I'm excited to be able to reproduce and annotate them here, since they offer a fascinating, behind the scenes glimpse of how the Mac's breakthrough user interface was crafted. He kept a Polaroid camera by his computer, and took a snapshot each time the user interface reached a new milestone, which he collected in a loose-leaf notebook. It's a shame that these tend to be lost to history, since there is a lot that we can learn from them.įortunately, the main developer of the user interface, Bill Atkinson, was an avid, lifelong photographer, and he had the foresight to document the incremental development of the Lisa User Interface (which more or less became the Mac UI after a few tweaks) with a series of photographs.

Like any evolutionary process, there were lots of false starts and blind alleys along the way. The Macintosh User Interface wasn't designed all at once it was actually the result of almost five years of experimentation and development at Apple, starting with graphics routines that Bill Atkinson began writing for Lisa in late 1978.

Original mac drawing program