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."

Comments

Knew I read this before

[enigma48]

/. 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).

Mac changed everything

[gilesjuk]

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.

Ah, Memories

[rob_squared]

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

The original message.

[Baldrson]

Here is the base message 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?

Re:You got to wonder

[Midnight Thunder]

The site seems to be here: http://emulation.victoly.com/ Must admit I couldn't find any Lisa emulators on the site, but did find this link: http://lisa.sunder.net/

I disagree with the conclusion

[AshPattern]

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.

commentary is off-base

[idlake]

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.

Re:Article is hostile : mc68000 was 32 bit! not 16

[NormalVisual]

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.

Re:You got to wonder

[Dogtanian]

Two years later. And yes, the graphics and multi-tasking ability of the Amiga kicked the Lisa's ass (and Macintosh's) all over the shop at a fraction of the cost, no doubt about it.

But, as a former Amiga user, I'll still say that the OS 1.x interface wasn't the best GUI ever. They improved quite a lot with 2.x onwards, but that was five years or so later.

Remember, the original Mac didn't sell well either

[Animats]

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 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.

The Mac's other salvation: square pixels

[PapayaSF]

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.

80386 better than 68000.

[tjstork]

Time to bust out the holy wars.

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_p resentations/MC680X0OPTAPP.txt

http://www.df.lth.se/~john_e/gems/gem0028.html

http://linux.cis.monroeccc.edu/~paulrsm/doc/trick6 8k.htm

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/article2 14.asp#ADC

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.

Re:80386 better than 68000.

[Misagon]

You are comparing a newer generation to an older.
The 68000 came in 1979. The i386 was introduced first in 1986.
The 68020 however, introduced in 1987 did support 32x32->64 bit multiplication and division between all data registers. An external MMU was available, but it was unused by MacOS and AmigaOS.
And the 68000 has had nice relative addressing modes from the start. I don't understand what you are referring to. (I have written machine code for all of these.)

Re:not really

[OwnedByTwoCats]

High-end PC:

High-end PC: 640 KB RAM. No further expansion possible
LISA: 1 MB RAM, expandible to 2 MB.

High-end PC: One 360K floppy, one Hard Drive
LISA: Dual 860K floppies, 5 MB Hard Drive.

High-end PC/Hercules Graphics: 720x348 bin-mapped display (plus 80x25 chararcter)
LISA: 720x364 bit-mapped display