Marcin Wichary: I’ve been emulating the Apple Lisa recently, and I was struck by how many of its UI strings were slightly or wholly different than what we’re used to. It makes sense. Lisa came out in 1983 as Mac’s predecessor and really the first GUI that is directly linked to what we’re using today. Even though it borrowed things from work done at Xerox, tons of conventions were not established yet. So, I thought it would be fun to actually take a closer look. There are so many things that feel so close to current conventions we use even today, but a lot of language and interface elements aren’t quite there yet. I really enjoyed the “while you wait” and “while you work” options for printing. Another thing to note is how the interface feels Mac-like, but not quite, due to the Lisa’s odd rectangular pixels (720 × 364 resolution) and lack of Chicago and Geneva as the system-wide typefaces. It reminds me a little of GS/OS on the Apple IIgs.
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