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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."
/. 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.
I kid, I kid.
Anyway, here's a picture of the orgional ad: http://www.jagshouse.com/lisabrochure.html
I don't get it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.)
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley