Submitted by “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.
Wasn’t the fate of the Lisa computer sealed when Jobs decided to sell it for about half the annual salary of an average US citizen ? The price tag haven’t changed much though…
Kochise
That and the fact that when the Mac was released, it was in nearly every way better than the Lisa and at a much lower cost. In fact, Apple eventually developed an expansion card for the Lisa that converted it into a Mac in order to move remaining units. Apple even changed the name of these machines from Lisa to Macintosh XL.
Well, the Lisa got canned pretty fast and all attention went to the Mac. It did not exactly fly off shelves when released. But, when it came together with Aldus Pagemaker and the laser printer, desktop publishing was born.
Um.. reality contradicts you… The Lisa did not “get canned so fast…” at all, in fact they released a both a Lisa 1 and later a Lisa 2 and continued production for 3 years. The original Mac 128 only lasted 1 year before it was discontinued in favour of the Mac Plus. The Lisa 2 used 3.5″ floppies and addressed quite a few of the issues. The Lisa 2 continued to be sold late in its life as the Macintosh XL, which ran Mac OS via emulation. No one is saying it was “overly” popular, but it was by no means dropped quickly as you imply. The Lisa line was dropped in favour of the Mac, true – but then this is by no means unusual in the world of computing. Plenty of machines did okay (and by “okay”, I mean sold enough units to not be an immediate failure) at the time, but then never saw a successor. Especially in the old days.
Jobs wasn’t part of the Lisa project (or CEO) by the time the Lisa was released, indeed – he was championing the Mac, which is ultimately one of the reasons that got him fired by Sculley ( that and trying to oust Sculley.) Jobs therefore had zero influence over the price, bar the influence he had by sitting on the board. Sculley was his own guy, and if you believe Jobs controlled Sculley, I’d point you towards the fact that Sculley fired Jobs to disprove your assumption.
I wonder why the crowd went nuts at the Macintosh presentation, because it, at first sight, looks like the Lisa from a GUI perspective, only cheaper (but still too expensive).
That’s why many people bought cheaper yet more powerful (§) Atari ST computer, and later added the Dave Small’s Magic Sac, Spectre 128 then Spectre GCR expansion to them. With original Apple Macintosh ROMs, it litteraly transformed an Atari ST into a full featured Mac. Look for “Gadget by Small” on the Internet, this guy is a real genius, the old school kind of geek that just makes wonders.
http://www.atari-forum.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gadgets_by_Small
http://mrblog.org/2004/01/06/where-are-they-now-dave-small/
http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=19275
Kochise
Thanks for the interesting links!
I’m an Apple person and I think these old 80’s Macs are cute, but I would never have bought one back then and if I had I’m pretty sure to have been disappointed. The Atari ST and Amiga were much more powerful and well, more fun. I guess even an Apple 2 or Commodore 64 was more fun. More software, both serious and games. Even the ZX Spectrum had better looking games.
It’s odd the Mac was marketed as the computer for the rest of us, because even without accounting for inflation if would be darn expensive today.
Also it seems the Lisa tried to be more innovative than the Mac.
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.
Well, the lack of self awareness of the Amiga and ST users has always been legendary…
Edited 2013-02-03 21:44 UTC
>a handful of both odd and useful features that truly made the Lisa something unique.
Are you serious!? Out of these 5 “features”, only the last one (hibernate/resume) is a candidate for being a positive feature. The other 4 are a Digital Restrictions Management scheme, a bug, and 2 GUI/filesystem mistakes/bad ideas.
I mean, I know Thom is a rabid Crapple fanboi, but still, did he even read the article before linking to it?
Edited 2013-02-03 02:39 UTC
Exactly… you’ll be modded down for referring to Thom as a “rabid Crapple fanboi” and for calling the company “Crapple,” but you pretty much hit the nail on the head with your description of the “features” in the article.
Anyone with two brain cells wouldn’t praise DRM unless they were getting paid, and having two identically named–yet totally different files–is just stupid. And the system can’t even keep track of time only two fucking decade into the future… seriously, how is this even considered a “feature” in the first place? Was Y2K a “feature” that was so desired that we just let it go by unnoticed? I don’t think so. At least with all the computing systems affected, the Y2K bug didn’t happen until far more than two decades after its origin!
The article is called “5 quirks and oddities”, not “5 amazing and unique features”.
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.
I didn’t see a “handful of features” in the article that could be classified as either:
1. Not a ridiculous bug that any company would rightly be slammed to the ground for.
2. Not some kind of bizarre design decision that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
3. Actually a worthwhile feature for the user.
4. Or even a “feature” at all.
Really, the article leaves no wonder as to why the damn thing didn’t take off in the first place… everything that the article claims makes the system “unique” is an undesirable trait.
Sorry, but the article is sorely lacking on what the summary suggests. It is a collection of basically nothing but “odd” bugs and design decisions. Useful features? Don’t think so. “Features” at all? Not at all in my view. “Odd” is the only word they got even somewhat right.
Edited 2013-02-03 19:15 UTC
I guess this is the core of your argument, it’s your opinion vs the writer’s.
Personally I don’t care if something is a feature, bug, stupid or clever. If it’s “odd” I find it interesting.
Not really; the core of my argument is that the sentence I quoted from the beginning of the article and the summary sounded like the rest of the article would be an interesting read. It most definitely was not.
Clearly the author failed miserably to get his point across. Just a bunch of bugs and other undesirable behavior, everything odd, but nothing of interest as a “useful” feature whatsoever. I was expecting after reading that line for something interesting, but no–nothing but pointless crap. Crap that would make you stay far away from Apple if you were in the market for a new computer at that time period.
Did that computer have anything going for it? Anything at all? After reading that article I was left with a firm no. If the author was trying to raise awareness of the genius of the Macintosh’s predecessor, he failed miserably at that too. I went in looking for actual features and interesting and unique ways that it did things… and all I left with knowledge of were bugs and poor system design.
Edited 2013-02-03 19:40 UTC
Considering the price I don’t thing it really mattered if it was crap or the best thing since sliced bread: no one could afford one.
The points pointed out were things most people probably didn’t know about the Lisa. Not only was it a commercial failure, but also overshadowed by the Macintosh. This makes the Lisa an enigma for most people, even Apple fans.
Actually, something that costs so much that no normal person can afford damn well better be top-notch quality! So the few people who paid out their ass just got a buggy, poorly designed system? Wow… seriously, it’s almost starting to seem like this thing was specially designed to be a failure.
Why is it a buggy system? I have a feeling you’re saying this because of the date “limitation”. I don’t think there are many computers that would last 12 years. The Amiga came and went after the Lisa before the year 1995 arrived.
The Lisa may have been expensive, but so was the IBM PC. The IBM PC was even more expensive and it was the lesser computer (if you forget about available software).
The targeted audience wasn’t, probably, the people at home, but the business world, just like the IBM PC. During that time people used home computers at home like the VIC-20, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and later the MSX line, Atari ST, Amiga.
It does make you wonder why these home computers were more fun, had better sounds/graphics and even better GUIs than the Lisa/Mac/PC, but were much cheaper and why the PC still won out in the end.
I guess it was a combination of two primary factors. At first (at the beginning): “no one was ever fired for buying IBM”.
And the second: …just look at the proportions in the graph at http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ (also page 6). With such onslaught, the economies of scale did the rest – and the PC became the best choice from some point on.
BTW Lisa – one Lisa 2 used as a web server: http://www.lisa2.com/
Now I’ll perhaps find some emulator…
Edited 2013-02-06 18:45 UTC
They don’t have the same name, they have different names but what is shown is different from the actual name.
I can certainly see why it would be nice to have a view of a bunch of files with different type but same name.
Wait, I am confused. Is Thom a rabid Apple fanboi, A rabid Anti-Apple zealot or a rabid Windows fan?
The common nominator is “rabid”, so Thom is a rabid.
Is that an anti-aliased font in those screenshots? That was way ahead of its time – even the Mac didn’t get that until Mac OS X.
No, it’s not anti-aliased. You’re seeing image resampling.
The Lisa used rectangular pixels, at a resolution of 720 x 360 pixels. The image had to be resampled to 720 x 540 to display in the proper aspect ratio with square pixels.
As their names indicate, bilinear and bicubic interpolation will always sample in two dimensions. This causes the image to “smear” a little bit horizontally, even though only the vertical dimension has changed.
Edited 2013-02-04 07:59 UTC
My understanding is that Lisa was late and slow. And that every computer since then has copied the Lisa GUI, which was inspired by Xerox, but not a total ripoff.
That’s all! Just the progenitor of computing as we know it.
“every computer since then” hasn’t just copied the Lisa GUI – they were also inspired by Lisa (among others), but not a total ripoff…