Instead of typing a sequence of commands on the computer keyboard; the user merely points to tiny "icons" or commands on the screen by sliding the "mouse" (a plastic control box the size of a cigarette pack) on the desktop beside the computer. As the mouse rolls, an arrow called a cursor moves across the screen. To erase obsolete information, for example, the user moves the mouse to point first at whatever is to be thrown away, and then at an icon in the shape of a tiny trash can...
I remember trying to teach someone to use a mouse, and having to move their arm back down onto the table. See, you can't hold it in mid air, you need to slide it across the mousepad. (and in this case it was specifically required, I believe it was a mouse systems mouse with an LED and a patterned metal mousepad)
The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously.
There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on the 68000, a page fault was not handled properly if a register had incrementation set. So the Lisa compiler had to be dumbed down to not use that feature, slowing down execution somewhat.
If Motorola had fixed those problems sooner, the history of personal computing might have been very different. Intel's x86 machines, with their 16 bit address spaces, might have gone nowhere on the desktop.
Hence the cost-reduced Macintosh - no MMU, no memory protection, no CPU dispatcher. Also no hard drive. The original 128K Mac was a flop commercially. Not until memory cost came down and Apple got a hard drive into the product did it sell successfully. The IBM PC had a hard drive earlier, which got them going in business use. The floppy-only Macs were incredibly slow.
My dad and I found one at a garage sale when I was a kid. I bought, repaired, and resold mostly 8 bit machines, but found a big bunch of Apple Lisa stuff for not a lot of money, maybe $150. I didn't really know much about it, but it was interesting and I figured I could get my money back out of it. It had the computer, three external hard disks (2x5MB and 1x10MB), and some software and other accessories.
This would have been around 1988-1989, and the Mac had been out for a while; this seemed like a quaint old computer at the time. Since the Lisa wasn't quite Mac compatible, there wasn't really anything you could do with it...the software it had (early variants of stuff like Mac Write and Paint and such, called, I think Lisa Write, etc.) was what you got.
When I unboxed everything I found the receipts from when the original owner bought it all new. He'd spent something like $20,000+ on the whole setup. Computer was $10k, and each of the hard disks was several thousand dollars.
I sold the whole setup for about twice what I paid for it (I seem to recall about $300, but it's been a long time, and it wasn't super memorable...I bought and sold a lot of weird old computers back then), after cleaning it up and testing everything and tinkering with it until I was bored (I was a Commodore kid with a C128D and saving up for my first Amiga...Apple stuff was just a curiosity, not anything I wanted for myself).
Though I wasn't super into it at the time, it's one of the few things I kinda wish I still had all these years later. It has real historical significance that I didn't really appreciate at the time.
I think the difference is between productivity gain. In these early days, you bought a computer or you had to use a calculator and paper. It's the difference between automating a dentist or realtors office or not doing automation.
Now, buying a new computer results in marginal productivity gains because likely it's just replacing another computer and maybe improving things or maybe just adding a touch-bar.
My dad paid $6k+ for a IIci in 89. I had no idea at 9 years old and really no appreciation for what kind of money that was. In 2000 I bought a Power Mac G4 for around $2k. Being young with lots of disposable income, I didn't appreciate then either what kind of money that was. It's only recently that I've started to understand what a computer costs as I've bought computers while paying living expenses.
According to the article Lisa was a $50 million gamble.
I just read somewhere about the 2000 engineers Google took on for the Pixel phone from HTC. Keeping the lights on for the buildings they are in is a $50 million gamble, that's without paying them or allowing for inflation. But you get the idea, $50 million was cheap for the product compared to what hardware tech costs to develop today, particularly if it has an operating system to write from the ground up.
Incidentally, the threat from IBM mentioned in the article. Peanuts turned out to be the ill-fated PCjr that had good graphics and a bad price point for the home market. Popcorn turned out to be the first PC based lug-gable computer from IBM.
Trying to understand Steve Jobs is an effort in futility I know, but I've never understood what he was thinking around this time. He refused to accept responsibility for his daughter when she was born in 1978, and even 5 years later, he was still questioning the accuracy of DNA paternity tests in Time Magazine and despite being a multi-millionaire, only grudgingly paying $500 a month for child support. But then he goes and names this computer after her, yet claims for years it wasn't named for her. Sure, he was pretty young (28) but that's hardly an excuse. Jobs wasn't just a pathological narcissist, he was just plain weird.
Not mentioned in the article, but one of the major contributors to its failure is that the Lisa was a very restricted environment that made it difficult to develop for:
Contrast this to the IBM PC where people could easily get started programming in BASIC (included in ROM!) or Asm (MS-DOS DEBUG), for which many magazines of the time had listings. Of course not every user did, but certainly a lot of them started and eventually helped greatly grow the amount of software available.
The PC had a learning curve but the user was in full control, whereas the Lisa didn't have much of one but had many impediments that prevented users from becoming developers. This attitude persists in Apple today.
Spirit. The Lisa was a MUCH more powerful computer than the first Mac - which is why you needed a Lisa in the first place. The Mac wasn't able to run much of anything developed for the Lisa. Mac software was written in machine language, as I recall the Lisa made more use of higher level languages, so even the tool chain would be problematic.
Additionally to the other features mentioned, originally the file system, but without using any of the auto-repair abilities, the Lisa had. (This was soon to replaced by HFS+.)
According to the wikipedia page for the Lisa, Jobs went to the team developing the mac, and changed the focus from a command-line machine to be a cheaper Lisa competitor, releasing the Mac 1 year after the first Lisa. How could Jobs get away with trying to cannibalize the sales from their flagship machine? It seems traitorous if true.
Haha! They've made several movies and written books about this drama. Whether or not it was traitorous depends on who you view as being a traitor first, Steve Jobs or John Sculley.
I recommend reading Walter Issacson's book on Steve Jobs, or watch the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a good take on it.
I really, really, really wanted one of these when they first came out and my stepdad laughed in my face when I asked to borrow that much money for a computer "for college" when we had a perfectly functional Apple IIe at home.
It’s interesting to me how well-reported this seems, or maybe how it seems informed by ensuing decades of literature rather than being reported in the moment. Apple’s mythos, Jobs’s showmanship, and the importance of Xerox PARC and Apple’s deal with Xerox were all established lore very early on. I guess it’s just bias on my part that it seems like things would have been less clear or known at the time.
I think it was a distribution problem. Now we’re accustomed to being able to easily find any public information we want, but 35 years ago you had to work at it.
>. To erase obsolete information, for example, the user moves the mouse to point first at whatever is to be thrown away, and then at an icon in the shape of a tiny trash can; at the press of a button on the mouse, the information vanishes
I'm trying to imagine most readers of a 1983 Newsweek magazine would read this and be turned off from computers for life
Watching early Apple presentations and modern presentations shows the company prioritizing sales over innovation. Now we see a phone that is marginally better than the previous year, with taglines like "the best iPhone ever". The future is AR and gestures in my opinion, if keyboard input speed is ever an issue then a glove Swype interface would work. Many smaller companies have already set the stage nicely, such as the currently monocular Vuzix Blade (https://www.vuzix.com/products/blade-smart-glasses).
Edit: Guess HN thinks we're going to be carrying screens in our pockets forever.
While we are definitely going to have more AR, I'm not convinced that it's the future at all. But I guess that's the case with most people and most technologies until they become ubiquitous.
AR still seems like a solution looking for a problem.
The idea of having to wear a glove to type is horrid.
As with the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, I fully expect Apple to wait for things like smart glasses to evolve a bit before jumping into the fray with a mass-market application. Being one of the first-to-market has never been their thing.
[+] [-] a1pulley|6 years ago|reply
Instead of typing a sequence of commands on the computer keyboard; the user merely points to tiny "icons" or commands on the screen by sliding the "mouse" (a plastic control box the size of a cigarette pack) on the desktop beside the computer. As the mouse rolls, an arrow called a cursor moves across the screen. To erase obsolete information, for example, the user moves the mouse to point first at whatever is to be thrown away, and then at an icon in the shape of a tiny trash can...
[+] [-] emptybits|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilasX|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rongenre|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on the 68000, a page fault was not handled properly if a register had incrementation set. So the Lisa compiler had to be dumbed down to not use that feature, slowing down execution somewhat.
If Motorola had fixed those problems sooner, the history of personal computing might have been very different. Intel's x86 machines, with their 16 bit address spaces, might have gone nowhere on the desktop.
Hence the cost-reduced Macintosh - no MMU, no memory protection, no CPU dispatcher. Also no hard drive. The original 128K Mac was a flop commercially. Not until memory cost came down and Apple got a hard drive into the product did it sell successfully. The IBM PC had a hard drive earlier, which got them going in business use. The floppy-only Macs were incredibly slow.
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
Now had Compaq not been so lucky, then the PCs might have indeed gone nowhere.
[+] [-] Narishma|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|6 years ago|reply
This would have been around 1988-1989, and the Mac had been out for a while; this seemed like a quaint old computer at the time. Since the Lisa wasn't quite Mac compatible, there wasn't really anything you could do with it...the software it had (early variants of stuff like Mac Write and Paint and such, called, I think Lisa Write, etc.) was what you got.
When I unboxed everything I found the receipts from when the original owner bought it all new. He'd spent something like $20,000+ on the whole setup. Computer was $10k, and each of the hard disks was several thousand dollars.
I sold the whole setup for about twice what I paid for it (I seem to recall about $300, but it's been a long time, and it wasn't super memorable...I bought and sold a lot of weird old computers back then), after cleaning it up and testing everything and tinkering with it until I was bored (I was a Commodore kid with a C128D and saving up for my first Amiga...Apple stuff was just a curiosity, not anything I wanted for myself).
Though I wasn't super into it at the time, it's one of the few things I kinda wish I still had all these years later. It has real historical significance that I didn't really appreciate at the time.
[+] [-] voodootrucker|6 years ago|reply
Now, buying a new computer results in marginal productivity gains because likely it's just replacing another computer and maybe improving things or maybe just adding a touch-bar.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
Apple Lisa 1983 $9,995 ($25,143 in 2018 dollars)
Apple Macintosh 128k 1/24/84 $2,495 ($6,000 in 2018 dollars)
Macintosh II 3/2/87 $5,498 ($12,125 in 2018)
Next Cube 9/18/90 $10,000 ($19,177 in 2018 dollars)
[+] [-] gilbetron|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sircastor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Theodores|6 years ago|reply
According to the article Lisa was a $50 million gamble.
I just read somewhere about the 2000 engineers Google took on for the Pixel phone from HTC. Keeping the lights on for the buildings they are in is a $50 million gamble, that's without paying them or allowing for inflation. But you get the idea, $50 million was cheap for the product compared to what hardware tech costs to develop today, particularly if it has an operating system to write from the ground up.
Incidentally, the threat from IBM mentioned in the article. Peanuts turned out to be the ill-fated PCjr that had good graphics and a bad price point for the home market. Popcorn turned out to be the first PC based lug-gable computer from IBM.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa#Third-party_softwar...
Contrast this to the IBM PC where people could easily get started programming in BASIC (included in ROM!) or Asm (MS-DOS DEBUG), for which many magazines of the time had listings. Of course not every user did, but certainly a lot of them started and eventually helped greatly grow the amount of software available.
The PC had a learning curve but the user was in full control, whereas the Lisa didn't have much of one but had many impediments that prevented users from becoming developers. This attitude persists in Apple today.
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
Considering you needed a Lisa to develop for the Mac for the first few years, it’s good that they made it.
[+] [-] outworlder|6 years ago|reply
Check folklore.org for more stories of that time.
[+] [-] mepian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasontherobot|6 years ago|reply
I recommend reading Walter Issacson's book on Steve Jobs, or watch the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a good take on it.
[+] [-] oblio|6 years ago|reply
V1 Jobs (post 97) was much the same, but with a bit of humility that allowed him to empathize enough to be able to make successful products.
[+] [-] Quequau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webwielder2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlesism|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martyvis|6 years ago|reply
I'm trying to imagine most readers of a 1983 Newsweek magazine would read this and be turned off from computers for life
[+] [-] ma2rten|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webwielder2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindgam3|6 years ago|reply
Feels bittersweet to recall the age of "friendly" computing in these dark days of "antisocial" computing.
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7YkTu5geuc
[+] [-] walrus01|6 years ago|reply
It debuted at $9995, which is about $26,500 in today's money.
[+] [-] usermac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] netsec_burn|6 years ago|reply
Edit: Guess HN thinks we're going to be carrying screens in our pockets forever.
[+] [-] randomvectors|6 years ago|reply
AR still seems like a solution looking for a problem.
[+] [-] tguedes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|6 years ago|reply
As with the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, I fully expect Apple to wait for things like smart glasses to evolve a bit before jumping into the fray with a mass-market application. Being one of the first-to-market has never been their thing.
[+] [-] dmitriid|6 years ago|reply