The Atkinson Polaroids

April 4, 2026

I’ve been reading (slowly) David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years, and really enjoying it. I’ve previously read quite a few books about Apple’s history, but Pogue has put together something really special with this one.

This morning I came across this sidebar about the development of the Apple Lisa:

Atkinson found it hard to get work done at the office. “People bustling around, talking all the time—you know, you need to write code,” he said. “You need to put blinders on and focus, right?”

So he decided to work at his home in Santa Clara. On his desk, he built a proto-Lisa: an Apple II modded with a special bitmap graphics card to drive his monitor.

But now he had a problem: How could he show his work to the rest of the Lisa team? He couldn’t haul the prototype back and forth to Apple; it was much too fragile for transport.

He wound up taking Polaroid self-developing photos of each new design idea, then riding his motorcycle to the office to show the team.

Atkinson preserved those Polaroids in a leatherette-bound photo album. Today, Atkinson’s 135 Polaroids serve as a time machine, a glimpse of the earliest days of the user interfaces we now take for granted.

Turns out, the whole collection of Polaroid photos is available to view on the Computer History Museum website! ¹ It’s really fun watching the graphical user interface getting pieced together nearly from first principles with this collection. It also includes a number of early computer graphics demo screenshots, which are fun.

While I’m linking to this site: prior to the launch of the book, Pogue hosted a panel in association with the Computer History Museum, and which was recorded and available on YouTube. It’s well worth a watch.

There are also 159 images here, rather than the 135 mentioned. I’m not sure what the discrepancy is exactly, but there are several duplicates and non-screenshot images. ↩