From: utzoo!decvax!wivax!linus!genrad!wjh12!clp
Newsgroups: net.works
Title: A comment on Lisa, based on discussions with some of its designers.
Article-I.D.: wjh12.212
Posted: Sun May  1 01:43:12 1983
Received: Tue May  3 03:24:42 1983


   Reading the latest discussion about Lisa, I am a little distressed.
I, too, was amazingly impressed by the Lisa demonstration here at Harvard.
However, I wanted to find out more about the system, so I hung around and
spent a few hours with Bill Atkins and crew talking about how they had done
the project and what Lisa applications would be like. I was THEN really
impressed for the first time:

    Lisa is a carefully engineered collection of tools, with well-defined
interfaces. Apple is willing (and able) to provide one-on-one sessions with
applications writers to explain the interfaces and to help get them started.
The designers of Lisa knew that they couldn't do it all themselves and thus
wanted to make a framework (library) of routines that new software writers
could use. Lisa is an open system in the sense that no routines or interfaces
are hidden or undocumented...

    And: just a note about windows. Bill Atkins has written a VERY impressive
system for Lisa. Anyone who mentions silly limitations in his system hasn't
talked to him. He clips arbitrary regions (rounded rectangles, etc.) and
does incremental updates to uncovered arbitrary regions, as well as having
fast charater painting and point size conversions, italisizing, etc. His
system is a good piece of work, and he'll be publishing a paper about it soon.
These routines are all discussed in the technical talks that he sometimes
gives after demos. My impression of him from the few hours I talked to him
was that he was an excellent programmer and project manager.

    I don't work for Apple, or anything like that, but I felt I should mention
what I had learned from the designers, who aren't here to stick up for them-
selves. I believe that Lisa can succeed as a product, even with a slow disk,
because of Apple's strong committment to software development, especially
by new applications writers... 
							    Charles L. Perkins
						    ...decvax!genrad!wjh12!clp