The Birth of the Apple Lisa

Ton writes "People think Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, but it's much more subtle than that. Braeburn has posted a story about the development and birth of the Apple Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical interface. More on this subject at Andy Hertzfeld's (one of the original developers of the Mac) site Folkore.org."

Comments

Re:Lisa Cut Apple's Throat

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I *love* using apple computers, but I have to add to Mr Bullfish's point with a story about a friend of mine.

Back around 1990 or so he bought a Mac IIfx. That thing was trippy scary fast for the time, and it cost him a HUGE pile of cash - something like $12,000. Which is a huge amount of money for a computer by todays standards and just short of extortionate back in 1990. However it had that weird 64 pin memory, so upping the RAM cost a freakin' fortune, and it was never used again, which meant that this machine was a $13,000 DOORSTOP. That pissed him off. But he was a Believer, and he went back to the Kool-Aid trough again in summer of 1995 and bought a Quadra 950 for about $8,000. It was discontinued a few months later, and at the time with no realistic upgrade path, except to spend another $8000 on a 9500.

At that point he said "FUCK APPLE" - he had invested over $20,000 on TWO computers, both of which were doorstops. He was able to strip the 950 for some parts, at least. Since then, he's been a Wintel Guy ever since.

Apple has a habit of doing that - building extremely expensive machines that have no useful upgrade path. Now that computers are so friggin cheap, upgrape path doesn't mean that much, but back in 1990 it really did.

I bought an LC (or was it an LC-II? I don't remember...) back in 1991 because it was a colour macintosh for less than $2000, which I thought was FANTASTIC. I think it had 8 megs of RAM. But, with no upgrade path, it was useless after a few years, and then I bought my Quadra 650 for about $1700. The Quadra was great - it worked like a champ for years and I finally sold it to someone who is still using it for word processing running Word 5, FreeHand 5, and Quark 3 to this very day.

Apple's crude discontinuation of Lisa was just the first in a series of major customer mis-steps by Apple. (full disclosure: both of my Apple computers died in April, so now I'm running a cheapy Wintel box, but only until the MacIntel boxen arrive. Then I'll get a MacIntel powerbook. YAY!!! I look forward to getting back to OSX. Windows makes my day long and grim, and the software I use precludes Linux, for now.)

RS