I had looked for this page a while back and finally found it again: Lisa GUI Prototypes shows the story of the Apple desktop from the first prototypes of 1979 to the announcement of "Aqua" for Mac OS X in 2000. It was around October 1980 when the Lisa started looking like what we know today. Interesting things in this document are a couple of things that showed up in Mac OS X:
Another page documents an early form of Sleep:
Lisa has a soft power switch. When 'off' Lisa is actually in a low power mode. Press the power button while the computer is running the Lisa Office System program suite and Lisa saves all documents and shuts down. Press it again and Lisa boots back up and reopens all documents precisely as they were before the computer was turned off.[Apple Lisa Features]And also more details on the stationery feature, which even affected creation of folders in this document centric system:
There is no "New Folder" option in Lisa's File/Print menu. Instead, double clicking on the "Empty Folders" icon will create a new folder in the directory of the "Empty Folders" icon, which can then be placed wherever one wants.
Seeing the "Put Away" menu item in Lisa reminded me of a classic Mac OS feature that I imagine was rarely used, and does not exist in Mac OS X. The desktop in classic Mac OS was a magical place. It was meant to be like your normal desktop - you'd put documents or folders on there for a brief time for easier access to them and then put them away in their proper place when done. So if you had a folder nested deep in your hard drive named "Projects" and in there you had "My Current Project" as a folder, you could drag "My Current Project" to the desktop for easier access, and the Mac would remember its original location. What this meant was that when done, you could use the menu item "Put Away", and it would be filed back into the "Projects" folder nestled somewhere deep in your hard drive. In theory, this should have helped people keep their desktops clean. In practice, I don't think too many people knew it was there or what it could be used for.
There were some downsides to the desktop being a mystical place, however. Once you started having multiple volumes in your machine, dragging an item to the desktop kept that item associated with the volume it came from. When disks were disconnected or ejected, certain items would disappear. But it's a common thing to think "I need this file from this floppy, so I'll put it on my desktop and then eject.", only to have the file disappear when the floppy was ejected. Furthermore, using Mac OS "naive" applications that didn't understand the desktop could make finding items difficult - since the actual "desktop folder" containing the items was usually hidden. Mac OS X takes the route of making the desktop a folder in your home directory. It's still very easy to get to in open/save dialog boxes. And putting anything on your desktop is an actual "Move" operation, and in the case of moving from another volume, it's a "Copy" (Mac OS X lets you know this by changing the cursor to include the "+" symbol used to denote a copy when dragging a file to your desktop), so that putting something on your desktop from a mounted server, a removable drive, or whatever, means that removing that drive won't mean the sudden disappearance of a file. One thing is lost in this system though, and that's the "Put Away" action. There are times, however, where you want easy access to a particular file (like a project plan or folder) for a limited time, and then to put it away. This is where the Document side of the dock comes in, and I've found it quite useful myself. Drag a document to the dock, and you've got a shortcut to it right there. If the document is already open, you're taken right to it. If it isn't, then it's launched. I've found this very handy for tracking outliner documents used to track thoughts and to-dos for various projects. And since you can pick up a document's icon from the title bar of its window, you can place it on the dock without having to dig through the finder to get it again after saving it. And while there's no put-away action for the dock, removing an item is just a pick up and drag off - *Poof!*. Making aliases on the desktop work too, or even in "Favorites", although cleaning these up always require trips to the trash.Putting shortcuts on the dock seem to be the closest to the original desktop behavior.
Thanks to Matthew Thomas' excellent dissection of a bad confirmation dialog, I came across a link to The GUI Gallery. It's a great look back at some old UI's, as well as new. It's made me even more interested about the Lisa Office System. The Lisa Office System was far more powerful than most versions of the Mac OS that proceeded it, and has some interesting features that bear reminiscence to an OpenDoc powered Mac OS or to Mac OS X (in some ways).
For example: Documents are created by "tearing" a piece of "paper" off of a "stationery pad". That is, double-clicking the stationery icon creates a new document icon. There are also no "applications", only "tools" that must be present for you to work with the documents.
This kind of user interface eliminates the need to start applications directly and the need to "save as".
The stationery metaphor is extended to all applications on the Lisa, even LisaTerminal. The "LisaTerminal Paper" in this case represents a connection configuration file. Interestingly the Win9x HyperTerminal kind of does this but you must start the program directly to create a new connection.
Other LisaOS terminology that differs from most GUIs:
Set Aside - Minimize the window to an icon on the desktop.
Put Away - Close the window and, if necessary, save any changes.
Duplicate - Copy a file.
Housekeeping - Disk management options.
Pictorial view - icon view.
[Nathan Lineback, "Lisa Office System", viewed Feb 8 2003]
Some small things of interest are the Set Aside / Put Away actions. Looking at the animated gif of Lisa Write menus, the actual menu entries are "Save and Put Away" and "Save and Continue". "Set Aside" is interesting, and seems similar to the minimization effects on current UI's. The verbiage seems more familiar to physical desktop use, as you may set aside your calculator or the current chart you're drawing to clear up space for a moment.
The Lisa also looks like it actually could multitask. Unlike Mac OS versions 1-6, where only one application could run at a time (unless Multifinder was used), the desktop and other applications could run side by side in the Lisa. This also leads to an interesting difference between the Lisa UI and the Macintosh UI - windows on the Lisa include an icon in the corner detailing what the window is (hard drive, calculator, Lisa Write document, etc), an effect used in Windows. Mac OS 8 brought this feature back to the Mac, somewhat, and with some cool side effects (that actually showed up earlier in the NeXTStep UI) in that the icon in the title bar of a TextEdit document, or the folder in a Finder window title bar, is a live object that can be picked up and dragged.
The most interesting piece of the Lisa Office System, to me, is the use of stationery. As I've mentioned before, this was a big feature of OpenDoc. When you use Microsoft Office, AppleWorks, or many other large applications these days, they all have some sort of "templates" or starting point option, like a business letter or resumé. Stationery Pads are the same concept, except that they exist at the file system / operating environment level instead of at the application level. Stationery Pads showed up in the Mac OS in System 7 ("Blue"). Marking a file as a stationery pad means that when you open the file, it launches like any other file and shows up already filled out in the application/editor of choice. Unlike opening a normal file, the "this is a new file" flag is set, and the first time that you hit "Save", you're prompted to save it as a new file. Since OpenDoc, and the Lisa Office System (by the looks of it), didn't have the concept of "New" in its editors (since in OpenDoc there is, by default, no application to decide what "new" is), you'd have to start from a stationery pad. Instead of launching an application like Keynote and selecting "New" to start a new presentation, you'd use a stationery pad object of "Blank Presentation" (or maybe "Sales Presentation") to start one from the Finder itself. I think that while OpenDoc's stationery pads would prompt for a "Save As" dialog box upon first save off of a stationery pad, in the Lisa Office System you would select a stationery and use the menu item "Tear Off Stationery" to create a new file/object of that type. What does this mean? It means that there is no need for "Open" or "Save As" dialog boxes, a problem mentioned by Matthew Thomas in his post "When good interfaces go crufty" (interestingly, this long running cruft appears to be a result of the technical shortcomings of the original Mac OS, which could only run one application at a time). Interestingly, Stationery Pads still exist in Mac OS X and their behavior is different than in "Blue" (Mac OS 7-9) and closer to that of the Lisa Office System. If you mark an item as a Stationery Pad in Mac OS X, then when you double click to open it, the Finder makes a copy (called "Copy of whatever") and opens that file.
While we're all used to the current way of doing things, and in some cases I heavily prefer it (ie - when dealing with large behemoth applications such as Adobe GoLive, or when firing up BBEdit or OmniOutliner to do quick scratchpad type actions that I don't want to save), I wonder how different things would be if the Lisa operating system could have run on the original Macintosh's. Would everyone else that came along after the Mac OS have offered "Open / Save As" dialogs? Would there have been a "Quit" menu item? Would OpenDoc have survived? OpenDoc, especially, was right there. Maybe the parts couldn't be embedded, but the paradigm was entrenched in the Lisa. Files were the first class citizens, not applications. In fact, the Lisa didn't even call them Applications, but "Tools". Tools helped you work with files, much like OpenDoc's "Part Editors" existed to help edit parts of a document.
I wonder where, in this model, tools like NetNewsWire or web browsers would fit? Would a web browser be treated more like a Desk Accessory, like many of the Brushed Metal apps in Mac OS X seem to be? And if that's the case, is the choice of a Brushed Metal UI for Safari actually right? It definitely makes me wonder.
And nothing would make me happier than to see a sneaky rebirth of OpenDoc show up in Mac OS 10.3. I doubt it will happen. But I'm increasingly convinced that the OpenDoc / Lisa Office System way is right for many many things. And I think computers would be better if either idea had actually taken hold.
If GAP uses the Pizzicato Five rendition of the 59th Bridge Song, they'll have my membership and loyalty for.. well, if not for life, then for quite some time.
A sake martini? Oh yeah, it's heavenly.
At least it will be, until I have to wake up tomorrow.
