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30 Years of the Apple Lisa and the Apple IIe
walterbyrd sends this excerpt from an article that might make you feel old:
"At its annual shareholders' meeting on January 19, 1983, Apple announced two new products that would play a pivotal role in the future of the company: the Apple Lisa, Apple's original GUI-based computer and the precursor to the Macintosh; and the Apple IIe, which represented a natural evolution to the highly successful Apple II computer line. ... The Lisa introduced a completely new paradigm—the mouse-driven graphical user interface—to the world of mainstream personal computers. (Note that the release of the Xerox Star workstation in 1981 marked the commercial debut of the mouse-driven GUI.) The Lisa’s elevated retail price of $9995 at launch (about $23,103 in today’s dollars), slow processor speed (5MHz), and problematic custom disk drives hobbled the groundbreaking machine as soon as it reached the market. ... Around the time of the Apple III’s launch, Apple was so sure of the new computer's success that it had halted all future development of Apple II-related projects. But by 1982, as it became clear that the Apple II wasn’t going away (in fact, it was becoming more popular than ever), Apple scrambled to upgrade its aging Apple II line, which had last been refreshed in 1979 with the Apple II+. The result was the Apple IIe, which packed in several enhancements that regular Apple II users had been enjoying for years thanks to a combination of the Apple II’s plentiful internal expansion slots and a robust third-party hardware community to fill them."
that must mean I'm .... really old now.
The Lisa had a mouse and was pushed by Apple management due to the high price tag. The Apple IIe was much cheaper, had visicalc, supported a certain level of commodity hardware and wasn't pushed by Apple management.
The Apple IIe outsold the Lisa 20 to 1.
If I remember correctly, my Apple ][e included all the board schematics, which made it easy for everyone to make cards/etc. A few years ago I found my AppleSoft basic tutorial, which was pretty neat.
Ah, the good old days. Too bad nothing's beaten Wizardry when it comes to RPGs.
For an amazing read look up the BYTE magaxine review of the Lisa. The article takes you on an amazing trip where the writer is trying to describe for the first time so many things we dont even think about.
IIRC he describes the 'pointing device' (mouse) as "about the size of a pack of cigarettes that moves a point on the screen - The screen then uses small pictures of common tasks to represent your actual desk top.
Watching them describe 'the desktop metaphor' when they dont know what it is a crazy reminder of just how fast this all happened...
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The Lisa was ahead of its time, and many people don't know that. I grew up with a Lisa (later upgraded to Macintosh XL). For YEARS, my dad would complain how the Lisa could do more than the Macintosh operating system. Even the difference in desktop paradigms (where the Lisa was a document centric system, and the Mac is an application centric system). However, my dad's investment in the Lisas and their quick demise led him to curse Apple and Steve Jobs for a long time. We've still got 1 or 2 systems sitting in an attic somewhere. And I recall a few years ago having come across the whole set of system manuals for the original Lisa (with Twiggy drives).
The Macintosh was such a superior machine in nearly every aspect that the unsold Lisas had to be hauled off to the landfill.
I don't know about the Mac being superior. I had the chance to use both, the Lisa had many advantages over the original Mac.
The problem with Lisa was the $10K price tag. That just put it out of reach of many Apple II developers so a market never really materialized, unlike the Mac which was affordable by such developers.
Prior to the first native Pascal, and later C compilers, friends and I were actually using 68000 coprocessors for Apple IIs to write Mac software in assembly. A Microsoft Basic program running on the Mac would read the binary from the serial port, poke it into RAM and jump to it. I am not saying this was cost effective compared to buying a Lisa for Mac development, but we had time and no money. One of my friends actually completed a strategy game port from PC to Mac in this manner. I'm not sure but I think it was one of the SSI games. Its not as crazy as it sounds. Core non-UI code could be debugged to a degree on the Apple II's 68000 coprocessor.
The Apple ][+ was the very first computer I ever really programmed on to any significant degree, which I used at school, and I had a //e at home myself in 1984.
To date, it remains the only computer that I ever worked with which I felt I understood thoroughly. I had a reference book "What's Where in the Apple" which documented all of the Apple's i/o memory location/blocks, zero-page addresses, and practically every ROM procedure entry point, which I ended up practically memorizing.
I have many fond memories of writing for that platform, and I doubt I'll ever forget it.
Heck, I still remember some of the hex opcodes for 6502 instructions: EA was NOP, 4C was JMP, 20 was JSR.... and 60 was RTS.
I remember I was sad when Woz decided to leave Apple, because I knew, even then, that meant that Apple was probably not going to take the Apple // line any further.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I know the feeling. The //e is what I cut my teeth programming on ^_^
That was my second love, after the II+. Still miss the programming when it was direct and simple.
I am so glad that I learned assembly language on a 6502. If I had started on an x86 I probably would have had a bad attitude towards assembly like most who did start on x86. To be fair, x86 became a whole lot better once it went 32-bit. However 68000 remains my favorite. Learned it via coprocessor boards in our Apple //e systems. PowerPC was OK, it had its moments.
Here is what they got wrong. It was not a stand alone device. It really required a bigger more powerful machine to work well. That is why I move to the much less powerful, useful, rugged Palm V. At the end of the day, a partner was more useful than a competitor.
Apple has gotten that right now. Data can be viewed across a range of devices. Entered anywhere viewed anywhere. Which is the critical difference between the iPhone and Newton. Data Compatibility between the software. Google is also doing a very good job at this using Google Drive. MS still seems to be focused on making sure they receive a license payment for each individual box.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Don't forget about MacWorks. The floppy disk that let your Lisa emulate a Macintosh. Slowly due to 5 MHz vs 8 MHz processor. And with weird display due to 1.5 to 1 rectangular pixels instead of nice square pixels.
Anybody remember having to use a Lisa to develop for the Mac? Cross compile. Put it on floppy disk. Then test it on a Mac. And every step was painfully slow. Compilers. Linkers. Inserting a floppy disk. Copying the file. Ejecting the disk.
Inserting the disk into the Mac had a much shorter delay before you could launch your program. (Assuming the Mac was booted and you had a 2nd floppy drive. Or you used a Corvus drive connected by Omninet.)
My how things have improved.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Anyone a Mockingboard fan?
I cut my teeth too on BASIC and 6502 assembly back then when I was 11 years old in junior high school.
The mockingboard had excellent info w/ assembly examples etc. for working with the sound chips.
Used to use the 6522 interrupts on the mockingboard to do different things not always related to sound!
Huge ultima fan especially with mockingboard.
Music Construction Set -- landmark interface from child prodigy Will Harvey
Anyone wire up their non-maskable interrupt to jump into the monitor to aid cracking games? remember those days? The Pirate bay.
Also wrote BBS software w/ dialup modem and floppies to store BBS message base / user base / e-mail prior to internet e-mail.
Many hours in front of the apple hacking away.
Such nostalgia...
Hard Hat Mack, Cannonball blitz, getting ready to fire up an emulator!
I, too, started with assembly on 6502 (well, the Commodore 64 had a 6510 to be precise). Then 68000 on the Amiga. Good times. After that I mostly developed on ARM2 and ARM3. That was the most beautiful instruction set I've ever seen. All effects on conditions codes are optional, which makes for some very efficient code. Bloody fast, too. For that time anyway, I've not kept up with current trends.
But, for sheer fun, nothing beats the 6809 CPU. You can feel it's halfway between the 6502 and 68000. Underrated, really. I really should build a single-board computer with that delight again. Nothing against Arduino and such things, but there is something different about those older designs.
Funny how PC prices still hover in the same general price range.
In 1983, for about $2,000, I got this (I was 13):
Apple //e, 64KB
Green Monochrome Apple Monitor
Apricorn 80-column card (for displaying 80-columns, duh)
Imagewriter Printer (9-pin dot matrix, noisy as heck)
Two 5-1/4" disk drives (and disk drive controller card)
PFS Write (Word Processor)
Snooper Troops (game)
Cheap Particleboard Desk
1-year subscription to NIBBLE magazine
Best Christmas gift ever. Of course, this was my ONLY Christmas gift for some time, as it depleted a huge chunk of my parents' savings, so after this Christmas gifts consisted of one or two pieces of $50 software (like Wizardry, or Bard's Tale).
This setup lasted me until late 1988 when I saved up enough summer job cash to build a 386 clone.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
As I mentioned in another post, I very much appreciate my parents for getting an Apple IIe (with the 80 column text card) but it took me long after to consider how expensive that piece of hardware was for them just in 80s US$ let alone what it could cost today!! My fond memories of coding my own stuff (like a school presentation with ASCII graphics) and playing "Agent USA" and "Ultima 4" and "Ultima 5" and other games but it never really sunk in until these anniversaries came around just how expensive the hardware and software really was.
So while I salute my parents and Apple for providing me with a neat little computer to play and do some BASIC code on, I am really shocked it went anywhere due to the price tag.
The Lisa got so many things right. A good GUI, a protected-memory operating system, and a hard drive file system. The problem was price. The price problem was due to trouble at Motorola. The Motorola 68000 didn't do instruction backout properly, so it couldn't handle page faults correctly. That was corrected in the Motorola 68010, but the 68010 was too late for the Lisa. So the Lisa had to use a compiler hack to work around the lack of instruction backout.
Because the 68000 couldn't do instruction backout, Motorola didn't make an MMU chip for it. So the Lisa had a custom MMU built out of a large number of ICs. This pushed the parts count and cost way up.
Because good hard drives weren't available for personal computers when the Lisa was designed, Apple built their own, the LisaFile. Apple's attempt at hard drive manufacturing produced a slow, expensive, unreliable drive.
By the time the Lisa shipped, Sun was shipping the Sun I, and the UNIX workstation era had started. The Lisa was in the same price range as UNIX workstations, but the Sun I had a 68010, Ethernet, and hard drives that were expensive but worked.
If it weren't for the instruction backout problem on the 68000, the history of computing could have been completely different. The Lisa was usable, but overpriced. The original Macintosh was an appallingly weak machine - one or two floppies, a slow CPU, and very little memory. This tends to be forgotten, but the original Mac was a commercial failure. Not until the hardware was built up to 512K and a hard drive was supported did it become profitable. (Or usable.) But it was saddled with an OS designed for 64K of RAM. (The original MacOS had a good GUI, but under the hood, it was a lot like DOS - not only was there no memory protection, there wasn't even a CPU dispatcher. The original Mac was supposed to have only 64K of RAM (most of the OS was in ROM) but shortly before shipment, it was increased to 128K.)
In 1980, when I first saw the Apple II, it's all I ever wanted. My mom would ask what I wanted for christmas and I would always say "An Apple II computer". Of course, it was just too expensive to get a pre-teen at that time (and we were not well-to-do). Instead of getting an Apple computer for my Birthday, one year my Mom got me 2 shares of Apple computer stock. It's not much fun for a kid to play with shares of stock. Luckily, my father bought me a //e later that year. The stock has since split a few times, and is now almost worth as much as the //e cost originally, but I got WAY more value out of the computer than I did out of the stock.