The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too.

With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that.

What did the Touch Bar do?

The Touch Bar replaced the top row of the keyboard with a narrow touch screen and a Touch ID surface/​button on the right.

The touch screen provided a constant virtual Esc key on the left, and the remainder could become one of a few things:

• app controls – whatever the app wanted (either buttons or more interactive surfaces):

• control strip – roughly the same as what function keys do today by default (brightness, transport controls, volume):

• a hybrid mode of smaller app controls on the left, and expandable control strip on the right:

• F1–F12 keys:

• a few smaller modes, like showing spaces, quick actions, or emoji:

• small submodes where only the middle of the Touch Bar would be taken over:

The Verge has a five-minute video that shows a lot of this stuff nicely.

Functionality

Touch Bar arrived with a hybrid of functionality for casual and pro users – some built into the macOS itself, and some coming from specific Apple-owned apps.

A few apps offered basically a subset of their toolbars (although often without customization), with an occasional submenu, like digging deeper into font options or choosing a color adjustment. Some apps like Safari and Photo would invest in tiny previews of objects.

Particularly demo-friendly were sliders for volume and brightness, and those in specific apps – playback in QuickTime, or swiping through the photo gallery, clearly inspired by similar controls on the iPhone. Even though Touch Bar was referred to as “multitouch,” it really only supported tapping and horizontal swiping, with just the latter being something classic function keys clearly couldn’t do.

A simple but effective was also an arrow pointing to Touch ID authorization and payments – a small example of software proprioception – which Apple even included as a GIF in their press release:

But there were also some strange moments, the strategy feeling a bit like “let’s throw a lot of stuff at this and see what sticks” (then again, it worked for the first Apple Watch!):

• Any system dialog would show its buttons repeated in the Touch Bar. This felt puzzling to me, as those were already served well by both mouse interactions and keyboard (Esc/​Enter).

• It was nice that you could drag the volume or brightness control, but then the slider would be disconnected from your finger and the volume would also appear in the old HUD on the screen, altogether feeling like different parts of the system weren’t aware of each other.

• Xcode offered a button to comment out the current line or selection, which must have felt almost insulting to programmers – is there anyone who’d prefer that over the ⌘/ key combination?

Lastly, for the first edition, the IA felt complex:

• Word completion was in the middle of the bar, but the emoji entry point was on the left.
• There were many kinds of chevrons (at least three!), and the action didn’t fully match their arrows – some of the chevrons indeed made the controls expand in an expected direction, but some instead drilled deeper and took half of the bar, and others took over the whole thing. (On top of that, some controls had regular horizontal scrolling.)

• Some controls that looked like regular buttons expanded on tap, too, so in effect it was never truly clear what a control would do when touched.
• The close boxes were sometimes on the left, and sometimes on the right of the buttons.

Settings

Strangely for such a high-profile feature, the Touch Bar settings arrived sprinkled in between older keyboard options, rather than in a separate Touch Bar tab that could help you understand the whole system easier, and also perhaps offer nice previews of what was possible.

Apple’s penchant to brand even small things also backfired a little bit – customizing the Touch Bar required facing strange phrases like Quick Actions, App Controls, and Control Strip (this is where the usually non-nostalgic Apple reused a classic name, rather than naming it System Controls to mirror App Controls).

On the other hand, the Customize Control Strip interaction here was an absolute highlight, providing a magical-feeling bridge between the world of the Touch Bar and the heavens above it – this was perhaps the best-designed part of the whole system:

(That kind of customization was also available in some, but not all of the apps that supported the Touch Bar.)

By the way, Apple seems to have learned the settings lesson since 2016, or even overlearned; the action button introduced to the iPhone in 2023 came with a lavish new interface:

First public reactions and the evolution

Back in 2016, the Touch Bar arrived to muted optimism (“not great, perhaps promising, looking forward to season two and three”), mixed with loud frustration from seemingly every single person who relied on the physical Esc key.

Touch Bar was only revisited once, in 2019; this slight update reintroduced a mechanical Esc key, and felt slightly faster in use.

There were no other hardware improvements, and I believe zero software changes from Apple’s side during the whole lifetime of the feature. Some third-party apps added Touch Bar support in the first few years, but even then the verdict seemed somewhat reserved:

Most Final Cut Pro power users will be so used to using keyboard shortcuts for the editing functions they use regularly that they may not find the Touch Bar any quicker for simple editing and playback, but the sheer number of context-dependent settings means it’s likely to prove its value eventually.

The Touch Bar never made it to non-Pro MacBooks or other computers, and started being phased out altogether five years after its arrival. Perplexingly and for reasons we might never know, the project was “maintenanced” almost as soon as it launched, and it wasn’t immediately removed perhaps only to save face.

Haptics and ergonomics

Touch Bar felt unpleasant to fingers.

People’s ire around the Esc key was mostly in how “dead” it felt next to the other keys, which was especially important for something further in the periphery, used as an escape hatch or as a core interaction by programmers. (The key was also slightly offset, likely only to preserve symmetry vis-à-vis Touch ID on the other side.)

I bet that the unavoidable and constant comparison of the feel of the Touch Bar buttons to the real keys just below was what made the whole thing feel worse than it was, and I’ve always wondered if haptics could have helped here. What if a light touch offered gentle haptic feedback similar to feeling the “ridges” of the keys without pressing them, and a deeper press offered a proper haptic tap?

Already in 2016, Apple had similar tech in the trackpad underneath. I bet I’m underestimating how hard or expensive it would be to repurpose it, but: the iPods never had true haptic feedback, yet even in the first model they arrived with a little speaker that emitted haptic-like sounds on actions. It was surprisingly effective, and I was curious why Apple didn’t do the same thing here.

On top of that, while the row of function keys above is fun for an occasional press, it doesn’t ergonomically seem as great in prolonged use. Reaching up to the Touch Bar is more effort than reaching for the trackpad, whether you put it below or to the side – there’s a reason keyboards grow wider but they rarely grow taller. In The Verge video above, you can see the reviewer use a Touch Bar button as a modifier key while interacting with the trackpad below, and it feels unpleasant just watching that happen:

On top of that, the Touch Bar surface sat lower than the surface of the keys, which made it ever so slightly less pleasant to use – it didn’t only feel like it was above the keys, but also behind them.

There were other rough edges that added up:

• The Touch Bar would go to sleep eagerly (after only 60+15 seconds), hiding all its controls and forcing you to tap it or press a key to wake it up.
• The quality of the animations was not the same as on the other touch devices or the Apple TV.

• While the Touch Bar itself was fast enough to support smooth scrolling, there was also some (I think intentional) delay when pressing the Fn key and some Touch Bar controls, plus a general slight, but perceivable latency on every touch.
• Speaking of scrolling, it was uneven: in Calendar, you could use momentum scrolling but the calendar didn’t update in real time, and stopping the momentum by tapping anywhere like on the iPhone actually selected a different month:

• Often the only way to escape a submode was to press a close box on the left, which was unpleasant given the position of your hand; there was no thoughtful shortcut, like double tapping an option, to exit faster.

Size

Using the Touch Bar was being constantly aware of its small size: The previews were tiny, your fingers overlapped content all the time, and scrolling only happened in the horizontal plane. (And you had to keep your finger in a straight line instead of a slight arc – not a natural gesture.)

Expanding the Control Strip required tapping on a very small chevron; there were tons of those tiny chevrons elsewhere, too, narrow and hard to press without haptic feedback. It made the interface feel fiddly, a strange compromise from a company that thoughtfully established and enforced the “44 pixels” minimum size for touch targets with the first iPhone. (The chevrons were exactly half of the recommended minimal physical width of any touch target on the 2007 iPhone – 3.5mm instead of 7mm.)

Many spaces felt tight in other ways, too. Craig Federighi’s keynote demo showing Safari previews was claustrophobic with just five tabs:

When using any typing surface, the Touch Bar would get divided into three areas: app controls, suggested words, and control strip on the right:

In other apps, some areas were scrollable, but there was no room for a scrollbar. Using the Touch Bar in any meaningful capacity felt like constantly guessing what’s movable and what isn’t, and constantly resizing tiny virtual windows, except without any pleasant resizing mechanics from Apple’s larger screens. Here, the emoji pane UI is doing some really clever things to help traverse hundreds of emoji, yet it still feels not enough:

The interactions in photo editing and a few other places felt so cramped and convoluted that I wonder why anyone would choose them over the spaciousness and precision of the screen above.

I wonder if the limited height also created other downstream effects. For example, drilling down did a (slow) fadeout/​fade in effect, instead of scrolling down and up to help you understand the hierarchy – and showing the chevron pointing in that direction, too. I am guessing that was because the movement would suggest you can swipe up and down, and there simply wasn’t enough room for that gesture to feel good.

Using the Touch Bar, I kept thinking of the wonderful customization feature I mentioned that cleverly fused the Touch Bar with the screen above, and also a similar interaction from a 1980s Xerox machine (where pressing the key below More would show other options):

Could this have worked for other Touch Bar interactions to create more room, or would it become frustrating as your fingers would naturally want to tap the bottom of the screen? There is a small thoughtful integration like this in text editing, where the Touch Bar seems to be aware that while your fingers are downstairs, you might be looking up:

But then, in the same place, choosing a color is not integrated the same way:

All in all, the Touch Bar was new I/O sandwiched between an old O and an even older I, and it didn’t seem like all the relationships here were fully figured out.

Could Touch Bar just grow larger? Asus Zenbook Pro showed the endgame of this idea – it enabled some new interesting things, but threw in tons of more challenges like a missing trackpad, or deciding what to put on each surface:

I wouldn’t expect Touch Bar to go nearly as far, but I was curious to see it grow a little bit vertically to alleviate some of the pains.

Customization and infrastructure

Apple bet the Touch Bar house on individual app built-in support and a few core interactions. But I wonder in hindsight if the answer was user customization.

On that front, the Touch Bar exposed Apple’s underinvestment in the actions infrastructure. Keyboard customization in macOS has already felt ancient in 2016 and did not improve since, and Shortcuts app didn’t even exist then. This was Apple’s chance to provide a gentler Keyboard Maestro-like experience for the masses, but the Touch Bar didn’t allow you to plop in even a few function keys alongside the new features – the only option for that was the old-fashioned mode with F1–F12 with none of the benefits of the Touch Bar (you couldn’t even change the labels!), and also without haptics.

Sure, there was a gesture in this direction with Quick Actions, but those felt extremely underbaked; in my explorations with Automator and Touch Bar, I encountered some truly confusing settings and flows and could never make it work fully. Here, I had to go to a faraway System Preferences pane, and see various Quick Actions that were not talking to one another:

In a better setup, it would be possible to assign any key or action or menu command to any ground-floor Touch Bar button; something like SF Symbols (formalized in 2019) could provide all the necessary icons. Or, one could imagine some delightful integrated interactions like this one that would make it easy and pleasant to make the Touch Bar feel personally useful.

Or, how about sparklines or other tiny widgets that’d quickly show visual status, of the kind pro users like to put in the menu bar already, and easily pluggable to data sources (see the very recent TerminalWidget)? Or a left/​right slide gesture, buttons, or a keyboard combination to swap between Touch Bar “spaces”?

How about learning what commands you use most often that don’t have keyboard shortcuts, per app, and suggesting them as the first five buttons on the Touch Bar?

Could the Touch Bar have been saved?

Today, it often feels like the Touch Bar chose revolution in the moments the right answer was evolution, and evolution in places that called for a revolution. With hindsight, after seeing projects like Stream Deck and Flux Keyboard capture people’s attention, maybe it could have worked this way:

• First version arrives with a physical Esc or at least “sound-based haptics,” and allows you to do more things via much nicer settings software: easy assigning of buttons to system actions, and icons so you no longer have to remember whether it was F3 or F7 doing your thing. Don’t treat the Touch Bar as repudiation of function keys, but as their enhancement. On top of that, add some easy-to-put-together widgetlets and sparklines. This is Pro hardware, and these feel like pro features.
• Staying tighter, focused, and reigning in some more complex interactions would help, too (problem: they look so good in videos!). Instead of boiling the ocean and recreating a lot of the existing GUI in a cramped space, focus on just one–two great interactions per app. Finder: Show the Quick Actions that were already customizable and not as easy to access in some views! Emoji: Paginate instead of scroll, but do a really clever pagination that highlights the power of a parallax swipe gesture that can only exist here. System: Add immediate screenshotting by default.
• If this worked, subsequent versions would add haptics, perhaps increase the size, and go mainstream from pro users to regular users, learning all the useful lessons along the way (also from third-party apps like Pock).

But I’m not sure. Touch is fun but there is, ultimately, a ceiling on value you can squeeze out of a small touch strip, and a floor on complexity of yet another input/​output device.

And there was always an elephant in the hardware room – many pro users are likely to use computers on desks with separate keyboards, which puts the Touch Bar either too far away or makes it altogether inaccessible. In the decade since, Apple hasn’t even solved this for Touch ID, the only part of the Touch Bar that didn’t get sacrificed to the angry IBM 3270 terminal gods.

Would the Touch Bar have worked as a standalone device? Could it ever become good enough for you to want to pay for it twice?

Perhaps not. But had Apple improved the keyboard and action customization software for the Touch Bar, only to see it crash and burn, we could at least still keep the software.

I love looking at origins of obvious things, because of two things:

• They help me get unstuck. If you go far enough, you will find out that even the most ossified conventions that are older than you haven’t always been this way.
• They put me in the mood of “what of the things that feel normal today that deserve to feel dated, obsolete, or awkward?”

I’ve been emulating the Apple Lisa recently, and I was struck by how many of its UI strings were slightly or wholly different than what we’re used to.

It makes sense. Lisa came out in 1983 as Mac’s predecessor and really the first GUI that is directly linked to what we’re using today. Even though it borrowed things from work done at Xerox, tons of conventions were not established yet.

So, I thought it would be fun to actually take a closer look.

For context, Lisa was as slow as it was expensive, and generally considered a failure. It was basically abandoned by 1985. Not much third-party software has ever been written, but Lisa shipped with 7 impressive office apps with fantastic names: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaList, LisaProject, and LisaTerminal.

The screenshots below come from an emulator and from manuals (this links to the 1984 version, but each manual also includes a link to the original 1983 edition). The emulator is pretty harrowing; please upvote the idea of Lisa in Infinite Mac if you would want to see it!

As Lisa powers up, we see the appearance of the “wait” dialog box. We’ll encounter more symbols like this triangle, inspired by traditional flowcharts.

Let’s start with menus, as these really were the treasure map to the whole system.

The Desk menu is basically the equivalent of the dock today.

The File menu has Print appended to it, indicating how important printing was still then; a truly “paperless office” won’t really be possible for two more decades (and seemingly still hasn’t fully arrived).

There is no Window menu yet, so the menu also contains some of that burgeoning functionality. Set Aside is what we would call Minimize today. Save & Continue is basically a contemporary Save, and Save & Put Away a hypothetical Save & Close. Revert to Previous Version is the same as today’s Revert. By the way, in the Revert dialog I appreciated the nice gesture of telling the user how much time passed since the last save, and a warning about undo (we’ll get back to this):

Print Current Selection would today be just Print Selection. Print As Is is basically Print… but skipping the setup dialog with number of copies, etc. It was added later in Lisa’s life, and today, we’d probably call it Print Again?

If you’re noticing a pattern already, it is more wordiness compared to what we see these days. It makes sense. Our growing familiarity with these concepts is what will allow these strings to become tighter over time.

This is that Print… dialog, by the way, with beautiful “while you wait” and “while you work” verbiage (although usually I do not condone strings getting so close to each other). The manual explains: “You can have the Lisa use most of its attention to print your document while you wait. A document will print more quickly if you choose While You Wait, but you won’t be able to use the Lisa for any other tasks.”

The other strings feel less typical. Format For Printer… is Page Setup, but with a lot of quirks. Printers were not usually yet WYSIWYG, able to mirror stuff exactly on the screen. They often came with their own fonts, so some matching was necessary:

The manual had an entire section called “When Settings Don’t Match a Printer,” and there were I imagine god knows how many error cases that had to be covered, including:

And Monitor The Printer… is today’s Print Center: a way to see the real-time printing status. Note a lot of writing here elaborates further on the “while you wait/​while you work” dichotomy:

Monitor The Printer was important, by the way, since the manual warned you your printer might occasionally become haunted:

But, let’s go back to the File/​Print menu. I actually found a version of this menu that comes from a 1982 pre-release Lisa, never launched to the public. Let me show them side by side:

It’s fun to see designers figuring it all out. You will notice the lack of dividers and ellipses actually touching the work-in-progress strings. 1983’s Set Aside is 1982’s very modern Close. Save & Put Away is Put Back. And, at the bottom, it seems the team didn’t yet figure out that the menu options need to consistently use verbs for commands, and adjectives or nouns for toggles – so we see Intended for Printer… (rather than Format For Printer…) and Printing in Progress… (rather than Monitor The Printer…).

Lastly, in a released version of LisaList, this menu would come bearing a harrowing Fix Damaged Document command. Not only it doesn’t even have an ellipsis, but the manual also says “there is always the chance that the recovery process will make things worse instead of better.” Vaya con dios, I suppose.

Let’s move on to the Edit menu.

Today’s Select All is a verbose Select All Of Document, and since this is the first public appearance of undo, that feature is also more descriptive, appearing as Undo Last Change. But otherwise the menu feels surprisingly modern, shortcuts and all.

Unsurprisingly, the first undo wasn’t as developed. We saw earlier in this post “Once you click OK, you will not be able to change your mind, even with Undo,” which today would probably say “This is not undoable.” You could also see a frightening error message arriving without any further clarification, like above.

Sometimes, the app would warn you undo doesn’t have your back. We’ve seen this before, and here’s another example.

Since undo only had one step, LisaCalc and LisaList also had Restore Previous Entry for when you changed your mind after editing a cell in the spreadsheet. You had to employ this strategically, as you did the already-mentioned Revert to Previous Version.

“You can even undo Undo!” bragged the manual, and I imagine there must have been interfaces where undo came without a matching redo. But the eventual solution, of course, was bidirectional undo/​redo with many steps. This basically only needed more memory, still very expensive in 1983.

Above we also see Clear Entries that would just be called Clear today.

Elsewhere in Edit menu, Clear Lines Off Top would appear in LisaTerminal only, and was a charming (and I would argue better) way of saying Clear Scrollback.

The next menu, Type Style, would be called Font today. “Type” is typewriter nomenclature – Lisa was meant to be a typewriter replacement. The point/​pitch convention for font sizes and letter spacing also comes from typewriters, and in an older version of that menu even font names arrive from that universe (PS = Proportionally Spaced!):

Otherwise, notable is the deterministic Plain Text reset with a P shortcut that would in time lose to printing. I miss this sometimes, this “reset” idea, as I think it would nicely compliment Paste And Match Style.

(By the way, Lisa was the last computer to use Apple logo as a modifier key.)

While Type Style is for selection, Format ¶ is all about paragraphs – HTML people know this distinction as “inline vs. block.” (The pilcrow symbol means “paragraph,” although I did not expect it to be common use even then.) The flyout menus with their convoluted mechanics weren’t invented yet, but in some sense there was no need for them as the options were very limited.

It is interesting to see Margin/Tab Ruler as two options with deterministic shortcuts ([ and ]). But the most unbelievable shortcut must be Same As On Clipboard. It reformats the current selection to match what you have in the clipboard – an early salvo in an endless battle that later brought us Paste Special, Paste And Match Style, Paste And Retain Style, Copy/​Paste Properties, Paint Format and so on, and so on. And it was given S, rather than spending it on Save (& Continue).

Otherwise Left Flush and Right Flush would be called aligning today, and the ¶ pilcrow symbol would be replaced by a simple Paragraph Spacing.

In LisaCalc, Format is missing the ¶ because, well, there are no paragraphs in spreadsheets! I love Words Left/Nos. Right, and empathize with trying to align the digits. But it wasn’t even close, was it.

Page Layout shows that we’ve had UI boolean problems from day one. Show Page Ruler and Hide Page Ruler do it deterministically, with one always disabled, and without checkmarks. Preview Pages and Don’t Preview Pages do the checkmark, but introduce a dreaded double negative. (These last options, by the way, is the “pages/​pageless format” showing page margins and dividers, that bother us so much about Google Docs.) Today, these would all be in the View menu that doesn’t exist yet.

And speaking of boolean challenges, here are some top-level menus from LisaList with even more conventions:

But, back to the Page Layout Menu. Insert Page Mark would be Insert Page Break today. I really love Allow To Cross Pages as the opposite of Keep On Same Page, and the incredible O and Q shortcuts.

In LisaCalc, this particular menu comes with a beautifully named For Your Information (sentence capped, for some reason)…

…throwing up a sheet-like window showing basic stats. Today, that window would have a more boring name and probably land in the File menu:

The Search menu is fascinating – why wasn’t it called Find like its items are? I am particularly enjoying W keyed off of Find What (today: Find), while F is taken by Find Next Occurrence (today: Find Again). There is some mnemonic sense to it all, but I like today’s proximity of ⌘F/G better.

What we know as Replace is Change here, and I am particularly loving Cases Must Agree and Cases Need Not Agree (today usually called “case sensitivity.”)

Hide Dialog Box is a string with surprising to me amount of UI jargon. The H shortcut was added later in Lisa’s life, presumably at users’ behest. It’s strange today to see a shortcut like this to hide one specific floating dialog box.

Similarly, Insert Wild Card with a confusing ellipsis allows you to insert a symbol in your find dialog that stands for “match anything here” – top-level menu options reaching inside specific dialog boxes were not uncommon in early years of GUIs, but I think fell out of favor over time as the idea can be conceptually confusing.

The menu below is from LisaWrite, and I like how comparing it with other apps makes us see the team trying to settle on a convention. In LisaList there are no ellipsis, but question marks!

And in LisaCalc, there are… both:

You can notice that it wasn’t clear where one would put Find-related commands and their today’s presence in Edit menu doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either. We just got used to it. (Also note the “occurence” typo.)

Spelling menu has a bunch of fun options and conventions, and an extremely generous use of keyboard shortcuts:

• Find Next Misspelling (you don’t often see that word!)
• Suggest Corrections + Paste Guess (this is just replacing the word with the suggestion – interesting use of the clipboard metaphor)
• Put In Dictionary (today: Learn Spelling)

LisaDraw sports the Arrangement menu, which will look very familiar to anyone using Illustrator, Sketch, Figma, and so on. This is where Bring To Front and Send To Back started! With a tiny bit of editing (Arrangement is now Arrange, and some of the Objects nouns would be omitted), this would feel pretty modern.

I love these visual menus, and I think we lost that kind of stuff along the way:

Okay, let’s move on from menus. The system also relied a lot of dialogs. Let’s look at some of them:

This wordy dialog would become a small loading state today. The verbose “To terminate the operation, hold down the Apple key while you type a period” probably felt necessary because other than Shift on a typewriter, people were not familiar with modifier keys. Lisa doesn’t have the Esc key, and Mac still respects the ⌘. convention in many places in 2026.

(By the way, why would you want to stop saving? Presumably because it could take quite a while.)

In this similar dialog, you can see a reference to a “micro diskette.” Even though Lisa’s “Twiggy” disks seem gargantuan today, they were smaller compared to the original, 8″ floppy disk. (In a similar way, Lisa and other machines of the era were called “microcomputers.”)

Lisa had some proprioception: In this dialog, the disk put in the first drive is called an “upper diskette.” (Also note: more undo education.)

Disks were not large, so sometimes you had to deal with this kind of horror. It’s interesting how the dialog plain sends you to the manual – an early equivalent to eventual Learn More links.

This is another example of a rather verbose set of instructions. On one hand, this is better than “Error 456” and nothing else. On the other hand, it feels like a lot of stuff to memorize.

Also of note, the beautiful Housekeeping menu. I actually forgot about the Finder (or, in Lisa’s parlance, Desktop), so here’s a screenshot of it also:

Housekeeping was basically the junk drawer – on the Mac a year later, this will be named Special. It also has some stuff that today would be in the View menu. (This later version of Lisa calls Trash the same as the Mac. Earlier on, you would see it named a Wastebasket instead.)

Of note elsewhere in Desktop is the use of the term Stationery, roughly meaning “template,” but with extra sprinkling of desktop-metaphor skeuomorphism. Also, Attributes Of is an early version of Get Info.

Another verbose dialog (compare with Abort/​Retry/Ignore from around the same time). This is before we invented hint text that we’d just put under the buttons themselves.

In case you haven’t noticed by now, Lisa’s strings all have two spaces after a full stop!

There was lot of “you cannot” dialogs, walking you through some recovery steps.

Plug and play didn’t yet exist (this would all happen in the 1990s), so that had to be explained also.

I also love the anthropomorphic phrasing “Preferences has been told,” which I don’t believe you see anywhere today.

And I think we can round up this post with a few small delightful language details like this one.

As a huge fan of the slightly pretentious “presently” over “currently,” I smiled seeing this next to the printing status.

“Just a moment, please…” feels so old-fashioned, somehow.

And I want to end on a pre-release version of the Edit menu we’ve already seen. You can spot here Select Entire Document (instead of eventual Select All Of Document), but of course the best thing is the Copy, Cut, & Paste with an ampersand! I find it so, so charming.

I hope you enjoyed this tour. It was interesting to me to see how many of these became the standard back there and then, how many were tweaked a little bit, and which ones had to be redone more thoroughly.

Now, excuse me as I have to go deal with my whistling printer.