When he was involved in the development of the Lisa user interface, Bill Atkinson used to take pictures of the Apple II screen with his Polaroid and take these pictures to his colleagues at Apple to discuss.
Today a screen sharing would do the trick but at the time everything had to be invented. Whoever would later develop MacPaint and Hypercard (amongst other things) brought out some of these Polaroids at a Lisa 40th anniversary conference at Computer History Museum de Mountain View.
Bill Atkinson reminisces regarding his brilliant inventions at Apple
These images show tracks, graphic tests, interface research or font tests of the future computer. About the interface, Atkinson for example explained that the concepts of folder and document – perfectly distinct and clear today – were intertwined, there was a ” confusion around these two elements.
We might also mention the ancestor of the clipboard which permanently showed its contents on the screen and might contain several elements at the same time.
With the Apple II, each character was the same width. The Lisa changed the situation by introducing a proportionality between them: the “i” was less wide than an “M” for example.
Creator of MacPaint and QuickDraw (with Andy Hertzfeld) the future graphic engine of the system, Atkinson worked on the display of images. He had tinkered with a Western Union ticker to turn it into a scanner. And so to be able to scan images to your computer: “ One of my little hobbies was figuring out how to go from a black and white image to grayscale ».
Several more of these images are visible chez The Verge and bear witness to the challenges faced by the creators of the Lisa. Following in the footsteps of the Xerox Parc work, they simply had to invent a new way of interacting with a computer.
