Bill Atkinson: Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a firsthand look at early Apple UI decisions, such as menu bar placement, from the person who made them.
What it is
Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroids taken during Lisa development, documenting how its graphical interface evolved. Recorded at the Computer History Museum.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Rochus · 2025-02 · on “Bill Atkinson reviews the Lisa source code”
Very interesting. Here are the two other videos in the series: [this video] Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI [LINK] Bill Atkinson Interview for Lisa’s 40th Anniversary The videos were recorded in 2022, even before CHM published the source code. If you want to navigate the source code which Bill refers to in the video, here is a tool to do so: [LINK] .
Cites al_borland · 2026-01 · on “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”
> Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard). macOS tends to use the arrow keys for this, with various modifiers. Command + the arrow moves to the start or end of things (documents or lines), Option will be at the word or line level. Adding Shift to either of those will highlight those regions. > Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. I've never been a cmd-tab user, so I don't notice thins. Once Exposé (now Mission Control) came out, I just stuck with that. I bind it to an extra button on my mouse. > The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements. The reason for this dates back to the original design of the Lisa. Bill Atkinso
Cites RodgerTheGreat · 2026-06 · on “Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models”
Lisa and early MacOS are tremendously different in their details than the Alto operating system. While there was clearly a transfer of inspiration, Apple engineers like Bill Atkinson made countless small and large innovations to simplify the Xerox GUI model and improve its usability based on extensive in-house R&D and user testing (and in some cases implement features that the Apple team presumed Xerox had but actually didn't exist on the Alto). It is simply ahistoric to build narratives around Apple stealing Xerox ideas wholesale. For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: [this video]