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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."
The Lisa was introduced for sale in 1983 for about $10,000. It sounds like development began in 1979.
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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/
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 #!
Actually, the original PC BIOS wasn't so much reverse-engineered, as it was simply duplicated. IBM published the full annotated assembler listing in the original IBM PC technical manual. I still have a copy, somewhere. And in any event, because the BIOS was accessed via software interrupts (unlike the Apple ][ machines, which required direct calls into the ROM) it was pretty painless to duplicate the functionality, and IBM for its part didn't seem to care one way or the other. That simply encouraged the entire PC clone market to burgeon and spread. Contrast this to Apple Computer, which was continually trying to shut down competitors (like Franklin, for example.) Apple ][ clones had endless compatibility issues with applications that were making ROM calls that would fail on non-Apple firmware. IBM (by using INT13 software-interrupts to access BIOS services) eliminated that problem, and so long as a clone BIOS correctly emulated the original functions the system would work.
// disk controller board. They wouldn't sell me the part (it was for one of my customers, I finally found a computer store that had a couple left) and I was told that "we recommend you purchase a Mac." Apple lost market share all right, and it wasn't because of the Mac ... it was because they treated loyal, long-standing customers like myself as dirt. After that experience (and several others like it) I went out and bought a PC and never looked back.
//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.
About a year after the formal release of the Mac, I called up Apple's service people looking for a replacement gate array chip for an Apple
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
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. They do seem to be making some good moves lately: let's see if they can keep it up.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Jef Raskin's total contribution to the Macintosh project was "Hey, let's build an inexpensive computer that's easy to use." That's it. He had absolutely no technical input whatsoever, and no input at all once Jobs took over the project.
People love to latch on to Raskin and call him the unsung hero, but the fact is that he totally abandoned the project when he didn't get to do everything his way.
How does square pixels allow true WYSIWYG? The screen representation is still an approximation (unless you are printing on a B&W printer with 72DPI). One thing that we've learnt since is that tall pixels are better value, as the human eye needs greater horizontal resolution than vertical (c.v. cleartype, lcd mode in freetype, or whatever). I would rather have a 2:1 tall-pixel display than a /2:/2 once the resolution goes above 100dpi - better visual resolution for a given investment in pixels. Quickdraw even supported non-square pixels in the original firmware.
(And IBM PCs had square pixels in some modes too in 1985)
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