Sabah Arif writes "TheLisa, started in 1979 to provide an inexpensive business computer toApple's lineup, enjoyed little success. With its advancedobject oriented UI and powerful office suite, the computer was pricedwell above the means of most businesses. Despite its failure,the Lisa influenced most user interfaces, and introduced manyfeatures unheard of in earlier systems (like the Xerox Star or VisiOn).Read the story of the development and demise of the AppleLisa at LowEnd Mac." How the Lisa Changed Everything Log in/Create an Account | Top | 88 comments | Search Discussion Display Options Threshold: -1: 88 comments 0: 87 comments 1: 66 comments 2: 48 comments 3: 18 comments 4: 10 comments 5: 5 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Remembering Lisa (Score:1) by erick99 (743982) <homerun@gmail.com> on Sunday October 09, @11:36AM (#13750693) I remember going to training on the Lisa when I first started working for an Apple dealer in '83 (though the training might have been in '84). The Lisa sold for about $10,000 with a small hard drive. Still, it was very cool. [ Reply to ThisRe:Remembering Lisa by ghound (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @01:17PM I for one welcome... (Score:1) by Crayon Kid (700279) on Sunday October 09, @11:38AM (#13750704) ...our new user interface overlords.Oh wait. It's not 1979 anymore. Let me see... 2005 minus 1979 is 26... it's obviously the 26th aniversary of Lisa that makes this news-worthy, right? [ Reply to ThisRe:I for one welcome... by erick99 (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @11:40AMRe:I for one welcome... by andersbergh (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @12:13PMRe:I for one welcome... by GigsVT (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @12:22PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:I for one welcome... by gbarrelhouse (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:40PM Knew I read this before (Score:5, Informative) by enigma48 (143560) * <jeff_new_slash@j ... .com minus punct> on Sunday October 09, @11:40AM (#13750716) (Last Journal: Wednesday January 26, @02:11AM) /. already posted this story http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/31/ 1346224&tid=190&tid=3 [slashdot.org] a few months ago. In their defense, the old article was hosted at Braeburn.ath.cx (but looks like they've redone their website and braeburn resolves to lowendmac.com). [ Reply to This The Lisa Was a Very Slow Computer (Score:5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09, @11:40AM (#13750718) Haha.. reminds me of this joke:Knock knock..Who's there?(wait 45 seconds) ... ..... .......Lisa! [ Reply to This You got to wonder (Score:5, Interesting) by Stevyn (691306) on Sunday October 09, @11:42AM (#13750726) How would things be different today if Apple initially offered the Lisa at a substantially lower price just so people experienced the GUI? IBM and the clones were much cheaper, so businesses probably chose initial cost over an interface that could have lowered training costs and increased productivity. And if people were using Apple machines at work, then they would have bought an Apple for home later on. [ Reply to ThisRe:You got to wonder by cosmic_0x526179 (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @11:48AMRe:You got to wonder by Midnight Thunder (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:06PMRe:You got to wonder by Midnight Thunder (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:14PMRe:You got to wonder by GigsVT (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @12:07PMnot really by jbellis (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:12PMRe:not really by GigsVT (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @12:19PMRe:not really by jbellis (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:45PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:You got to wonder by tpgp (Score:3)Sunday October 09, @12:31PMRe:You got to wonder by cpt kangarooski (Score:3)Sunday October 09, @12:42PMRe:You got to wonder by oliverthered (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @01:39PMRe:You got to wonder by JulesLt (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @01:15PMRe:You got to wonder by Hiro Antagonist (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:35PMRe:You got to wonder by Dogtanian (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @01:41PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.2 replies beneath your current threshold. Mac changed everything (Score:4, Informative) by gilesjuk (604902) <giles@jones.zen@co@uk> on Sunday October 09, @11:44AM (#13750730) The Apple Lisa was way too expensive and rather slow. The Mac was much cheaper and worked much better. Hence why you buy an Apple Mac not an Apple Lisa when you go to an Apple store now.It was Steve Jobs who brought us the Mac too, he recognised it was the right product and better than the Lisa. Much of the work on the project until Jobs took over was done by Raskin and his team. [ Reply to ThisRe:Mac changed everything by TheAncientHacker (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @01:05PMRe:Mac changed everything by cerebis (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @03:14PM Ah, Memories (Score:5, Informative) by rob_squared (821479) on Sunday October 09, @11:47AM (#13750740) (http://www.lifelinesys.com/) I remember the good old days, back when the Apple computers were simpler. When the mouse only had 1 button.I kid, I kid.Anyway, here's a picture of the orgional ad: http://www.jagshouse.com/lisabrochure.html [jagshouse.com] [ Reply to ThisRe:Ah, Memories by Tablizer (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @02:14PM Jobs didn't get it. (Score:3, Informative) by Baldrson (78598) * on Sunday October 09, @12:00PM (#13750784) (http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery | Last Journal: Wednesday July 21, @08:12AM) As I described here years ago: [slashdot.org]Gutting programmer effectiveness and routing new programmersinto BASIC by a factor of at least 10 while maintaining, and evenslightly improving the GUI is a great example of "not getting it". Youcan say OOP would become important in a few years and I can say thewindowing GUI would become important in a few years with or withoutJobs. But the revolution had already occured at PARC (and if you'refocused on the mouse environment -- even a decade earlier at SRI whichis where PARC, and indeed PLATO with its touch panel [thinkofit.com],got their inspiration -- I remember sitting in meetings at CERL/PLATOviewing the films of SRI's research in 1974 as part of PLATO'scomputer-based conferencing project). DOS applications were startingto pick up on it despite the horrid CGA they had to work with initially-- and it wasn't because Jobs did the Mac. The Windowing GUI wasinevitable and obvious to people with money as well as most personalcomputer programmers, especially once Tesler had already popularized itwith his 1981 Byte magazine article [byte.com]. Dynamic, late-binding programming environments that highly leverage thesparse nerd matrix out there -- like Smalltalk, Python, etc. -- are,however _still_ struggling to make it past the concrete barriers Jobspoured into the OO culture with the Mac. When Jobs passed upSmalltalk for Object Pascal, and then again, with Next, passed upSmalltalk for Objective C, he set a pattern that continues to this daywhen Sun passed up that sun-of-Smalltalk, Self [sunlabs.com] and went with that son-of-Objective-C, Java. Gutting the superstructure of technology while maintaining appearances isn't leadership. [ Reply to This The original message. (Score:4, Interesting) by Baldrson (78598) * on Sunday October 09, @12:08PM (#13750832) (http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery | Last Journal: Wednesday July 21, @08:12AM) Here is the base message [slashdot.org] originating the "Jobs Didn't Get It" exchange:When Jobs brought technology in from Xerox PARC, and Adobe, he had the keys to the kingdom handed to him on a silver platter:1) A tokenized Forth graphics engine.2) Smalltalk.The Forth graphics engine was originally intended to grow from a programmable replacement of the NAPLPS videotex graphics protocol, into a silicon implementation of a stack machine upon which byte codes, compiled from Smalltalk would be executed. At least that's the direction in which I had hoped to see the Viewtron videotex terminal evolve when I originated the dynamically downloaded tokenized Forth graphics protocol as a replacement for NAPLPS in 1981 and discussed these ideas with the folks at Xerox PARC prior to the genesis of Postscript and Lisa.If Charles Moore could produce an economical 10MIPS 16 bit Forth engine on a 10K ECL gate array on virtually zero bucks back then, why couldn't Jobs with all his resources produce a silicon Postscript engine with power enough to execute Smalltalk?Somehow a Forth interpreter made it into the first Mac, as did Postscript, but Smalltalk just didn't.The Motorola 68000 family just didn't have the power. It may have been better than the Intel 86 family, but that really isn't saying much, now is it? [ Reply to This | ParentAn addendum by Baldrson (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:15PMyou clearly have no idea what you're talking about by jbellis (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @12:19PMObjective-C is not even close to Smalltalk by idlake (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @01:24PMSelf is a Smalltalk by Jecel Assumpcao Jr (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:15PMspot on by idlake (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @01:36PMRe:spot on by oaklybonn (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:15PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.No, you don't get it. by Tablizer (Score:3)Sunday October 09, @01:53PMRe:Jobs didn't get it. by Blakey Rat (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:46PM Where are they now? (Score:1) by clamboat (813890) on Sunday October 09, @12:01PM (#13750791) "By Monday morning, a preliminary version of Desktop Manager was ready for review by Atkinson's boss, Wayne Rosing, who was thrilled with the change." Wayne Rosing went on to a distinguished career at Sun, eventually heading the Sun Labs research division before taking the helm at FirstPerson, the semi-spinoff meant to commercialize Java. Wayne retired for a few years before being called by his friend Eric Schmidt to become a VP at Google, where he remains today. Hell of a career.I think Owen Densmore was also an alum of the Lisa project. He left Apple and moved to Sun where he created the object-oriented postscript system that was used to program NeWS, the Network Extensible Window System. I think the acronym might have been captialized in a funny way so it could be trademarked.What ties all this together? Both NeWS and Java were invented by James Gosling who is still at Sun, and is probably still doing cool stuff. [ Reply to This Article is hostile : mc68000 was 32 bit! not 16! (Score:1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09, @12:05PM (#13750808) Article is hostile : mc68000 was 32 bit proccessor because it used 32 bit registers, had 32 bit math, and address more than 16bit addressing in linear addressing and used address registers than held 32 bits.the DATA bus and code bus used 16 wires.... b ut it was a goddamned 32 bit chip and this fact used to piss off intel x86 people for many years.So much so that they try to rewrite history with articles like this crap that ignore that the chip was 32 bits.A 64 bit processor for example DOES NOT have 64 bit data bus lines typically to the actual motherboard ram, and certainly NEVER EVER offers all 64 bit of addressing. (possibly some offer 48 in this universe though).but does that mean a 64 bit chip is not a 64 bit? no!! Jsut as the 68K was a genuine 32bit chip and almost no effort was needed when a full 32 bit wired version was offerred for sale.The article is hostile to history of the mac and lisa.by the way i bought both the years both shipped. [ Reply to This Re:Article is hostile : mc68000 was 32 bit! not 16 (Score:4, Informative) by NormalVisual (565491) on Sunday October 09, @01:34PM (#13751222) Interestingly, the article also refers to the 8088 as a 16-bit processor, which is an 8-bit processor if one uses the same criteria that you'd have to in order to call a 68000 "16-bit". 68000: 32-bit registers, 24-bit address bus (linear addressing), 16-bit data bus8088: 16-bit registers, 20-bit address bus (segmented addressing), 8-bit data bus I frankly don't consider the 8088 and 68000 even remotely comparable - it's far easier to program for (and design hardware around, IMHO) the 68K. The only difficulties that I knew of anyone really experiencing when moving to the 68020 and other full 32-bit variants was that people had gotten into the really bad habit of using the upper 8 bits of the A registers for general storage, which would break things on a '020 horribly. Even so, it was certainly nothing like the EMS/XMS hell that PC programmers had to go through just to use memory above 1MB because of the limitations of the 8088 memory architecture. [ Reply to This | ParentRe:Article is hostile : mc68000 was 32 bit! not 16 by Blakey Rat (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:49PM80386 better than 68000. by tjstork (Score:3)Sunday October 09, @03:11PM1 reply beneath your current threshold. LISA (Score:3, Interesting) by hhawk (26580) on Sunday October 09, @12:17PM (#13750873) (http://www.hawknest.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 05, @05:11PM) The Lisa wasn't cheap unless you were comparing to some mainframe. We had one at Bell Labs when I was there. Did some graphics on it, which was easier than trying to do graphics with TROFF/PICS...but it was also always breaking needing service and it didn't get a lot of use.. [ Reply to This Lisa was like taking home an attractive woman (Score:2, Funny) by geekoid (135745) <dadinportland AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday October 09, @12:21PM (#13750895) (http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 21, @05:37PM) to find out she has a penis. [ Reply to This1 reply beneath your current threshold. I disagree with the conclusion (Score:5, Informative) by Ash� Pattern (152048) on Sunday October 09, @12:25PM (#13750917) (http://www.bitmuse.com/) My father, an early adopter-type, had a Lisa for his office, and it was the Lisa that I first learned how to program on.One of the most maddening things about programming the Lisa was that you couldn't make programs that integrated well with the Lisa office suite. Why? Because there was no API for the GUI. None. If you wanted a window drawn, you fired up QuickDraw and drew it yourself. Want a scroll bar? Do it yourself. Menus? Right.I ended up only using the development environment's console for my programs' interfaces. The development environment was also console based, probably for the same reasons. A couple of years later, Apple released the Lisa Toolkit that had all that stuff, after they had announced they were going to discontinue it.So in my opinion, it was the lack of software that killed the Lisa, not its high price. I mean, people were paying for it, and they wanted more. The ability to use proportional fonts was the killer feature to end all killer features.It's worth noting that Apple learned its lesson about making developers happy - the developer support program for the Macintosh has been one of the best. [ Reply to This xerox didn't copied apple (Score:1) by nazsco (695026) on Sunday October 09, @12:34PM (#13750956) (Last Journal: Saturday October 01, @04:15PM) there are thousands of anecdotes about rafkin convincing jobs and the rest to the managers to walk to palo alto to take a tour in xerox's labs, where they saw for the first time a computer with a GUI.but kudos to apple. they release it before. [ Reply to This Comprehensive Lisa info at guidebookgallery.org (Score:4, Interesting) by toby (759) * on Sunday October 09, @12:41PM (#13750988) (http://www.telegraphics.com.au/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 08, @02:40AM) Marcin Wichary [aresluna.org] has compiled a great deal of Lisa information [guidebookgallery.org], from screenshots, ads, brochures and articles to posters and videos, at his site GUI Gallery Guidebook [guidebookgallery.org]. Recent postings include 17 exclusive Lisa posters [guidebookgallery.org] for download and enjoyment, and an interview with Dan Smith [guidebookgallery.org] that reveals "The original trash can for Apple Lisa was supposed to have been an old, beat up alley trashcan, with the lid half open, flies buzzing around it and appropriate sounds as user put something inside." [ Reply to This commentary is off-base (Score:4, Informative) by idlake (850372) on Sunday October 09, @01:13PM (#13751132) I had a Lisa, and Apple made the same mistakes with the Lisa as Xerox had made with the Star: it was too expensive, in particular for the limited hardware and completely incompatible software you got.Claims that the Lisa represented significant technological innovation seem dubious to me. You need to compare the Lisa to the totality of R&D efforts around at the time, not just the Star. Xerox alone had Alto, Star, Smalltalk, and probably others. The GUI of the Lisa was an evolutionary change, and not always for the better; what was under the hood of the Lisa can charitably be described as pedestrian. It took Apple 20 years to catch up and finally adopt system software that even is in the same league as Smalltalk-80 (that's "80" as in "1980"; Smalltalk-80 is the language and platform that Objective-C and Cocoa are modeled on).Lisa's main significance was to be a prototype for, and cannibalized for, Macintosh (and it served as the main development machine for Macintosh apps for a while), but I can't think of any significant new technology it introduced. [ Reply to ThisRe:commentary is off-base by Blakey Rat (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:37PMRe:commentary is off-base by nagora (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:52PM What is an "object oriented UI"? (Score:3, Insightful) by Tablizer (95088) on Sunday October 09, @01:34PM (#13751226) (http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15, @02:22PM) OOP is a technique for organizing programming code, not UI's. Thus, what exactly is an OO UI? I am not sure if there is only one way to interpret a UI analog to programming code code techniques. In fact, nobody can even agree on a clear definition of OO in the code world. If you want to start a bar fight in OOP forums, ask for a precise definition of OO, and e-chairs start flying. [ Reply to ThisRe:What is an "object oriented UI"? by PapayaSF (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:42PMRe:What is an "object oriented UI"? by Tablizer (Score:1)Sunday October 09, @03:22PM Remember, the original Mac didn't sell well either (Score:3, Insightful) by Animats (122034) on Sunday October 09, @01:42PM (#13751255) (http://www.animats.com) It's worth remembering that the original Macintosh was a flop. The attempt to cost-reduce the Lisa resulted in a machine too weak to do much of anything. Remember the original specs: 128K, no hard drive, one floppy. Ever use one? Ever actually try to get work done on one? You had to fit the OS, the app, and your documents on one floppy. Or you could get an external floppy, which made the thing marginally useable. It was cute, but not productive.The lack of a hard drive was the killer. By the time the Mac came out, IBM PCs had a hard drive, so Apple was playing catch-up. Apple had tried building hard drives (the LisaFile), but they were slow and crashed frequently. But at least the Lisa had a hard drive.Third parties added a 10MB hard drive to the Mac [atarimagazines.com] in early 1985, which brought performance up to an acceptable level. Some people say that third-party hard drives saved the Mac. But Apple fought them tooth and nail. Apple finally came out with a 20MB external hard drive for the Mac in 1986. This was very late; IBM PCs had been shipping with hard drives for five years.Sales for the Mac were well below expectations. Apple had been outselling IBM in the Apple II era. (Yes, Apple was once #1 in personal computers.) In the Mac era, Apple's market share dropped well below that of IBM.What really saved the Mac was the LaserWriter, which launched the "desktop publishing" era. But that required a "Fat Mac" with a hard drive and 512K.By then, the Mac had reached parity with the Lisa specs, except that the Lisa had an MMU and the Mac didn't. The Lisa also had a real operating system, with protected mode processes; the Mac had "co-operative multitasking" in a single address space, which was basically a DOS-like system with hacks to handle multiple psuedo-threads.The MMU issue was actually Motorola's fault. The 68000 couldn't do page faults right, and Motorola's first MMU, the Motorola 68451, was a terrible design. The Lisa had an Apple-built MMU made out of register-level parts, which pushed the price up.Apple might have been more successful if they'd just stayed with the Lisa and brought the cost down as the parts cost decreased. They would have had to push Motorola to fix the MMU problem, but as the biggest 68000 customer, they could have. [ Reply to ThisThe Mac's other salvation: square pixels by PapayaSF (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @02:59PM document centric... (Score:2) by hitmark (640295) on Sunday October 09, @01:59PM (#13751327) (Last Journal: Tuesday June 14, @07:02PM) hmm, it would be realy interesting if this was brought back again.today its to much focus on what apps one use, not what one want to do.i all to often see people having photoshop installed when all they do is look at digital photoes... [ Reply to This Another good site is (Score:1) by stevey (64018) on Sunday October 09, @02:49PM (#13751564) (http://www.debian-administration.org/) Another good site full of first-hand descriptions of how early Apple development was done is http://folklore.org/ [folklore.org].I've never owned a Mac, and am too young to have been involved in earlier developments - but that site does make it all seem very impressive. [ Reply to This Re:Oh Please (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09, @11:38AM (#13750708) Clearly not, as MS has left us nothing but a shattered wasteland of hopes and dreams... [ Reply to This | Parent Re:Oh Please (Score:1) by pwnage (856708) on Sunday October 09, @11:55AM (#13750766) No, but Microsoft Bob did get Bill Gates laid [wikipedia.org]. [ Reply to This | Parent1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Oh Please (Score:2) by hey! (33014) on Sunday October 09, @12:28PM (#13750934) (http://kamthaka.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 30, @04:18PM) Well, it was very historically significant machine. By your standards, Smalltalk is contemptible because it never had more than a handful of programmers. [ Reply to This | Parent Re:Oh Please (Score:2) by OrangeTide (124937) on Sunday October 09, @01:05PM (#13751101) Microsoft Bob did change the way people thought about human interfaces. It got a lot of things right, and a lot of these newer experimental interfaces have a lot in common with BOB. I think the problem with Bob wasn't the technology, but it was a lack of a market. [ Reply to This | Parent Re:Oh Please (Score:2) by rbanffy (584143) on Sunday October 09, @01:27PM (#13751205) (http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/) Microsoft Bob was very important - it told us what not to do and which way not to go.An yes, the Lisa shows paths we did follow as well as some we didn't. The whole idea of centering document creation on templates at the GUI level is very interesting and should warrant further investigation. Hope Gnome and OpenOffice folks think about it. [ Reply to This | Parent Re:Oh Please (Score:2) by kevcol (3467) on Sunday October 09, @02:01PM (#13751339) (http://www.subgenius.com/) What do you mean?! I am using Bob right now- it's a tremendous OS! [ Reply to This | Parent Re:You are a Moron (Score:2) by ScrewMaster (602015) on Sunday October 09, @02:22PM (#13751425) Actually, the original PC BIOS wasn't so much reverse-engineered, as it was simply duplicated. IBM published the full annotated assembler listing in the original IBM PC technical manual. I still have a copy, somewhere. And in any event, because the BIOS was accessed via software interrupts (unlike the Apple ][ machines, which required direct calls into the ROM) it was pretty painless to duplicate the functionality, and IBM for its part didn't seem to care one way or the other. That simply encouraged the entire PC clone market to burgeon and spread. Contrast this to Apple Computer, which was continually trying to shut down competitors (like Franklin, for example.) Apple ][ clones had endless compatibility issues with applications that were making ROM calls that would fail on non-Apple firmware. IBM (by using INT13 software-interrupts to access BIOS services) eliminated that problem, and so long as a clone BIOS correctly emulated the original functions the system would work.About a year after the formal release of the Mac, I called up Apple's service people looking for a replacement gate array chip for an Apple // disk controller board. They wouldn't sell me the part (it was for one of my customers, I finally found a computer store that had a couple left) and I was told that "we recommend you purchase a Mac." Apple lost market share all right, and it wasn't because of the Mac ... it was because they treated loyal, long-standing customers like myself as dirt. After that experience (and several others like it) I went out and bought a PC and never looked back.And the parent poster isn't too far off base in one respect. Apple's market share did drop, not so much because of the move from DOS3.3/ProDOS to the Mac, but because of the way Apple treated their existing base of Apple ][ and //e customers. I mean, even when the Mac came out there was still a huge base of installed Apple //e business customers and Apple pretty much just threw them away, fully expecting them to migrate to the Macintosh. Migrate they did, but to the IBM PC.Never forget one thing: Apple was the incumbent, with all the advantages that confers. Atari and Commodore together couldn't market themselves out of a cardboard box and both eventually fell by the wayside. I look back at Apple Computer as a company that was at the right place at the right time with everything in its favor, only to squander opportunity after opportunity, relegating itself to second place. And such a distant second as to be almost out of the running, when they could have owned the market. They do seem to be making some good moves lately: let's see if they can keep it up. [ Reply to This | ParentRe:You are a Moron by phillymjs (Score:2)Sunday October 09, @03:02PM9 replies beneath your current threshold.