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

The Lisa Was a Very Slow Computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha.. reminds me of this joke:

Knock knock..

Who's there?

(wait 45 seconds) ... ..... .......

Lisa!

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.

Re:You are a Moron

[ScrewMaster]

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.

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 // 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.

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 //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.

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.