Signal: How did you get involved with the Macintosh group?
Smith: Towards the end of the Lisa project, Macintosh development was getting much more established. I spent a little bit of time with Bruce Horn and Steve Capps, the people who worked on the Finder, because they were doing the same thing I'd done on the Lisa. We were able to share some ideas. That was useful for all of us. I had already conquered a number of the problems they were facing and, in their development, they had found a couple of interesting solutions to problems I had not found a solution for.
Signal: What's an example of something they found a solution for?
Smith: They had a user interface solution for the problem of how to get a tool to operate on documents not of its kind. The solution was to simply select all the documents and the application involved, and click on one of those as a set.
Signal: Wasn't the Macintosh group reinventing the wheel by not letting you write the Finder?
Smith: It was to some degree, but the Macintosh group was faced with constraints which were pretty extreme compared to those on the Lisa. The amount of memory available and not having any real hardware memory management made some things quite a bit more difficult on the Macintosh.
Signal: Was the Macintosh a step backwards from the Lisa? Was the machine sorely underpowered for what it was trying to do?
Smith: Not with respect to the original design goal. The original goal had envisioned the Macintosh as being a personal computer that would run a single application at a time. It would have superior graphics and the Lisa-style user interface. But it was going to be restricted in terms of exactly how much it could do. It turns out that in terms of computational power, in terms of raw speed, the Macintosh actually exceeded the Lisa to some degree.
Signal: Do you feel the Macintosh group did a good job of capitalizing on what the Lisa group had pioneered? Or were not all the lessons learned?
Smith: Yes and yes. They did a tremendous job of leveraging off what Lisa did. All the graphics routines carried over, almost to the byte, thanks to Bill Atkinson's foresight. The window and menu management routines were essentially brought over as is, at least as far as the interface. The major changes that had to be done for the Macintosh were that things had to be recoded in asssembly language in order to get the program sizes down. But most of the interfaces and stuff like that were pretty much the same, but with improvements along the way. In that sense, the Macintosh was really a second generation Lisa, so they had an opportunity to improve on a lot of things. In some cases, a step was made backwards.
END OF PART 4b
> 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
> ###########################################################
>
>
> 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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