A sidebar to the “Apple’s Lisa: A personal Office System”
report published in January 1983, pp. 9.
Although we found Lisa to be quite responsive for most activities, it takes a painfully long time
to open a document and place it in a new window. To quantify just how long “painfully
long” is, we took stopwatch timings of both the time it takes to load a document from a file
folder stored on disk and the time it takes to re-open a file which has been temporarily “set
aside” and left on the desk-top. The results of our tests are as follows:
| From folder | From desk-top |
LisaCalc document | 34-57 secs. | 14-15 secs. |
LisaGraph document | 20-57 secs. | 11-23 secs. |
LisaDraw document | 19-46 secs. | 11-12 secs. |
LisaProject document | 30-50 secs. | 12-18 secs. |
LisaList document | 18-20 secs. | 13-19 secs. |
LisaWrite document | 35-47 secs. | 14-15 secs. |
As you can see, we show a range of times in each column. The smaller time is typical if you are
loading a document of the same type as the last one loaded (e.g., a LisaCalc spreadsheet followed by
another spreadsheet), while the larger time is typical if you are loading a document which is different
in type from the last one.
What are the reasons for times such as these? The first is that the opening of a document (not a
device directory or file folder) involves loading its application tool along with the document. Even
a short document requires what might be a large software program. The second reason is that we
were using an internal, development version of the system, which causes the application tools
to be larger (hence take longer to load) than normal because of debugging code. The third reason
is that the general process of getting programs optimized before shipment to customers is underway but
unfinished.
We would therefore expect that later versions of the Lisa software will provide faster loading times than
did the ones which we used. However, we would not expect the times to change dramatically. We doubt that
opening a document on Lisa can ever be made to be a quick operation. We are afraid that Lisa users
are ultimately just going to have to adjust to this.
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