Bill Atkinson had the foresight to document the creation of the Lisa User Interface by keeping a Polaroid camera near his computer, taking a snapshot of each significant milestone (see Busy Being Born). Although we didn't systematically save pictures of key Mac milestones, I've managed to cobble together a few seminal Macintosh screenshots to present here in a similar fashion.
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Bud Tribble had a tendency to work late at night. I usually came to work at Texaco Towers around 10:30 AM, so if Bud was there when I arrived, it usually meant he had spent all night there. One morning in mid-May 1981, when I arrived at my usual time, Bud was anxious to show me something before I could even take off my backpack.
I knew Bud had been working on the initial porting of QuickDraw to the Macintosh, but I thought he was at least a week away from getting it running. At this point, we had some cursor routines going and a way to download and execute Pascal programs compiled on a Lisa, attached to the Mac by a serial cable. But we didn't have a memory manager, event manager, or file system yet, so Bud had to build scaffolding in various places to overcome these limitations. He had compiled a bitmap drawing program Bill wrote in Pascal for Lisa, linked it with LisaGraf and other library routines, and started debugging it, fixing each problem as it manifested.
Bud had made huge progress the previous evening, and the demo was substantially running now. It was incredibly exciting to see Mac-like software running on the Mac for the very first time. The demo featured working pull-down menus, complete with a nicer style of drop shadow than Lisa used, and an elaborate graphical pattern menu, illustrated in the screenshot above.
Xerox aficionados will note the use of Cream 12 as our first system font, which was the default font used by Smalltalk that Bill had converted to the LisaGraf font format. The window title bar was a folder tab because we were still confused about the difference between folders and documents. The demo already had scroll bars and a grow box similar to what we shipped, although you couldn't interact with them yet. In fact, the only part of the program that actually did something was the "Quit" command.
In April, I had written some screen printing code that dumped whatever was on the display out the serial port to a dot matrix printer. Since the Mac screen was rather small, I added a feature to print it at double size, so it mostly filled a page. I used that to print the display of Bud's demo, with the impressive graphical pattern menu pulled down, on the very day Bud got it working—that's what is reproduced above.
Bruce Horn joined the Mac team in late 1981 (see Joining The Mac Group), with the charter to write a graphical shell we called the "Finder," since it helped users find applications and documents to launch. We were influenced by ideas from the Architecture Machine group at MIT (a predecessor to the better-known Media Lab), as portrayed in a program called "DataLand" that allowed users to manipulate graphical objects in spatial arrangements. Bruce was excited about spatial data management, and his first assignment was to write a prototype to explore how it could work on the Mac.
Bruce came up with the idea of representing files as small tabs superimposed on an image of a floppy disk. He wrote a prototype he called "the micro-Finder," pictured above. I started helping him implement various parts of it, and pretty soon it was actually useful. You could drag the file tabs to position them and click on the large buttons on the right to launch programs or rename and delete files. We used the micro-Finder through most of 1982 for demoing the Mac until the real Finder became usable around year's end.
After the micro-Finder, Bruce also worked on another prototype that included folders in a two-pane view (Bruce thinks he can eventually dig up a picture of it; if he does, I'll include it here). Meanwhile, Bill Atkinson was crafting an icon-based file manager prototype for Lisa (see Rosing's Rascals), and eventually we decided to follow that direction for the Macintosh.
Here is a very early version of MacPaint, probably from March 1983, after Bill had been working on it for about a month. The first thing to notice is it wasn't called "MacPaint" yet—it still bore its original name, "MacSketch," inherited from its predecessor, LisaSketch.
This early version uses icons designed by Bill himself before Susan Kare got a chance to tweak them. Some of the most important MacPaint tools, like the paint bucket and the lasso, were still months away from being implemented.