Reverse engineering VisiCorp's pioneering GUI for commodity PCs shows how little modern GUIs get from Xerox – and how much we all owe Apple.
Another year, another magisterial chunk of software history from Nina Kalinina: On recreating the lost SDK for a 42-year-old operating system: VisiCorp Visi On. Kalinina has deconstructed an early PC GUI that made so little splash that it makes OS/2 look like a big hit – and she's even come up with some tools for writing new apps for it.
A few weeks short of a year ago, The Reg FOSS desk was working on a historical opinion piece on how the OS/2 flop shaped modern software. Soon after we finished it, we came across Nina Kalinina's remarkably in-depth history of Windows 2, and we wrote about that as well. Since then, we have been following Kalinina's Mastodon feed with fascination. Recently she has been taking apart VisiCorp's Visi On – one of the first GUIs for IBM-compatible PCs. We recommend the amusingly discursive Wikipedia article on Visi On.
VisiCorp's own ad doesn't show much
VisiCorp is better known for VisiCalc. Launched for the Apple II in 1979, this was the first spreadsheet program for personal computers. Later, VisiCalc was supplanted by Lotus 1-2-3, as developed by MIT laureate Mitch Kapor – before 1-2-3 was outcompeted by Excel. It was very rudimentary indeed, but it was transformative and created an entirely new category of software.
VisiCorp invested some of the profits from VisiCalc into writing Visi On, which it previewed in 1982 – not merely before Apple launched the Macintosh, but even before it launched the Lisa in 1983.
In other words, although it took a few years to make it to release, Visi On was designed before Apple showed off its first GUI computer. Visi On is a WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) GUI that was laid out without any influence from Apple's design, and wow, does it show. You can get a very vague impression from perusing screenshot galleries – we reckon that ToastyTech has the best – but static images don't convey its profound weirdness well. You need to see it running, and that's what Kalinina has done – and much more besides.
This vulture has been working with Macs since the era of System 6, and if we had $1,000 for every time we've read someone saying that Apple stole everything from Xerox… well, we wouldn't be working for The Register, we'd own it. No matter how loud and how confident, they're wrong – but Kalinina brings the video evidence of just how wrong.
When the Macintosh turned 40, we wrote about the significance of its design. For this product, Apple invented important features we all take for granted – simple but fundamental things like Load and Save dialog boxes, which simply didn't exist before.
More recently, we described the remarkable LisaGUI – not an emulator, but a recreation of the Lisa's GUI inside a web page. It's very different from the Mac and all subsequent GUI desktops: it doesn't really have "apps" that you run to create "documents" – instead, applications are stationery templates, from which a double-click tears off a new document that you can save and name.
Aside from the software itself, the result is a nearly 10,000-word essay about resurrecting ancient software and getting it working. It's a fascinating read if you're interested in software archaeology. She decided not to embed animated GIFs in the document, which in our opinion is a sad loss. For the action shots, and if you just want to see it happen, we refer you to her Mastodon thread of demos.
Seeing a pre-Lisa GUI in motion and in use, and seeing things like the very strange ways that windows are positioned and resized, really emphasizes how strange the pre-Apple GUI era was, in a way that somehow the demos of exotic Xerox prototypes, or products that cost as much as a house, don't. Never mind standard things like pull-down menus, as Kalinina describes, Visi On barely had identifiable buttons. Over months, she slowly worked out how graphics are displayed, and how to show a terminal window.
Xerox laid down a path, but it's Apple that laid the trail that everyone else followed – and seeing what it looks like down one of the other tracks is fascinating and very educational.
We've included a YouTube clip by way of an illustration, but don't take VisiCorp's own advertisement as a good demonstration. It isn't. The point is that until Kalinina's remarkable work, there was very little to choose from. We recommend her demos instead of VisiCorp's. ®
Source: The register