Lisa’s copy (and cut, and paste) – Unsung

I love looking at origins of obvious things, because of two things:

They help me get unstuck. If you go far enough, you will find out that even the most ossified conventions that are older than you haven’t always been this way.

They put me in the mood of “what of the things that feel normal today that deserve to feel dated, obsolete, or awkward?”

I’ve been emulating the Apple Lisa recently, and I was struck by how many of its UI strings were slightly or wholly different than what we’re used to.

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It makes sense. Lisa came out in 1983 as Mac’s predecessor and really the first GUI that is directly linked to what we’re using today. Even though it borrowed things from work done at Xerox, tons of conventions were not established yet.

So, I thought it would be fun to actually take a closer look.

For context, Lisa was as slow as it was expensive, and generally considered a failure. It was basically abandoned by 1985. Not much third-party software has ever been written, but Lisa shipped with 7 impressive office apps with fantastic names: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaList, LisaProject, and LisaTerminal.

The screenshots below come from an emulator and from manuals (this links to the 1984 version, but each manual also includes a link to the original 1983 edition). The emulator is pretty harrowing; please upvote the idea of Lisa in Infinite Mac if you would want to see it!

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As Lisa powers up, we see the appearance of the “wait” dialog box. We’ll encounter more symbols like this triangle, inspired by traditional flowcharts.

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Let’s start with menus, as these really were the treasure map to the whole system.

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The Desk menu is basically the equivalent of the dock today.

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The File menu has Print appended to it, indicating how important printing was still then; a truly “paperless office” won’t really be possible for two more decades (and seemingly still hasn’t fully arrived).

There is no Window menu yet, so the menu also contains some of that burgeoning functionality. Set Aside is what we would call Minimize today. Save & Continue is basically a contemporary Save, and Save & Put Away a hypothetical Save & Close. Revert to Previous Version is the same as today’s Revert. By the way, in the Revert dialog I appreciated the nice gesture of telling the user how much time passed since the last save, and a warning about undo (we’ll get back to this):

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Print Current Selection would today be just Print Selection. Print As Is is basically Print… but skipping the setup dialog with number of copies, etc. It was added later in Lisa’s life, and today, we’d probably call it Print Again?

If you’re noticing a pattern already, it is more wordiness compared to what we see these days. It makes sense. Our growing familiarity with these concepts is what will allow these strings to become tighter over time.

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This is that Print… dialog, by the way, with beautiful “while you wait” and “while you work” verbiage (although usually I do not condone strings getting so close to each other). The manual explains: “You can have the Lisa use most of its attention to print your document while you wait. A document will print more quickly if you choose While You Wait, but you won’t be able to use the Lisa for any other tasks.”

The other strings feel less typical. Format For Printer… is Page Setup, but with a lot of quirks. Printers were not usually yet WYSIWYG, able to mirror stuff exactly on the screen. They often came with their own fonts, so some...