Computer History Museum
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2025–2026
24:30 · 13K views · Jan 29, 2025
Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroids taken during Lisa development, documenting how its graphical interface evolved. Recorded at the Computer History Museum.
Cited as a firsthand look at early Apple UI decisions, such as menu bar placement, from the person who made them.
3 comments from Hacker News
Very interesting. Here are the two other videos in the series: this video Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI [LINK] Bill Atkinson Interview for Lisa’s 40th Anniversary The videos were recorded in 2022, even before CHM published the source code. If you want to navigate the source code which Bill refers to in the video, here is a tool to do so: [LINK] .
> Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard). macOS tends to use the arrow keys for this, with various modifiers. Command + the arrow moves to the start or end of things (documents or lines), Option will be at the word or line level. Adding Shift to either of those will highlight those regions. > Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. I've never been a cmd-tab user, so I don't notice thins. Once Exposé (now Mission Control) came out, I just stuck with that. I bind it to an extra button on my mouse. > The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements. The reason for this dates back to the original design of the Lisa. Bill Atkinson explains it in this video. It's a trade off between having issues with menus when windows are small, and having to move more. I believe this is why they added mouse acceleration, so no matter where you were, you could get up to the menus fairly quickly. this video > There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button. They're starting to get better on this. The full screen button has a menu to do many things, and one of them is to maximize (they call it Fill). You can also just drag the window to the top edge to maximize it, like Aerosnap on Windows. > If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back Windows > Center, will bring the active window to the center of the screen. > I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the
Lisa and early MacOS are tremendously different in their details than the Alto operating system. While there was clearly a transfer of inspiration, Apple engineers like Bill Atkinson made countless small and large innovations to simplify the Xerox GUI model and improve its usability based on extensive in-house R&D and user testing (and in some cases implement features that the Apple team presumed Xerox had but actually didn't exist on the Alto). It is simply ahistoric to build narratives around Apple stealing Xerox ideas wholesale. For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: this video