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

Re:Oh Please

[hey!]

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

Re:Oh Please

[rbanffy]

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.

Re:You got to wonder

[Hiro Antagonist]

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."

Re:The Apple II: What might have been?

[ScrewMaster]

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.