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Go backWaiting for a document

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 folderFrom desk-top
LisaCalc document34-57 secs.14-15 secs.
LisaGraph document20-57 secs.11-23 secs.
LisaDraw document19-46 secs.11-12 secs.
LisaProject document30-50 secs.12-18 secs.
LisaList document18-20 secs.13-19 secs.
LisaWrite document35-47 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.

Page added on 2nd October 2006.

Copyright © 2002-2006 Marcin Wichary, unless stated otherwise.