> LISA "FINDER" INFO
>
> PART 5b OF 7
>
> Signal: Why did it take so long for LisaDraw and LisaProject to migrate to
> the Macintosh and become MacDraw and MacProject?
>
> Smith: The primary reason was the memory constraints on the Macintosh.
> Most
> of the programs on the Lisa were huge by comparison to other software
> products. Significant recoding had to be done in order to get the products
> moved over to the Macintosh. It takes a long time to program in assembly
> language, or to reorganize your entire program with space a primary
> consideration.
>
> Signal: Didn't anyone realize Apple was trying to get the Macintosh to do
> Lisa-like things? Couldn't you have just put in more memory and saved many
> programmer-years of effort?
>
> Smith: A lot of people said, myself included, before the Macintosh even
> came
> out, that the thing was designed with memory that was way too low. The
> primary motivation there, of course, was to keep the price down. They
> wanted
> the Macintosh to be affordable to the common person. This was going to be
> a
> computer most people could go out and buy. As time went on in the project,
> more and more features were added. They decided to go with a different
> disk
> drive, with different memory, and slightly larger display, so the price
> ended up creeping up out of the reach of the common person, to the $2500
> figure. At that point the memory limitation perhaps wasn't as good of an
> argument as it was earlier, because at that point the memory wasn't the
> dominating cost of the product. So I'd have to agree with you on that one.
> If the Macintosh had initially come out with a larger amount of memory, it
> would have saved significant amounts of time in development.
>
> Signal: Is there any hope for a true, Lisa-like, multi-application desktop
> environment on the Macintosh?
>
> Smith: There certainly is.
>
> Signal: You say that like you're hinting.
>
> Smith: It's sort of like a hint. I know of some outside developments in
> that
> area, outside of Apple. There are a couple of efforts going on there. I
> wouldn't be surprised to see something like that fairly shortly.
>
> Signal: Switcher and the desk accessories have always seemed to be
> somewhat
> desperate attempts to give the Macintosh a Lisa-like environment. Couldn't
> Andy Hertzfeld have made Switcher juggle multiple applications on the
> screen
> at once? It's already executing any application on demand, but idle
> applications are kept off-screen. What if the Switcher's multiple screens
> were shrunk down to icons and saved on a visible background, or occupied
> windows that could be scaled and overlap? The Macintosh could still jump
> between applications, and yet the user could see all of them on the screen
> simultaneously.
>
> Smith: I'm not sure if that particular idea was around at the time, but
> Andy's initial goal was to just do something simple, and that had the
> highest chance of success. Switcher seemed a fairly simple idea, although
> it
> turned out, because of the Macintosh architecture and the system design,
> to
> be quite difficult to do. It really took someone with Andy's intimate
> knowledge of the low level aspects of the system to pull that off.
> However,
> now that Switcher has been done, and it's been shown it's possible, we
> will
> see more Lisa-like models, where the visual continuity is retained.
>
> Signal: Where do you see the user interface going? What will future
> products
> look like?
>
> Smith: What we'll see in the long run, in terms of software products
> anyway,
> is a much tighter integration. You'll be able to buy small tools that fit
> into the rest of the system and work in combination with all other tools.
> Say, for example, you're trying to compose a memo to someone. In front of
> you is your piece of paper in electronic form, and you're typing or
> writing
> on it. You want to do something like check the spelling of a word. Rather
> than necessarily invoking the spelling checker built into the word
> processing program you're using, you simply use the spelling checker you
> purchased the other day. It would be tightly coordinated with the overall
> system, so you could take that tool or any other tool and use it to
> operate
> on the document you're currently working on. What it's going to take to do
> something like this is a real solid low-level system design that provides
> a
> common data structure format everyone can plug into and that provides very
> easy access to all data on the system, whether it's a picture or a
> document
> or a database or whatever. Some sort of uniform style, such that any tool
> that's around can be used on any document. Some of that has been done to
> some degree with systems like Smalltalk, but nothing in any commercial
> sense.
>
> END OF PART 5b
>
> 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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Received on 2001-01-05 16:55:00