Computers: The Year of the Mouse

Apple's long-awaited Lisa ushers in a new era of easy computing

It actually looks a bit like a mouse, with its rounded corners, off-white color and thin wire tail. The size of a pack of cigarettes, it fits snugly into the palm of the hand. Slide it across a table and electric signals go down its 2-ft. tail. Plug that tail into a computer, and the mouse directs the movement of a pointer on a video screen. The result: a device that can bypass the thicket of codes, commands and complicated keyboards that have plagued users since the computer era began.

Last week Apple Computer Inc., the company that made itself a household word by making computing power affordable to individuals, unveiled a mouse-controlled computer named Lisa that may change forever the way people communicate with their machines. Says Wall Street Analyst Ulric Weil, author of Information Systems in the Eighties: "Simply put, Lisa ushers in the second generation of personal computers."

Priced at $9,995, the machine packs into a boxy, 50-lb. package most of the hardware advances of the past five years: a system that will store nearly 7 million words; a sophisticated "32-bit" microprocessor that is far more powerful than the eight-bit chip in its predecessor, the Apple II; and an ultrasharp video display that can show twice as much detail as a standard computer screen. But the key breakthrough is embodied in Lisa's software, the computer codes that make the machine much easier to operate than any other desktop computer. The operator simply takes the mouse in hand, and a little black arrow springs to life on the screen. That arrow can then be directed toward the postage stamp-size pictures lining the bottom of the screen. These are Lisa's "icons," graphic symbols representing such everyday objects as a trash can, a clipboard, file folders, a calculator, a battery-operated clock. By pointing the arrow at an icon and pressing the button on the mouse, the user triggers an action. He might use the trash can to discard the first draft of a memo. The clipboard is used as temporary storage when moving information from one place to another. File folders are for long-term storage.

The mouse can also conjure up any of six business programs that come packaged with the computer: word processing, economic modeling, graphing, list management, project scheduling and free-form drawing. The user can run several programs at once, just as an office worker can spread several jobs across a single desktop. Creating and editing files, running printers and other peripheral devices, and juggling long lists of numbers can all be done without consulting a manual or remembering a single computer command. Explains John Couch, Apple's vice president in charge of the Lisa project: "What we wanted to do was to emulate the way an individual works in an office."