Macworld - Thirty years ago, Apple unveiled the Apple Lisa, a pioneering machine that introduced the mouse-driven graphical user interface to a wide audience and opened a new chapter in personal computer history.
The Mac borrowed heavily from the Lisa, and the Mac went on to great things while the Lisa floundered. As a result, it's tempting to treat the Lisa as merely a footnote in the history of Apple. But as anyone who has used a real Lisa knows, Apple's first GUI-based computer played host to many distinctive quirks and traits that tend to get overlooked in the history books.
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The machine's 30th anniversary is as good a time as any to take a look at a handful of both odd and useful features that truly made the Lisa something unique.
Extreme copy protection
At the factory, Apple assigned every Lisa a unique, unchangeable serial number permanently programmed into a chip on the motherboard. The first time you ran an application from a floppy or copied it to the Lisa's hard disk, the machine "serialized" the application by writing its serial number to the application program. From then on, you could run the application only on that particular Lisa machine.
All software bought for a particular Lisa was locked to that machine, destroying any ability to sell the software used, and negating any future use of the software in the case of a massive hardware failure.
If the Lisa had become more popular (and if it had hosted more than about seven major applications), it's likely that users and the press would have objected strongly to this feature. Ironically, today's DRM, which links software to a certain account or piece of hardware, hearkens back to Lisa's copy protection mechanism.
Document-Centric approach
To open a document on the Mac, you can run an application first and then load the document from the Open command, or double-click on the document icon in the Finder to load the document in its application.
In the Lisa Desktop Manager (its Finder equivalent), you see application icons, but they just let you copy the application between disks. To create a new document, you "tear off" a blank document from a virtual stack of paper associated with an application. You can then double-click that document to open it, which automatically loads the proper application.
In this way, Lisa OS is document-centric rather than partially document-centric like OS X; iOS is application-centric in that it never lets you handle documents outside of applications on the system.
Duplicate file names
On the Mac, you can't create two files with the exact same name in the same folder. Makes sense; if the computer stored two files with the same name, how would it know which one to open?
Amazingly, Lisa OS is one of the only operating systems in history (if not the only one; research pending) to allow duplicate file names. Each file was assigned a physical file name that represented the file on the disk, and a virtual file name provided by the user that showed up in the Lisa interface.
Originally published on www.macworld.com. Click here to read the original story.
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