He was clearly a super experienced practitioner. If only the Apple of today actually did good UX again instead of catering to the whims of some "design genius"
New team member Bud Tribble suggested that it should be able to take
advantage of the Lisa's powerful graphics routines by migrating to its
Motorola 68000, and by February 1981, Smith was able to duly redesign the
prototype for the more powerful CPU while maintaining its lower-cost 8-bit
data bus.
This new prototype expanded graphics to 384x256, allowed the use of more RAM,
and ran at 8 MHz, making the prototype noticeably faster than the 5 MHz Lisa
yet substantially cheaper.
From folklore.org: The idea was what [Smith] called a "bus transformer" circuit, built out of
PAL chips, which adapted the 68000 to an 8 bit memory bus by exploiting the
fast "page mode" access mode of the RAMs. The new Macintosh, designed over
the Christmas break at the end of 1980, featured an 8 megahertz 68000, 64K of
RAM, and a 384 by 256 bit mapped display. It was 60% faster than the Lisa
(which used a 5 megahertz 68000) but a lot less expensive.
https://www.folklore.org/Five_Different_Macs.htmlInteresting that the inventor of the KoalaPad tablet (an early graphics tablet for 8-bit computers --- I can recall using one on a Commodore 64 in the high school computer lab) was a user of and advocate for the "Swyftcard":
>writing for A+ in November 1985, said it “accomplished something that I never >knew was possible. It not only outperforms any Apple II word-processing system, >but it lets the Apple IIe outperform the Macintosh… Will Rogers was right: it >does take genius to make things simple.”
Or, perhaps someone could explore a nice version of the Oberon programming environment on the Raspberry Pi? (apparently drivers are the big hold-up?)
https://www.fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html - Recreates (Jef Raskin's) Archy-like philosophy and workflow in emacs, including some customizations: "Ace Jump Mode ... works a bit like Jef Raskin's Leap feature from days gone by." Explicitly references Archy's predecessor, the Canon Cat
But now clicking on that URL brings up something completely different.
AfterHIA•2d ago
The funny thing is that given how crap things have gotten it doesn't seem like it would be very hard at all to architect a, "radically improved" version of modern computer interfaces. We even have LLMs to help facilitate parts of the system that might have been historically difficult to implement. Why not instead of building a, "modern" Windows or Mac OS you made a, "useable" version which was optimized to run on anything or could run with any stalling on a modern computer? I don't want Windows 11; I want Windows 25' I want it to work orders of magnitude faster than Windows 98 rather than using Moore's Law to create something that can, "do more with more resources but averages out to roughly the same experience as previous generations."
We're still effectively using the same computers we were using when I was a kid in the 1990s.
netdoll•2d ago
AfterHIA•2d ago
detourdog•1h ago
pixelpoet•1h ago
Was a very memorable time, great research and great people <3