Computers: The Year of the Mouse

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Lisa, of course, did not spring full blown from the mind of Jobs. Primitive hand controllers have been used with computers for nearly two decades, ever since Stanford Research Institute Scientist Douglas Engelbart built a scurrying table-top gadget in the mid-'60s nicknamed "the mouse." In the early 1970s, researchers at Xerox began improving on Engelbart's design, and soon after, computer experts at the company's Palo Alto research center began using a mouse in a computer language they called Smalltalk. By pointing and pressing buttons, they could send messages to and from objects on a screen without using a keyboard. In December 1979, Jobs and a group of Apple engineers visited Palo Alto for a demonstration of the Smalltalk system. They watched the electric rodent point at commands while a Xerox researcher, Larry Tesler, made the case for the hand-held device. Recalls Bruce Daniels, a Lisa designer who saw the presentation: "We loved it, what they were trying to put across in terms of ease of use. We all said: 'That's it. That's what we want to build.' " Six months later, Tesler joined Apple and the Lisa team.

At Apple, the Lisa project began to build. First there were rambling late-night rap sessions between Jobs and Couch, then the installation of a 40-man team in quarters behind the Good Earth health-food restaurant in Cupertino, Calif, and finally, in 1982, the establishment of a 400-man force in three one-story beige and red-tile buildings near Apple's antiseptic headquarters in Cupertino. Couch fired up the workers with what he calls the "Outward Bound school of business," stressing the virtues of originality and sweat. New workers were employed as pristine users, and psychologists tested new features for what the industry calls "user friendliness." The results now appear to be very friendly. Apple says its studies show that a novice can learn to operate Lisa in 20 to 40 min., as opposed to the 20 to 40 hrs. of instruction usually needed to master a first-generation computer.

Apple hopes that Lisa will go a long way toward opening up the computer market to a new group of consumers. "It's definitely the way things are moving," says Gary Kildall, the inventor of the popular CP/M operating system that runs many small computers and one of more than 28 independent programmers who are writing additional software for the Lisa. Paul Freiberger, a senior editor of the trade weekly Info World, agrees. "I was blown away," he says. "They are a year ahead of everybody."

Innovation, however, is not always a key to success in the marketplace, especially the mart for a $10,000 machine. "There's a lot more to selling equipment to major corporations than knocking on the door and taking orders," says Charles Hoerner of Foremost McKesson, who is shopping for a computer system for the San Francisco-based conglomerate. "There are lots of organizations that have an IBM bias. They are not particularly open minded." Says Barry Smith, Lisa's marketing manager: "Corporate life does not reward risk takers, and there's the old adage that you never lose your job by buying an IBM."