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How the Lisa Changed Everything
Sabah Arif writes "The
Lisa, started in 1979 to provide an inexpensive business computer to
Apple's lineup, enjoyed little success. With its advanced
object oriented UI and powerful office suite, the computer was priced
well above the means of most businesses. Despite its failure,
the Lisa influenced most user interfaces, and introduced many
features unheard of in earlier systems (like the Xerox Star or VisiOn).
Read the story of the development and demise of the Apple
Lisa at Low
End Mac."
I can't believe Slashdot is posting this "At Apple, even our failures are huge successess!" story. Would they publish one on how Microsoft Bob revolutionized the world of user agents and computer interaction?
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.
http://www.busyweather.com/
...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?
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
/. already posted this story http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/31/ 1346224&tid=190&tid=3 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).
Haha.. reminds me of this joke:
... ..... .......
Knock knock..
Who's there?
(wait 45 seconds)
Lisa!
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.
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.
I kid, I kid.
Anyway, here's a picture of the orgional ad: http://www.jagshouse.com/lisabrochure.html
I don't get it.
Gutting programmer effectiveness and routing new programmers into BASIC by a factor of at least 10 while maintaining, and even slightly improving the GUI is a great example of "not getting it". You can say OOP would become important in a few years and I can say the windowing GUI would become important in a few years with or without Jobs. But the revolution had already occured at PARC (and if you're focused on the mouse environment -- even a decade earlier at SRI which is where PARC, and indeed PLATO with its touch panel, got their inspiration -- I remember sitting in meetings at CERL/PLATO viewing the films of SRI's research in 1974 as part of PLATO's computer-based conferencing project).
DOS applications were starting to 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 was inevitable and obvious to people with money as well as most personal computer programmers, especially once Tesler had already popularized it with his 1981 Byte magazine article.
Dynamic, late-binding programming environments that highly leverage the sparse nerd matrix out there -- like Smalltalk, Python, etc. -- are, however _still_ struggling to make it past the concrete barriers Jobs poured into the OO culture with the Mac.
When Jobs passed up Smalltalk for Object Pascal, and then again, with Next, passed up Smalltalk for Objective C, he set a pattern that continues to this day when Sun passed up that sun-of-Smalltalk, Self and went with that son-of-Objective-C, Java.
Gutting the superstructure of technology while maintaining appearances isn't leadership.
Seastead this.
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.
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.
I wonder just how 'low end' it will be. Mac is so friggin expensive as it is.. ;-(
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?
Seastead this.
if you maxed it out with a high-end Hercules graphics card and 640KB of ram, you were still a few hundred short of $5k.
I don't mean to single Jobs out here since, of course, Gates is the guy who ultimately defected against civilization to become its richest man.
Seastead this.
for computing nothing but scientific calculations, especially (but not exclusively) math that can be vectorized, a dual G5 is cheaper per gigaflop than any computer for sale.
macs are cheap
they also sell something called a mac mini now too.
notice how www.top500.org one year is dominated by powerpc chips? thats because www.top500.org is based on a real test used to compare actual supercomputer cluisters. A mac cluseter is typically 5 to 7 times cheaper than anything else.
the 8gig of fast ram and THREE pci-x slots dont hurt either.
or the 16 gigaflops a lowly 2Ghz dual g5 can do. (two Ghz * two chips * 2 floating cores * combined multiple AND add in one clock == 16gflops)
and thats not even considering the astounding 128 bit huge registers on the generous altivec vector cores
PRICE INDEED?!?! waht are you a goddamned pauper?
price for what? getting nothing done per second?
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..
http://www.hawknest.com/
Objective-C's object system and general philosophy is _very_ smalltalk-ish.
Java is much more "C++ with some warts removed" than an Obj-C derivative. Obj C _is_ a "dynamic, late-binding programming environment." C++ and Java are not.
Self is no more a son of Smalltalk than Java is a son of Obj C. They (Self and Smalltalk) both came out of PARC, but they are very different.
I suspect you have no more idea about what went on at Apple than you do about programming languages, but I can't speak to that myself.
to find out she has a penis.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
Marcin Wichary has compiled a great deal of Lisa information, from screenshots, ads, brochures and articles to posters and videos, at his site GUI Gallery Guidebook. Recent postings include 17 exclusive Lisa posters for download and enjoyment, and an interview with Dan Smith 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."
you had me at #!
Xerox introduced the GUI and Apple was only the first of many to copy it - big deal. Remember, before Apple went full into the Mac they had significant market share. So it could be strongly argued, that going GUI was Apple's downfall.
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.
Yes, moving from CLI to GUI is why Apple's marketshare fell.
It had nothing whatever to do with the proliferation of cheap IBM PC clones starting in the mid-80s, once the PC BIOS was reverse engineered by Phoenix.
You fucking idiot.
Objective-C's object system and general philosophy is _very_ smalltalk-ish.
Yes, Objective-C has late binding and limited dynamic typing, but that's only a tiny part of what Smalltalk offered in 1980.
The sad fact is that it is Apple, more than any other company, that is responsible for the bloated toolkits and libraries that we see today: they set the pattern with the Lisa and the Macintosh toolboxes, and everybody else copied it, up to and including Java and C#. And while Objective-C happens to copy some of Smalltalk's nice object features, it is has grave deficiencies in areas like run-time safety, reflection, and resource management.
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 bus
8088: 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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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.
Table-ized A.I.
I fully agree: Apple's decision to go with Object Pascal, and then a collection of assembly-language toolboxes had really bad consequences for the industry, consequences that we suffer from to this day.
I disagree, though, with your assessment of the relationships of the different languages; Java, unfortunately, is not the son of Objective-C, it is the son of Object Pascal and C++. Objective-C would have been the right language for the original Macintosh--close to the machine to allow Apple to meet their price targets, but dynamic enough to eventually turn into something decent. Instead, Appple led the industry on a 20 year detour into static object-oriented languages and, worse, "toolboxes", and is now returning to a dynamic language that is 20 years out of date.
Fortunately, C# and Java do address this problem. While the C# and Java languages themselves are cumbersome and static, their runtimes are sufficiently powerful to put decent dynamic languages on top of them and still interoperate with the unwashed masses of static object-oriented programmers.
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 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.
apple set the pop standard for user interfaces way back when, gates got rich perfecting it and getting it to the masses, kde on the other hand is one of the world best kept secrets which is better than both.
You have to remember that the microcomputer hardware was sloooow and expensive back then. Compiled "static" languages simply run faster, even if they take longer to program with.
Personally, I feel that GUI's should be mostly declarative based such that one stores descriptions and attributes of windows and widgets rather than use boatloads of "new Window(...)" and "new Widget(...)" commands in code. Events are then bound to a programming language of choice. Declarative approaches are usually easier to adapt to multiple programming languages. Why does the world still want to hard-wire GUI's to one and only one programming language? Java still made this same mistake in 1996, almost 20 years after Job's alleged "big mistake". I see no reason why it *must* be this way. It does not make sense to reinvent GUI engines for each of the 100 or so common languages. They like to talk about "reuse", but don't practice what they preach.
Table-ized A.I.
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...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I don't know why some people think Self is a very different language than Smalltalk-80. With the optional parser and GNU Smalltalk classes you can even file in Smalltalk-80 code and run it.
http://research.sun.com/self/papers/smalltalk.pdf
I don't remember who said "Self is like Smalltalk, only more so" but that is a great definition. To avoid having to repeat this discussion all the time I have renamed my Self/R project as Neo Smalltalk.
'nuff said
> The Apple engineers were not the only ones impressed by the visit. The researchers at Xerox, long discouraged by Xerox's inability to release a product based on the technology developed at PARC, were impressed by Apple's seeming willingness to implement advanced technologies in their products.
Xerox --> Microsoft
+
Apple --> Linux
=
Internal wars?
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".
No, it makes the rather confusing assertion that:
1) Apple decided that a 16-bit machine was necessary for what they were trying to accomplish.
2) Apple considered many CPUs for the LISA, including the 8088.
So, you see, the article doesn't state that the 8088 is a 16-bit CPU, it just states that Apple considered it despite earlier agreeing that it wouldn't be sufficient. Based on the places I've worked, that happens quite a bit in the business world.
Comment of the year
Another good site full of first-hand descriptions of how early Apple development was done is http://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.
The Lisa, like other computers of the day, had rectangular pixels. The Mac's introduction of square pixels allowed true WYSIWYG, and was crucial to desktop publishing and computer art. The Mac's still strong position in the graphic arts industry is a direct result.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Time to bust out the holy wars.
p resentations/MC680X0OPTAPP.txt
6 8k.htm
2 14.asp#ADC
I like the 68000 because it has so many registers but I think all in all in the 80386 is the better CPU.
For reference, consider:
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/reports_
http://www.df.lth.se/~john_e/gems/gem0028.html
http://linux.cis.monroeccc.edu/~paulrsm/doc/trick
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~muchandr/m68k
Right off the wheel, we notice that the 68000 did not support 32 bit multiplecation at all. Doesn't sound too much like a 32 bit chip to me. Compare that to Intels quirky IMUL, which I believe puts the result into EAX, EDX to get a real 64 bit result.
Integer math was faster clock for clock on the 386. Compare things like 68K register addition to Intel register addition. There's no comparison.
Compare
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
to
http://www.df.lth.se/~john_e/gems/gem0028.html
Whenever you did any 32 bit pointer math on a 68k, you paid a huge, huge performance penalty. It was always more efficient to do things in 16 bit PC relative addressing.
The 68K had no concept of isolated memory or tasks. So systems like the Amiga and the Macintosh would run without any isolation between processes. I was an Amiga fan boy and I used to get that GURU meditation error so much that it was not even comical.
The tragedy of the 386 architecture was actually Microsoft and not Intel. DOS and Windows did not use even the 386 chip to its fullest capability for memory management. MS users would have to wait until Sept 1995, almost 10 years after the 386, for a true 32 bit operating system.
This is my sig.
While you build your garage supercomputers computnig rc5 numbers the rest of us has real problems to attend to, and an xserve with a dogslow OS X isn't going to cut it for REAL problems.
I bought my first Sun 100 (serial #82 1M ram 80M disk) later upgraded to Sun 100U in Aug 1982. When upgraded to bsd 4.3 in 1983 it had a GUI, so when the Lisa came out, so what? Admittedly, it cost over $20,000 but Moore's was in effect so, the Lisa a year later was about the same at $10,000. In 1984 when the Mac came out at about $2,500, it was below the price curve by 50% but it didn't have a disk! The Lisa had great software, what there was of it. The Sun had a real Unix, what more could you ask for?
All of the above machines had some version of the Motorola 68000, so where other people saw a Mac, I saw a very crippled Sun, needless to say I wasn't impressed, and I'm still not impressed.
I'd say the Sun is much more the model of what Linux is today, for better or worse.
I think it's kind of cool how in the Lisa ad below:
http://www.jagshouse.com/images/lisa4.jpg
The real world images above the icons look like the photorealic icons used in OS X (no shit, yes they're real, but i.e. the lighting, camera angle, etc.)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
The Fat Mac had neither a hard drive nor cooperative multitasking (unless you count desk accessories, but the original Mac had those too). There was Switcher which gave the ability to switch between apps, but there was no multitasking -- the background apps were completely suspended. Cooperative multitasking didn't come 'til Multifinder with System 6.
Internal hard drives didn't come 'til, I want to say Mac II? Was there one for the SE?
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
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.
I always find myself wondering what would have happened if Apple had taken all the energy and GUI focus that they had for the Macintosh, and instead applied them to the much more flexible, expandable Apple II line. Might the Apple II line have evolved into a modern-day industry standard, with as many clones and as much software as PCs have now?
The coolest voice ever.
It's hard to understand why anybody would call a product that sold faster than it could be produced and that exceeded even the most optimistic expectations a "flop."
In point of fact, the Mac and Mac Plus were stupendous successes for Apple, successes that really couldn't be duplicated until the iMac showed up in 1998.
The IBM PC wasn't successful because of its price (the Apple II was cheaper and more open) or because of its technology. It was successful because the nameplate on the front had a big, prominent IBM logo.
If the Lisa had been an IBM product, it would've been vastly more successful. Same with the Macintosh, Commodore 64, anything. Businesses bought IBM, because it was IBM and because IBM knew how to support corporate customers. Such was the power of the brand in those days, and there's nothing like it in the computer market today.
Clones sprang up around the IBM because it was the hot thing. They reverse-engineered the PC BIOS because that was the only way to go. No other computer could've justified the R&D necessary to create a clone, but the IBM could.
So Jobs didn't get it.
Gates didn't get it.
Sun didn't quite get it.
But we, with the full benefit of hindsight...we get it. Just like those little-known geniuses, writing papers in the bowels of university research labs and Xerox PARC. We get it now. We are so friggin' smart. So much better than those short-sighted billionaires who pillaged and plundered the ideas of their betters twenty years ago.
We get it. We are so brilliant. We totally rock.
Why compare two processors from totally different time periods?!
Can you install MS Bob on top of Lisa?
=)
Would they publish one on how Microsoft Bob revolutionized the world of user agents and computer interaction?
Actually the Mac version was much better, surely you remember Bob for Apples?
Some settling may occur during posting.
Why isn't this modded troll?
There is a huge 6 year gap between the two. I could say a powerpc G5 processor is alot better than an 8086. Well of course it is. But does that mean a fast Athlon64 is slower than a G5?
By the time the 80386 came out, Motorrola had 60020's and perhaps 68030's.
PS the 68020's and I think the 68000's could run Unix because of built in memory protection and other features. Could 8088's, 8086's, 80186's or 286's do that? No I do not Consider early SCO XENIX aka Openserver a real unix with built in memory protection and primptive multitasking until well after the 386.
http://saveie6.com/
Most PCs had hard drives in 1984?!? I doubt it.
I certainly didn't get a PC with a hard drive until my first 386 in 1990. I was perhaps a bit behind the times, but I doubt your average new PC had a HDD until at least 1986.
I said it was poo poo to a large british bank
Yeah so i was drunk!
Your history is a bit incomplete.* The EISA (1988) was the industries answer to the MCA (1987). Look at the card edge, and you'll notice it's basically the ISA (1985) bus with an additional row of pins. PCI came later (1994)
The VL-Bus was popular about '93-'94.
http://www.pcguide.com/index.htm
That was almost 20 years ago, now that I think of it.
True, the Plus did not have an internal hard drive... originally. It came with 1MB RAM and one internal 800k floppy. But... I installed an INTERNAL 20MB 5.25" ST-225N Seagate hard drive into it, by mounting it diagonally to the CRT, and soldering the SCSI connections directly to the motherboard. It was great!
Performance-wise it was OK (my previous machine was an Atari ST), but the thing had a great GUI for its OS, and with Lightspeed Pascal graphics was easily accessible.
When I think about those years, I stop even considering complaining about my PBG4 not being fast enough :-)
Actually, there were significant problems with the 68020, because many developers used the top byte of addresses for flags. But they were warned against it pretty much from day 1.
(Emacs, BTW, was a major early offender, because the default assumption it made was that you could use part of every pointer for flags. I think it still does this, rather than defaulting to separate pointers and flag bits except on platforms where the assumption has been tested.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I was there - I'm not reading this stuff from some fanboi's biography. IBM PC's of the time, and the clones were all as expensive or more so than Apple][ line - on par with the Macintosh line. We're talking before the 286 was released.
I dislike Apple because they forced me onto PC's by not providing a viable alternative until 2001, approximately 16 years too late.
Your need to call me a moron and a fucking idiot for expressing my opinion merely illustrates the depth of your ignorance.
10% market share? Awww, you're too kind!!
Seastead this.
...is the kind of discussion I expect in a Slashdot article. ;-)
When I was a kid at high school I was helping a guy who'd picked up a Lisa for his office. It wound up at my place while I learned how to set up a DB for him in Omnis. There I was with the biggest "home/office" computer I'd ever seen on a table in our lounge, mucking about with a mouse (woooo - never seen something like that before) and it even had an external HDD (which sat on top, had to be turned on before the computer so it could spool up to speed and sounded like a DC-8 engine-start as it did :)
:)
Had a few of the local geek-kids coming over to inspect it - amazing times
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
As far as I know, Apple never shipped a Forth interpreter with Mac system software (although Power Macs around 10 years later did include one as part of Open Firmware, used during booting only).
A couple of years after Mac's introduction, Apple certainly did ship a complete Smalltalk environment for 68K Macs, as did several third party vendors.
PostScript was never part of the MacOS imaging model (and with OS X, still isn't) and in any case did not arrive on the scene for a year after 'the first Mac'. Once the LaserWriter shipped, the printer driver gained a primitive PS generator for the Mac's QuickDraw model.
(Much later, some imagesetter vendors and preflighting/soft proofing applications, and Ghostscript, of course, included PostScript implementations for specialised purposes. Even Adobe's graphic arts applications did not embed anything approaching a full PostScript implementation until quite recently.)
you had me at #!
But the 8086 would be 16-bit using that criterion. Also, XMS was not available on a 8088, nor was EMS emulation in the typical sense (using paging ala EMM386) - although a memory board implementing EMS would work.
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