@dukope Susan Kare.

Incredibly influential designer.

(Edit: Read the thread below: its perfection seems to be an artifact of the Mac's square pixel interpretation of the Lisa's bitmap arrow, which looked narrower because the pixels were vertical. But whoever drew it for the Lisa drew it just before Kare was at Apple!)

@dukope Huh. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her bitmap sketches, but perhaps she was just mapping it out?

What have you found?

@JoshuaACNewman @dukope I think the Mac pointer came from Lisa. The Lisa pointer is, as far as I can tell, identical to the Mac one. I doubt Kare could have designed it; she was hired in early 1983, and the Lisa UI had been finalized by that point.

My guess is that the original pointer was designed by Bill Atkinson. He was one of the folks who visited PARC, so he'd seen the Alto pointer, and he also designed the Lisa UI (he invented the menu bar, too) https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html

@csilverman @dukope Thank you!

My memory is that the Lisa cursor was skinnier? I’m curious how it evolved, too.

@JoshuaACNewman @dukope
That might've been because the Lisa had rectangular pixels instead of square ones (still blows my mind that there was ever a debate about the shape of pixels, but square pixels were not a self-evident truth in the early 80s).

I didn't do a pixel-by-pixel comparison of the Lisa and Mac pointers; I was just looking closely at screenshots, so they may vary slightly. The Mac arrow is definitely closer to the Lisa design than the Alto, though: larger arrowhead, shorter tail.