Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 1b

Okay, so let's start at the beginning. I started at Apple on July 17th, 1980, and I just left there a few months ago. I was there for 17 years. This memo was written on July 18, 1980, so one thing I discovered when I left the big Xerox Corporation and went to this little Apple startup, was that you

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 1a

http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/appleint_10281997/appleint_xs cript.shtml Origins of the Apple Human Interface Larry Tesler Chris Espinosa 5:30 PM, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 1997 Computer Museum History Center Building 126 Moffett Field Mountain View, CA 94035 This is a verbatim

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 12

Q: Would you like to comment on the fact that both Lisa and the Xerox product [inaudible] ? LARRY TESLER: Yeah. Like the Xerox Star? And the Lisa -- the idea was, in both groups, was that people would only use a few applications. It's kind of true, most people only do use a few applications. But

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 11

Q: [Inaudible] LARRY TESLER: The question is, the user testing we showed for the Lisa had to do with novice users, and the question was whether we tested for how people acculturated over time. Well, the system, remember, from the very first page of the user interface guidelines Bill wrote was targ

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 10

I remember very, very, very clearly that one of the massive controversies around the development for the Macintosh, circa 1982-1983, was developers would come up to us and say, "You know, if you make the user interface consistent, and if you put all that software in ROM that makes it -- you know,

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 9

I'm going to read -- Bruce tends to philosophize a lot in this, so it's not going to be as useful to put up slides, but I'm going to read to you some of his experiences from the -- here we go. From user testing: "Our testing method is as follows. We set up a room with five to six computer systems.

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 8

Now, here's the big change. The Star had come out a year earlier than this, and we were all told by management and ourselves, "Don't pay any attention to that. We've got a product to ship." But in everybody's heart they kind of felt like "You know, most of the Lisa's easier to use than the Star, bu

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 7

All right. Now it's still 1981, I should mention that the Xerox Star was announced at NCC or something -- National Computer Conference, I think in June of '81. Some Lisa people flew out there, got a look at it. Bill Atkinson went, I believe, and Steve Jobs went, or maybe he sent Bill and didn't go

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 6

But, we started. This motivated those of us who decided we had to do this the right way to actually run more user tests. Because we thought maybe we could overwhelm them with facts, and that will overcome this reliance on votes of committees. So, Chris Doerr, Wallace Judd -- I think Wallace maybe

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 5

We had active folders, so we had to have passive folders; the folder that wasn't active was passive. Now look at the bottom. Who has ever seen Mac OS8? And when you drag a window to the bottom of the screen it just kind of pops, and becomes just a tab, and then you can click it and it will slide o

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 4

Those of you who know the Xerox Star know that the Xerox Star had that feature. Those of us who were from Xerox were under a confidentiality agreement, that we weren't allowed to tell the other Apple people about the Star. And so, as you go through this, you'll sometimes find that things seem like

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 3

Now, we talked about testing. We said that the design's already based on studies of user reactions to various models; as you saw, we did three or four hours of testing. [Laughter] And we're going to do more testing, and avoid any glaring design flaws. I was happy that that was put in, because that

Origins of the Apple Human Interface - part 2

And then it said, "The software is integrated through a powerful and simple user interface." And it doesn't say it here, but John Couch, who was in charge of the Lisa project, did a sort of Kennedy we're-going-to-send-a-man-to-the-moon-and-bring-him-back thing; he said "All I want is, I want to be

Origins of the Apple Human Interface

For a great discussion of the development of the Lisa computer's user interface see the following web site which has a transcript of a presentation by one of the Lisa's creators, Larry Tesler. Origins of the Apple Human Interface Larry Tesler Chris Espinosa Oct. 28,