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Jef raskin user interface12/30/2023 As a matter of fact, the references and bibliography alone are probably worth it for serious programmers.For those of us in the second category, the book is a glimpse into a world where computers serve useful functions in a simple way. This would become important later.There are two categories of people who should read this book:1) those who write programs and design user interfaces (which today includes everyone who builds a Web page, and2) those who don't.For the first category of folks, the point is clear - there are some well-researched principles to designing user interfaces, and you should know about them before you write code for human consumption. Jobs seethed, then took over a smaller skunkworks project being run by Raskin. In January 1981, senior leadership at Apple got tired of Jobs’ constant interference and micromanagement of the Lisa project and officially removed him from the team. This was fine, as memory prices were still sky-high in 1980, and most computers of the day had a maximum of 64 kilobytes of RAM. The 68000 was a 16/32-bit chip and used a 24-bit address bus, giving it a maximum of 16 megabytes of memory. The team abandoned the bit-slice processor and adopted Motorola’s new 68000 CPU. But in reality, Atkinson was already working on LisaGraf-the low-level code that would power the Lisa’s GUI-months before Jobs saw the PARC demo. Jobs’ visit to PARC became the stuff of legend, a tale of a brilliant visionary seeing the future of computing for the first time. Because Jobs thought Atkinson was great, he agreed to come along. Raskin altered his approach and got graphics programmer Bill Atkinson to propose an official tour of PARC in November 1979. However, he couldn’t convince Jobs, who thought Raskin and Xerox were incompetent. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine. Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple ][, had visited PARC in 1973. PARC researchers wrote software that displayed windows and icons, and they used a mouse to move a pointer on that screen. The Alto workstation, which was never sold to the public, had a bitmapped screen that mimicked the size and orientation of a piece of paper. GUIs were invented at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s. But the more interesting thing about the Lisa computer was how it evolved into something unique: It was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). Lisa was named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, even though Jobs denied the connection and his parentage. That’s when Apple management brought in a project leader and started hiring people to work on it. Woz got distracted by other things, and the project didn’t begin in earnest until early 1979. The idea was to make an advanced computer using a bit-slice processor, an early attempt at scalable computing. ![]() The Apple Lisa started in 1978 as a new project for Steve Wozniak. ![]() ![]() Two years later, it was almost completely forgotten. ![]() Forty years ago today, a new type of personal computer was announced that would change the world forever.
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