> We had a couple of real beauties where the users couldn't use any of the versions that were given to them and they would immediately say, "Why don't you just do it this way?" and that was obviously the way to do it. So sometimes we got the ideas from our user tests, and as soon as we heard the idea we all thought, "Why didn't we think of that?" Then we did it that way.<p>I’d love to hear some specific examples of this. Things that we probably take totally for granted now but weren’t at all obvious during the initial design and implementation phases.<p>This isn’t the kind of shit you get from A/B testing.
<i>"Tesler: Each engineer set his or her own schedule. Some engineers work something like Monday through Friday from nine to five. Others work all day at the office, then go home and work all night there. And what an individual engineer does may vary from time to time.<p>Daniels: These people have pride. They set their own milestones and they want to meet them, so they'll put in extra work to do that.<p>Tesler: We decided a long time ago that since the project would obviously go on for more than a few months — a couple of years — we couldn't have this constant pressure on everybody, because people would just crack. </i>"<p>This is great managerial wisdom right here.<p>From everything I've read, Larry Tesler really was someone great. RIP
An interesting interview with Dan Smith, who was the User Interface Coordinator for the Lisa, and then switched to the Mac project, is at <a href="https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26</a>
> In software, we drew mostly experienced people from other companies and very few people straight out of school. Even the ones we took out of school generally had lots of job experience. In fact, one time I surveyed the applications group and found an average of nine years' work experience in software. When we looked at resumes, we tried to find people with several years of experience in development. We made exceptions if someone had specialized in something we were interested in or was a top student who also had good summer experience. We wanted an experienced team because what we've been doing is a very major software effort. It's very complex, and there's such a large body of software to crank out and make reliable that it takes experienced people.<p>The remarks about team-building were very interesting too.
Good interview. It includes insightful commentary on how Xerox did and didn't influence the project, starting with this:<p>> BYTE: Do you have a Xerox Star here that you work with?
This type of interview, with such detailed technical questions and answers, with actual engineers (not product spokespeople), would be impossible these days.
Wayne Rosing is still working on technical problems at Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara. Absolute legend of an engineer. There is a LISA in the conference room there :)
For more of this sort of thing see:<p><a href="https://folklore.org/0-index.html" rel="nofollow">https://folklore.org/0-index.html</a><p>though I still think about what might have been when I read:<p><a href="https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html</a><p>and wish there was something readily available and well-supported along those lines now.
I had a Lisa on my desk in late 1983, along with an Apple II and Apple III and later a PC/XT (not sure if that appeared before they took the Lisa away). The Lisa was for evaluation, so I wrote some reports with it but didn't get to write any code. It was ridiculously expensive, but I could tell that it represented the future of personal computing. Explaining to my friends how it worked was difficult; even the concept of a mouse, much less fonts and a bit-mapped display, was foreign to them. None of my friends even owned any kind PC so they had little to compare my description to.
One can read the entirety of Byte's US magazine output, without the blogspam:<p><a href="https://vintageapple.org/byte/" rel="nofollow">https://vintageapple.org/byte/</a><p>(I have no idea if the foreign language editions and so on made it online)