LisaGUI recreates Apple's innovative computer OS, without emulating it

Somewhere between a cover version and a loving homage of the interface that helped shape the modern desktop

LisaGUI is a faithful reconstruction of the desktop and user interface of Apple's Lisa, the workstation that fed ideas into the early Macintosh, and it shows that there are still things to learn from that system.

A project by developer and artist Andrew Yaros, LisaGUI is a reproduction of the LisaOS in JavaScript. As the project's information page describes, it's not an emulator. This is partly because such things already exist, and the source code of its software is available, but it's also partly to make it work a little better inside a browser window than an exact emulation of a 42-year-old computer.

It came to the attention of The Reg FOSS desk because Yaros just posted a blog post about The Why of Lisa G. U. I.. To be honest, the blog's clever recreation of a classic MS-DOS era text user interface might well have charmed us enough to keep reading, even if we hadn't been impressed with the recreation – but both really struck us.

As the blog post explains, there are already web-based recreations of more mainstream OSes, such as Windows 93, and the amazing Infinite Mac, whose ancestor MacOS9.app we described back in 2022. The Lisa, though, is much less well-known. The Reg celebrated the machine's 30th birthday a dozen years ago, and that article mentions Apple's 1985 attempt to relaunch the Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL. That article has a good few screenshots, and it goes some way to illustrate just how different the LisaOS was from the experimental Xerox PARC machines Apple paid to see in 1979.

LisaGUI is the easiest way there is to play with the original graphical desktop. - Click to enlarge

The thing is, though, that most of us – even retrocomputing enthusiasts like this vulture – have never got to sit down and work with one for a while. The Lisa was so commercially unsuccessful that, as The Register recounted six years ago, Apple consigned several thousands of them to a landfill in 1989. As a result, to get a little bit of a feel for how the Lisa worked, you need to play around with it: create some documents, edit some text and so on. That's where LisaGUI comes in.

The letters "OS" in the name "LisaOS", incidentally, don't stand for "operating system." It was the Lisa Office System; the computer came with a suite of what today we'd call "applications." The thing is that they're not exactly programs that you run, because the Lisa didn't work like that – which is exactly the sort of information that you can't readily extract from looking at static screenshots.

When you double-click on a Lisa Office component, it doesn't open a program, because LisaOS tried to blur away the distinction between programs and documents. What look like app icons are little stacks of stationery templates and double-clicking one creates a new piece of that kind of stationery. You drag it somewhere to store it, and then you can work on it. This also, almost as a byproduct, means no "save" and "load" dialog boxes. Those are commands for interacting with a program, and that's not how the Lisa was intended to work: the important things were documents, not the tools that created them.

What paid for the R&D that went into the Lisa was the success of the Apple II range, which while a pioneering eight-bit micro, stuck closer to the conventions set by the minicomputers that came before it. To set it up, you inserted cards into slots, and then Apple II users had to learn about all sorts of concepts like what programs were and that you had to load them into memory and then, later, save data files from those programs onto media (cassette tapes or, for the wealthy, floppy diskettes). The same sort of concepts lay behind CP/M and then in turn MS-DOS.

The Lisa tried to do away with such 1970s stuff. LisaOS did have multitasking, but then, it didn't exactly have programs as such. It was an attempt at something far more ambitious, as befitted the demo that the Apple techies saw – and for which Apple paid, in stock – of Xerox PARC's prototype Smalltalk system.

Of course, the snag was that, when it was launched, the Lisa cost $32,500 in today's money (slightly under £25,000), and it flopped. That's why Apple's overlapping project for a more affordable machine – the Macintosh – drew on a lot of Lisa technology, and on the late Bill Atkinson's virtuoso code, but it dispensed with many of the high-concept ideas. It had no hard disk, not much RAM, no multitasking, and it embraced simple, familiar concepts such as running programs from diskettes and saving documents – including standardized load and save dialog boxes, because there wasn't enough memory to run the Finder at the same time and have it handle that stuff.

As we tried to explain for its 40th anniversary, the Mac was in some ways a more conventional computer than the adventurous and experimental Lisa. That, in turn, meant that for the Mac, the developers had to invent new metaphors for how to do things rather than typing commands at prompts – such as dialog boxes, which let you navigate to a folder on a disk.

Youtube Video

The Mac was a radical machine in its time – but it wasn't as radical as the Lisa, just as the Lisa was nowhere near as radical as Smalltalk on a Xerox Alto. But then, as Steve Jobs freely admitted in later interviews, he missed much of the significance of Xerox's demos – he was so spellbound by the graphical user interface, he didn't register the networking, or the programming language, or its object-oriented simplicity.

Many of the ideas and designs and implementations that were new in the original Macintosh in 1984 are everywhere now: they're so ubiquitous, we don't notice them. These include dialog boxes, maximize and minimize buttons in title bars, and a clear distinction between the program you're using right now and the underlying OS. That stuff wasn't there on the Lisa – either because it wasn't needed, or because it just hadn't been invented yet.

It's not so visible in screenshots, and you need to be keen to emulate a computer you've never even seen. LisaGUI means that you don't need to: it's right there, in seconds. Have a play around. It's fun. ®