> LISA "FINDER" INFO
>
> PART 3a OF 7
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "The Past, Present, and Future of the Macintosh Desktop" in Semaphore
> Signal issue # 26 from March 1986 has the following to say about the
> Desktop Manager's origins and development:
>
> "The Past, Present, and Future of the Macintosh Desktop
>
> To a first-time user, perhaps the most striking thing about the Macintosh
> is
> its use of the desktop metaphor: the folders and other icons intended to
> help make the Macintosh a user-friendly machine. For a perspective on
> where
> those ideas came from, how they were further developed by Apple, and what
> they might lead to in the future, we interviewed Dan Smith, an Apple
> Principal Software Engineer.
>
> Signal: Give us a brief history of your career at Apple.
>
> Smith: I've been at Apple for a little over five years now. I initially
> signed on to the Lisa project to work on what we called the Desktop
> Manager,
> essentially the equivalent of the Finder on the Macintosh. I worked on
> that
> for about two years, until the whole Lisa project was near completion.
> Then
> I became User Interface Coordinator for the Lisa project, then switched to
> a
> consulting role for the Macintosh, since Mac picked up about halfway into
> the Lisa development stage. I took some time off from the Macintosh and
> Lisa
> to start working on some future projects, did that for about nine months,
> then got pressed back into service to do a program development environment
> for the Macintosh, which is what I'm working on right now.
>
> Signal: Were you the desktop programmer? What was the organization
> responsible for the desktop and the other Lisa software?
>
> Smith: The effort was split up into a couple of different groups. There
> was
> the desktop group. Two of us actually did the implementation. I programmed
> the user interface portion, and Frank Ludolph did a fair amount of the
> lower
> level implementation. Then there was the applications group, and that was
> split up into essentially the different applications that came out:
> LisaDraw, LisaWrite, and so on. There was also an operating system group,
> which did the much lower level software.
>
> Signal: How did the ideas for the desktop originate, and how were they
> incorporated into your design?
>
> Smith: That's a pretty interesting story. When I started at Apple, the
> idea
> of the desktop hadn't really quite been born. In fact, it was thought we'd
> do something fairly simple, and it would be a one-person job for a couple
> of
> months and it would be over. It was a little later in the project that we
> realized the desktop was going to be a central part of the entire system.
> The idea of an iconic form didn't come along until quite late into the
> development of the product. We started off with something that was pretty
> Smalltalk-like. There was a notion of a thing called a browser, which is
> essentially a table you could flip through, listing the documents you had
> in
> a hierarchical fashion. But the whole initial desktop was essentially
> technically oriented. We went through iteration after iteration. I
> remember
> doing prototype after prototype, and trying them on several groups of
> people, getting it to be more and more useable. But a number of us were
> not
> happy with what we were getting, so fairly far into the project a couple
> of
> us took a radical departure. We took a fair amount of our own time
> developing an iconic model, then sprung it on the whole group. It met with
> some resistance, but the majority of people really liked it. Then it was a
> mad rush to incorporate it into the final product.
>
> Signal: Exactly who did what? Was the design fluctuating with the whims of
> a
> few individuals?
>
> Smith: The desktop had a pretty fiery history. We did have design reviews
> of
> all of the components of the system. We had teams: writers and marketing
> and
> engineering people who were all involved actively in the product. When we
> were actually doing the design and programming the application, the
> specification circulated amongst the teams. They all had a voice in the
> initial design of the product. As we circulated some of the actual design,
> and showed some of the prototypes, there was some frustration by some
> people
> that the desktop was not as easily useable as we would like. A couple of
> people, myself and Bill Atkinson primarily, and later Bruce Daniels, snuck
> off and worked on a prototype iconic model.
>
> END OF PART 3a
>
> Regards,
> David T. Craig
>
> ###########################################################
> # David T. Craig -- CyberWolf Inc. -- ACI 4D Developer #5
> # Aspen Plaza, 1596 Pacheco, Suite 203
> # Santa Fe, NM 87505 USA
> # voice 505.983.6463 ext 15 -- fax 505.988.2580
> # dcraig_at_email.domain.hidden
> ###########################################################
>
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Received on 2001-01-05 16:45:04