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How the Lisa Changed Everything

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the just-a-nothing-boring-sunday dept.

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."

10 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Oh Please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Oh Please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Clearly not, as MS has left us nothing but a shattered wasteland of hopes and dreams...

    2. Re:Oh Please by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, it was very historically significant machine. By your standards, Smalltalk is contemptible because it never had more than a handful of programmers.

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    3. Re:Oh Please by rbanffy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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  2. Re:You got to wonder by cpt+kangarooski · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Meh. A damn lot of the POS terminals I see these days have buttons -- often touchscreen buttons -- and are GUI based. A GUI doesn't have to be a windowing interface with a mouse, you know.

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  3. Re:You got to wonder by Hiro+Antagonist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The problem is, you're looking at computers as if they are disposable, not capital, goods. Realistically speaking, having a long-term planner in your systems department, someone who thinks about where a business is going to be in ten or twentry years, alleviates a lot of the costs of continuously replacing hardware, because their logic is, "Buy quality, plan for expansion, and don't through out perfectly good solutions just because Oracle bought me lunch at Morton's."

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  4. Re:commentary is off-base by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Making a computer easy for the masses isn't a "technology," but it's still damned important. You talk from the typical open-source "code is everything, usability unimportant" viewpoint but you have to remember that for the average user, if they can't use a feature, that feature might as well not exist. Now you're right in that the user experience for a few reasons didn't really gel until MacOS 4 or so, but the Lisa was a thousand times better (for users) than anything that came before it.

    Alto was, from every account I've read, a beast to work with. Sure, it had a GUI, but its GUI wasn't modeled after anything in real life, unlike Apple's desktop metaphor. You can make a GUI that's just as dense as a CLI easily, and that's what Xerox had done.

    Anyway, I think your criticism is unfair.

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  5. Re:The Apple II: What might have been? by ScrewMaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, it cost them the entire industrial sector, for one. At the time I was using Apple ]['s and //e's as data acquisition systems, real-time graphics displays, and other fun stuff like that. Then out came the Mac and my initial reaction was "Wow ... what a useless toy." Granted, it was cool and I had one for a while. However, without the ability to plug in an EPROM burner, high-speed A/D and D/A boards and other commonly-available Apple ][ peripherals the Mac was of no consequence to me. The PC, on the other hand, could be looked at as what the Apple ][ should have become (minus the stupid Intel CPU, of course. I would have just LOVED to have had a 68000-based Apple //e.) Slots, better monitor, lots better keyboard, etc. So, yes ... I think Apple might have ended up being a much bigger player if they'd played it a little differently. At least, it would have been a good idea not let Jobs' ego and limited view of the computing world push the Mac to the exclusion of the existing product lines.

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  6. Hindsight is 20-20 by Thu25245 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:I for one welcome... by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because he's a pretentious git, who wants people to think he's hip, happening, with it, a part of the hip happening with it scene.

    Actually, he's just some damn skript kiddie. They ALL talk like that.

    Pathetic, actually.

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