In many ways, the Lisa is more sophisticated than our current GUIs. In particular, I liked the way applications meshed into the system and disappeared into stationery - if you want to create a document, double click on its corresponding stationery stack and a new document is created. No need to find open Excel (or LisaCalc).
IIRC, Windows 95 briefly had this in the form of a Templates folder. You added files to that folder and then you could create new copies of those files from the context menu. I don't remember it persisting into other versions of Windows.
macOS still supports turning any file into a template, a feature first introduced in System 7 back in 1991.
Just Get Info on any file in the Finder, then check the "Stationary pad" box.
I'm actually quite astounded I overlooked this myself.
I can't believe I never knew about this! This could be useful to some of my workflows.
I just looked it up and here's an official help page about it: https://support.apple.com/en-tm/guide/mac-help/mchlp1341/mac
Wow! That's amazing! Never realized it was still there.
> if you want to create a document, double click on its corresponding stationery stack and a new document is created. No need to find open Excel (or LisaCalc
This is a cool idea, but not really as practical, at least, not in the way it's presented here. To create a document, you first have to have an existing template of that type. What happens if you delete all of your templates? Even in our small demo environment here, it's such an obvious flaw that the author keeps templates on a RAMdisk. But even without that problem, you have to know where your templates are saved. I was surprised to find a drawing app.
One way to potentially fix this is to just allow document creation from the global File menu. File > New > LisaType Paper. Of course, if Lisa had been successful, this would break down, too. Imagine a menu with LisaType Paper, LisaCalc Spreadsheet, Lotus Spreadsheet, Lotus Document, etc, etc.
But it is a very elegant system, and I wish we could have seen a world where this desktop metaphor survived, so we could see how those problems would have been solved.
Template mechanism was also present in OS/2 Presentation Manager, at least since 2.0.
Windows support for this survived I think until XP at least, but generally it runs the "New ..." context sub menu in Explorer.