Oral History of Bruce Daniels

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2023-08-01 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
Bruce Daniels was born in Houston, Texas, on January 10th, 1949, and grew up in Oklahoma. He majored in physics initially at MIT but switched to computer science in his junior year, and continued on at MIT for his Ph.D. work on the APL language. While there, Daniels became involved in programming the original version of the text adventure game Zork, and would later be contracted to write the Apple II version for Infocom. Daniels decided to leave his Ph.D. to join John Couch’s group at Hewlett-Packard, working on programming languages and tools for the HP 3000 minicomputer. After Couch joined Apple, Daniels would eventually follow him there in 1979. Although Daniels was originally on the Apple III project, he happened to join Couch, Steve Jobs, and others who were working on the Lisa to visit Xerox PARC in 1979, where they were introduced to the graphical user interface. Daniels would be recruited by Jobs to help manage the Lisa software group a few months later to help turn the Lisa into a GUI-based computer. In addition to managing and helping run user testing, Daniels also wrote a mouse-based graphical text editor that was used for software development on the Lisa.
At one point there was a plan to release a product for software development that was a Lisa with only developer tools instead of office applications, and Daniels led the project. When this was canceled sometime in 1982, Daniels moved to the Macintosh development team for six to nine months, influencing them in adopting the Lisa’s graphical user interface. Daniels was supposed to work on a word processor for the Macintosh, but balked when Jobs insisted he write it in 3 months, when he knew it would take 2 years. Daniels rejoined the Lisa group and Randy Wigginton replaced him on what would become MacWrite.
Once back in the Lisa group, Daniels worked on optimizing the system’s performance, helping the team track and fix bugs, and began to do public demos and other PR work for the Lisa, through its announcement date in January 1983. Daniels also helped create the MacWorks Macintosh emulation environment for the Lisa. After the Lisa shipped in the summer of ’83, Daniels began to do PR work for the upcoming Macintosh.
Daniels left Apple in 1984 to create a startup, Singular Software, to make a Macintosh database application. This was sold to Borland in 1986. After leaving Borland in 1987, Daniels joined Sun Microsystems, helping develop standards for software development inside the company, and standard user interfaces for internal applications. In between stints at Sun, Daniels helped create a cross-platform application toolkit at Oracle.
During the late 1980s, Daniels was also called to testify in Apple’s lawsuit against Microsoft and HP over the similarity in the look and feel of the Macintosh and Windows’ graphical user interfaces.
After rejoining Sun in 1992, Daniels worked in research, developing a high level language, DASL, that would generate Java code for graphical applications. This work would later be applied to the cloud.
In 1999, Daniels was asked by the governor of California to join the Regional Water Quality Control Board for the central California coast. After Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, Daniels decided to pursue a Ph.D. in hydroclimatology at UC Santa Cruz, studying the effects of climate change on local water supplies. Daniels developed a system to model variations in local water supplies and helped the Soquel Creek Water District build a system to replenish ground water with treated wastewater.
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Catalog Number: 102792891
Acquisition Number: 2023.0133