Steve if he had named the Lisa after her, he said no, but when Bono asked if the Lisa was named after her (not if Jobs named it after her) he said yes.

That little tiny bit that leaked out in that book explains the whole Pirates vs Navy thing and the Mac project. Other stuff from Fire in the Valley and "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" explain quite a lot more about his vindictive/abusive nature.
The same thing happened to the Newton, and a decade later after killing the Newton off, he built an iPad. The supposed excuse being that real computers have keyboards, ignoring the terrible keyboards phones and tablets have on-screen.
Both the Lisa and the Newton were way ahead of their time. The Newton after the 130 was very usable. The Lisa would have done a lot better if it was released in 1985 instead of 1983, when RAM prices were much lower...

While he's had a big positive influence on Apple, he turned it very much evil by closing things off. The lack of expansion slots in the original Mac, and modern day Macs, the closed walled off garden of the iPhone with the store, and the de-generalizing of the macos into a walled garden with a gatekeeper, signed and notarized binaries, monopolistic stores, glued in batteries, soldered in RAM, and SSD storage, a general disregard for recycling and repairability, etc.
Granted when he did return to Apple, Apple did have too many models, all alike and needed a clean up, it did need a new Mac OS, and for a while they had kept backwards compatibility with System 9 in macos x. But then they removed it after 10.5.
I suspect we'll see a similar removal of x86_64 compatibility in future macos or M1.5/M2 releases after getting most people to switch over. (This ofc effectively killed off the hackintoshes as well, or will do so once x86_64 is no longer supported.) and then we'll have to run things in emulators again.
Seeing the 2012 retina Macs with their super glarey glossy screens, and glued in batteries and soldered in RAM is what sealed the deal for me to move fully to Linux. It took until 2017 for me to do that as that's when my 2011 17' died. But yeah. At some point the negatives add up to too much and scales tip to "not worth it anymore."

Al Kossow:
" I would have liked to know and understand how the Xerox PARC projects morphed into the Lisa"

They didn't.

Lisa internally had much more influence from HP people than PARC people.
There were a LOT of ex HP people in the Lisa division.

The intro of Star was more of an influence on the UI than PARC/Smalltalk

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