
"Thirty years ago, Apple unveiled the Apple Lisa, a pioneering machine that introduced the mouse-driven graphical user interface to a wide audience and opened a new chapter in personal computer history. The Mac borrowed heavily from the Lisa, and the Mac went on to great things while the Lisa floundered. As a result, it's tempting to treat the Lisa as merely a footnote in the history of Apple. But as anyone who has used a real Lisa knows, Apple's first GUI-based computer played host to many distinctive quirks and traits that tend to get overlooked in the history books. The machine's 30th anniversary is as good a time as any to take a look at a handful of
both odd and useful features that truly made the Lisa something unique." A bit lacking in the meat department, but still fun.
Member since:
2009-11-30
Got to agree here.
I'm really attached my MacBook & iPhone these days.
But in all honesty, outside North America's wealthy, Apple of the 80's and early 90's was a complete irrelevance - I never saw an Apple II in the shops in the UK - ever. No-one owned one. No-one wanted one. I never saw one outside a magazine until I started work at BAe Space Systems in 1989 (they used one to run their environmental test ovens for satellite battery arrays). The Mac? Again, not in the flesh until university in 1990 - and even then, limited to one room - there were vastly more HP Apollo, Sun Sparc, or even ARM workstations than Mac's - the Mac was a toy that Atari and Commodore owners just laughed at (or emulated for DTP, at a quarter of the price with larger displays, faster CPUs and more memory).
And the Lisa - well, it didn't even make enough of an impression to get magazine coverage outside retrospectives on the Mac years later.