VCF East: Xerox Star vs. Apple Lisa

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Recommends GeekyBear · 2023-05 · on “Xerox Star 8010 Interfaces, high quality polaroids (1981)”

Here's video of Xerox personel demonstrating the Star 8010 UI back in the day. [LINK] Also, a more recent look at both the Star 8010 and the Apple Lisa. [this video]

Cites linguae · 2025-10 · on “Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)”

I remember trying out Plan 9 a few years ago. I like its underpinnings; I like how the designers pushed the Unix notion of "everything is a file" to its limits, with various services being presented to the operating system as file servers implemented using a protocol named 9P. It's a cool research operating system with a lot of very interesting ideas, but ultimately it's not my daily driver due to a lack of hardware and software support, though I am working on a research project (but for conventional *nix operating systems) that takes advantage of 9P. Carmack's description of the rio GUI is apt; rio is heavily based on Xerox PARC's Cedar environment from the mid-1980s ( [LINK] ). I had a har

Cites OhMeadhbh · 2026-04 · on “Macs Since 1983”

Meh. the Lisa was absolutely, positively, explicitly NOT a Mac. If you don't get that, then you misunderstand the business of computing in the late 70s / early 80s. The author also ignored Jef Raskin's work on the original Mac project (I wrote a serial driver for him in the early 80s for a 6809 prototype he was working on.) If you're going to make one of these Mac hagiographies, it's useful to point out the Canon Cat (which was more in line with Jef's original idea for the Mac) and then point out how different it was from main-stream Macs. And then point out WHY the Lisa was not a Mac. So... Why do people think the Lisa was a prototype Mac? It's easy to understand the confusion. It has a 68k