Lisa, Next, and Recursive History

GUIdebook is one of my favorite computer dork sites. It has an ever-expanding library of screenshots, advertising and cultural items for operating systems, hardware and applications. In some cases, the coverage is exhaustive, such as showing dozens of dialogs boxes from every version of Photoshop on both Mac and Windows.

Particularly interesting is the growing coverage of some less-than-maintream products. There's quite a lot of material on the Lisa, for example. One Byte article from 1988 caught my attention just now, "Lisa Lives." It talks about the Next cube and its similarities to the Lisa. More interestingly, the author mentions how he's waiting a for cube "for the rest of us."

One quote in particular stood out:

To me, it looks as though a portion of Steve Jobs’s history is going to replay itself. In the not-too-distant future, I think we’ll see a less-expensive, equally capable NeXT machine that will be available outside academia. This machine will be to the cube as the Mac is to the Lisa.

The irony, of course, being that Mac was to the cube as the Mac was to the Lisa. Then you can start to think about how Windows 95 stole directly from both the Mac and Next, and how Sun went out and wrote Java (then Oak), which was based on Objective-C and Cocoa, then think about how Apple was acquired by bought Next and wrote a Java bridge to Cocoa, then think about how C# .Net was based on Java, and how there's a C# bridge to Cocoa, and how Mono has an implementation of C# and .Net, which can be run Mac OS X.... but then your head starts to hurt and you have to curl up in a little ball on the floor.

The short version is: all roads lead to Apple, and some of the roads have infinite recursion.

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