3 H ARD T IMES
GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE The emergence of the graphical user interface (GUI) was part of the
same trend toward the democratization of intellectual work enabled by personal computers (PCs). In this case, though, it was not calculating, accounting, typing, or record-keeping skills that were rendered obsol-ete but rather the high level of computer knowledge required to access the Disk Operating System (DOS) of any desktop machine. Until the Macintosh appeared, most users of personal computers had to know the inner workings of MSDOS, the most ubiquitous operating system and the one used by all IBM-compatible machines.37
In Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Asprey explain the complexity of operat-ing most personal computers prior to 1984:
The user interacted with the operating system through a “com-mand line interface,” in which each instruction to the computer had to be typed explicitly by the user,letter-perfect. For example, if one wanted to transfer a document kept in a computer fil named SMITH from a directory called LETTERS to another dir-ectory called ARCHIVE, one had to type something like: COPY A:\LETTERS\SMITH.DOC B:\ARCHIVE\SMITH.DOC DEL A:\
LETTERS\SMITH DOC. If there was a single letter out of place, the user had to type the line again. The whole arcane notation was explained in a fat manual . . . For ordinary users—offi e workers, secretaries, and authors working at home—it was bizarre and per-plexing. It was rather like having to understand a carburetor in order to be able to drive an automobile.38
Prior to the appearance of the Mac, only one company had simplifie its user interface and greatly reduced the demands of the rigorous DOS learning curve for its operators. Between 1973 and 1975 Xerox Corporation designed and built a personal computer called the Alto at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The Alto’s interface was origin-ally called WIMP, an acronym for Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pull-down menus. At the center of its graphical user interface was the mouse, a device that had been invented in 1965 by Douglas Engelbart, head of the Human Factors Research Center, a work group that stud-ied the Man and computer interface (or Mac) at the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart based his invention on an obsolete engineering tool called the planimeter, an antiquated device once as common as a slide rule. When an engineer moved the planimeter over the surface of a curve, it calculated the underlying area. Engelbart’s SRI team experi-mented with several other pointing devices, all of which were intended as alternatives to overcome the limitations of the standard qwerty typewriter. Engelbart later remembered how “the mouse consistently beat out the other devices for fast, accurate screen selection . . .For some months we left the other devices attached to the workstation so that a user could use the device of his choice . . . When it became clear that everyone chose to use the mouse we abandoned the other devices.”39
In 1968 Engelbart and about a dozen helpers demonstrated the mouse in the now legendary Augmented Knowledge Workshop at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Many of his coworkers, including Bill English, who had completed the engineering details for the mouse prototype, later joined Xerox-PARC, where Engelbart’s mouse was incorporated into a system of visual displays that included graphic symbols called icons.40
Alan Kay, another SRI veteran, joined PARC at about this time.
While completing his Ph.D.between 1967 and 1969 at the University of Utah, Kay, along with Edward Cheadle, had built a computer called
FLEX whose interface included multiple tiled windows and square desktop items representing data and programs. At PARC he focused firs on the problem of managing the windows in which the mouse op-erated. At the time these were still the cumbersome tools envisioned by Engelbart’s SRI group. They competed for space on the computer’s monitor and did not overlap. It was very difficul for a user to keep track of which window he was currently working in. Kay borrowed his ingenious solution from the FLEX machine. He told his colleagues to
“regard the screen as a desk, and each project or piece of project as pa-per on that desk . . . As if working with real papa-per, the one you were working on at a given moment was at the top of the pile.”41
By 1975, using Kay’s desktop metaphor, PARC had built about a thousand Altos, and Xerox’s marketing group installed a small net-work of one hundred of these machines in the White House, both houses of Congress, a few universities, and some major corporations (including Xerox itself). From this position of prominence, Altos re-ceived a lot of favorable media attention—so much, in fact, that Xerox felt they had adequately prepared the American market for introduc-tion of the Xerox Star workstaintroduc-tion in 1981. Unfortunately, Xerox re-tailed the Star workstation for about f ve times the cost of a personal computer, the rough equivalent of an average person’s annual salary.
The Xerox Star’s failure in the marketplace was as defini ive as that of the Edsel in the fall of 1957.42
In 1979 Steve Jobs visited Xerox-PARC for a demonstration of their offi e-of-the-future network concept using the prototype Altos.Jobs was visibly impressed by these machines and their connectivity, which was facilitated by Alan Kay’s program, SmallTalk. Jobs was astounded that Xerox was not yet selling Altos.“Why,”he wondered, “isn’t Xerox marketing this? . . . You could blow everyone away!”
The next year, Jobs lost control of the Lisa project at Apple, and after a bitter corporate battle he was reassigned to administer another project—a less powerful computer whose design originated with Apple
architect Jef Raskin. Raskin had worked at SRI in the early 1970s when Engelbart’s group was still focusing on problems with the “man and computer” interface. At SRI, Raskin also had extensive contact with the PARC personnel. Jobs now insisted that Raskin’s new desktop computer should have features that were not in the original design, including Engelbart’s mouse.43
Before he left Apple in 1982, Raskin named the new computer after a favorite variety of apple that grew abundantly in the hills around Cu-pertino. Raskin’s name was really a pun, of course. To most buyers, a Mac computer was a variety of Apple computer, just as a Macintosh was a kind of apple. But in Raskin’s computerliterate circle, the word Mac recalled the Man and computer interface that Engelbart’s Human Factors group had been studying in the early 1970s at SRI. Cleverly, the name “Macintosh” evoked both the company that made the com-puter and the interface design problem that it solved.
For all their other differences, Jobs and Raskin agreed totally about their product’s name. They jointly envisioned a computer targeted to-ward a large market of personal users with limited knowledge, and a budget to match. When Lisa debuted in 1983, it would cost $17,000.
Although few at Apple were listening, Jobs knew in advance that Lisa’s price tag would be a big problem. He did not want to make the same mistake with the Macintosh.44
Much of Lisa’s high unit cost derived from its sophisticated combin-ation of hardware and software. The machine’s excellent performance relied on more than a megabyte of memory to run an elegant new op-erating system. Macintosh’s designers pilfered Lisa’s OS and rewrote it in greatly reduced machine code so that it would fi onto a single chip.
The Macintosh project was cocooned in a separate building over which Jobs himself hoisted a pirate fla . John Sculley remembered that
“Steve’s ‘pirates’ were a handpicked pack of the most brilliant maver-icks inside and outside Apple. Their mission . . .was to blow people’s