The Year of the Mouse

By Philip Faflick

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."

Apple is aiming Lisa at the nation's 30 million professionals, managers and administrative executives. Much is riding on the success of the machine, both for Apple, which invested $50 million and three years in the project, and for its harddriving, high-strung chairman, Steven Jobs. At the official unveiling of the new computer last week, Jobs was able to announce to his stockholders a 73% increase in quarterly profits on sales of $214 million. That increase was due almost entirely to the continued high sales of the durable Apple II (750,000 sold since its introduction six years ago; 45,000 in the month of December at its alltime-low list price of $1,330), a machine that is showing its age. The company discontinued manufacture of the Apple II last week and introduced an enhanced version called the Apple IIe, priced at $1,395, which its assembly plant in Carrollton, Texas, is turning out at the rate of one every 30 seconds. (The original Apple was a short-lived machine aimed at hobbyists, and only 600 were built.) The firm's other computer, the Apple III, never quite caught on. It suffered a disastrous launching (the first 14,000 had to be recalled for retooling) and then was outsold by International Business Machines' belated entry into the desktop market, the IBM Personal Computer.

Apple, setting out to prove that it could build a better personal computer than IBM or anyone else, seems to have made its point with Lisa. The new machine has some flaws: no color, a balky printer, a sluggish word processor, a few tricky hurdles in a new planning and scheduling program. But nothing on the market, including the IBM PC, compares with the new machine. Lisa pays imaginative court to details: when a knotty task is in progress, the machine signals that the ensuing work will take some time by displaying a little hourglass. When the "off" button is pushed before work on the screen has been properly stored, the machine automatically files loose documents and stows away relevant data before shutting itself off. Headlines and labels can be set in any of a dozen typefaces, then enlarged or shrunk with a flick of the mouse. Moreover, nearly all the built-in software is "integrated," that is, numbers, words and pictures can be easily transferred among the charts, graphs, memos and computations on the screen. Several companies offer software that is more or less integrated, but none matches the ease of use of Lisa and its mouse.

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."

Although IBM does not offer a machine that compares with Lisa, that gap could be filled at any time. "I'd expect direct competition to Lisa before the end of the year," says Clive Smith of the Yankee group, a Boston-based consulting firm. Already one company, VisiCorp, has announced that it is developing a mouse system that will plug into an IBM PC and give it some of Lisa's capabilities at a lower price. Apple itself is working on a scaled-down version of Lisa called Mackintosh (a misspelling of the Mclntosh apple). Priced at about $2,000, it is expected to make its debut this summer. Other mouse-driven machines are sure to follow, but Jobs shrugs them off. "We want to drive this industry," he says. "We could have introduced Lisa a year ago, but we wanted to make it perfect. We're prepared to live with Lisa for the next ten years." --By Philip Faflick. Reported by Dick Thompson/San Francisco and Bruce van Voorst/New York

With reporting by Dick Thompson, BRUCE VAN VOORST This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.