[alankay]

We understood Moore's Law, so it made sense in the early 70s to make a personal computer in 1973 that would have the power of much less expensive personal computers 10 or more years later. Why? Because the new SW and UI takes a lot of work to invent -- this allowed us to show Steve "the 80s" in 1979.

(Worth pondering this way of going about things.)

What was disappointing is that the market couldn't value personal computing, especially the general market. For example, the Lisa with its hard disk was really the better machine to be the flagship for Apple. In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle".

Instead, PCs could only be sold at consumer price levels, more or less as novelties and in business as spreadsheet machines -- and this forced the Mac to be much smaller (both in RAM and disk) so that it was more like a toy than a vehicle.

So, no, we (not I - I was part of a research community) did not underestimate the importance of economics. Note that my original Dynabook paper in 1972 said these would eventually be sold for the same price as color TV sets. But we did underestimate the ability of the early market to value computing.

[cma]

> In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle".

A car is a major purchase and people keep them for years or get significant resale value out of them. Moore's law would mean Lisa would be rapidly devalued. For businesses that could justify it generating $x amount of revenue in that time it could make sense. For individuals at the time I'm not sure.

That's not to say people don't spend extravagant amounts on cars beyond the base level of needed functionality. I just can't think of too many purchases at that level that get obsolete so quickly.

[thaumaturgy]

The economy in the early 80s was in pretty bad shape as far as the average household was concerned, and computing wasn't a "thing" yet. There wasn't yet an internet, not in anything resembling the modern sense, and there were nearly no services designed to be accessed from a computer.

So for the majority of the consumer market, computers just didn't really offer $10,000 of value.

The business market was maybe a little bit different, but still, businesses suffered badly through the early 80s too, and a computer would be an R&D expense moreso than a business expense. It would be a very long time before computers could do things beneficial enough to businesses to justify high upfront costs (plus the costs of finding or training anybody to operate the things). And, computers represented quite a big change in operations, and as anyone that's done any kind of business consulting has learned first-hand, businesses hate that.

With all due respect to the people who are much smarter than I am, the folks that invent and pioneer technology so often view it through a very different lens than the people who would use it, and they really struggle to bring the technology to larger society. Dean Kamen is my favorite example of a brilliant guy creating amazing technology that nobody can afford or find the right use for. Someday somebody else might come along and give the world the same thing but much cheaper and in a different package, and it'll change a lot of lives, and there will as usual be people to say, "But Dean Kamen invented it first and did it better." Well, sure, but nobody knew about it.

Despite the flaws that his detractors are always eager to bring up, that was something I respected about Jobs (and a few other industrialists) -- the combined ability to understand new technology, visualize how it could be brought to a broad market, and then do it successfully.

It's kinda fun to imagine how things might've worked out if Apple had never visited Xerox. Maybe SGI would do it instead and Apple would be that company that made the boxes we all played Oregon Trail on. But, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be using a Xerox OS.

[firmgently]

Although consumerism was already in full effect in the 80s people hadn't been conditioned into anything like the crazy update cycle we're in nowadays. I suppose the business world may have been different (seems unlikely?) but at least in home/personal computing people weren't buying new computers every 2-3 years - people did keep them for years. Maybe technically they'd have been devalued but if you're still using an item and it's doing its job the resale value isn't a consideration (in the late 90s it was still common for people in eg. sales offices to be using thin terminals with green-screen monitors, despite Windows PCs being readily available).

[chiph]

I was able to buy an Apple ][+ with my high school job at a supermarket. The Lisa was amazing (when it came out a few years later) but obviously not affordable by me. ;) Nor the Macintosh when I was on military pay a few years after that. Maybe I wasn't their target market by then. :(

But I don't think the Lisa was right for the corporate market either - since it didn't have connectivity to the firm's mainframe or midrange. On the Lisa, you had a mouse port, parallel port, and two serial ports. The serial ports could have worked, but IIRC the SNA network stack needed wasn't on the Lisa (and Apple would have been quite hostile to IBM if they'd tried to add it). So firms would have had to share data via sneakernet, and that was the same thing they'd been doing with their Apple ]['s for several years now -- so the 10x price difference wasn't worth it, even if the UI was gorgeous.

There was also the matter of the installed base of machines the company might have had. The Apple ][ used standard Shugart 5-1/4" mechanisms, but the Lisa (originally) used their new FileWare "Twiggy" drives which placed the top/bottom heads on opposite ends of the diskette. So information couldn't be shared between Lisa and Apple ][ users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_FileWare

Also - this may be my only chance to say Thank You for your work. So .. Thank you very much.

[BjoernKW]

There were machines like the Commodore C64 - and later to some extent the Amiga as well - that more fully embraced and valued computing in that they booted into an environment which allowed you to create programs right away.

With the C64 in particular there was no real distinction between the operating system and the programming language, the programming language actually WAS the operating system. The machine booted into an empty canvas for you to create something with.

I still find that idea fascinating. Absurdly enough, the closest we've come to this again afterwards is Microsoft Excel. A spreadsheet application today is the closest general purpose computing equivalent to 'an empty canvas everyone can use to create something with right away'.

[Joeri]

Arguably modern windows has more programming abilities preinstalled with the OS: batch scripting, powershell, javascript (command line and browser), and C# (csc.exe compiler).

The difference is one of visibility and discoverability. The 70's and 80's were the time when user equated to programmer, mostly by technical necessity. The separation between those two concepts came later, and it's evidenced by the way modern windows hides the programming languages it bundles.

[Nition]

My memory on this is super vague because this was way back in the mists of time, but I think some old versions of DOS used to have a BASIC interpreter built in, where you could just start writing BASIC code at the DOS prompt.

[GeekyBear]

Hypercard and later Visual Basic (to a lesser extent) made programing GUI based applications something mere mortals could do.

[rwmj]

Were you disappointed that both the Mac and iPhone didn't have the underpinning of a Smalltalk-like reprogrammable environment?

We had to wait for HyperCard on the Mac and I'm not sure such a thing even exists on modern phones.

[alankay1]

I was disappointed that something better than Smalltalk wasn't on the Mac and iPhone (Smalltalk was truly wonderful in the context of the 70s, but we considered it just a step in a good direction).

Not understanding Hypercard was one of Apple's largest mistakes in the world of end-users. It was a real breakthrough in something that end-users could really handle and be usefully programmable by them. Besides not understanding its significance on the Mac, we (old Parc hands) pleaded until we were blue in the face to make HC the basis of a really good web browser (it was a great model of a symmetric author-consumer media tool). Missing the latter was a tragedy.

In the light of the first comment, we could then contemplate an end-user system that combined what was great about Hypercard, Smalltalk, and some other experience from the 80s (e.g. the use-cases from Ashton-Tate "Framework", etc.).