A CEDIA palate cleanser: The Apple Lisa

by John Biggs on September 4, 2008

This monster has a 10 megabyte hard drive and a precursor to S.M.A.R.T., friends. I wish I had bought one of these back in the day, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be – mostly because it cost $10,000. WTF.

Blake - September 4th, 2008 at 11:38 am GMT+5

I love how the year only goes to 1995. Thats one way to fight Y2K

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Mangopudding - September 4th, 2008 at 11:54 am GMT+5

I would love to mod this!

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gf - September 5th, 2008 at 10:12 pm GMT+5

I purchased one of these back in about 1983 or 84.
They were a tremendous machine – an awesome advance on current machines of the time. The version of Pascal allowed getting back into the operating system innards via special software calls – so it was a high-level programming language with effective low-level hooks. The early Macintoshes were lame by comparison – execute-only machines – all development had to be done on the Lisa and downloaded into the Macs.. Rumour at the time went that the Steve with the Ego did not like the Lisa since he hadn’t developed it, so all the effort went into the Macintosh (despite the rumour that LISA was not an acronym – it was the name of Ego Steve’s only daughter).
One program the presenter missed out was Lisa Project – at the time it was the most useable (and hence to me the best) project management software around. In effect, the Lisa user had the earliest equivalent of the now dominant Microsoft Office & Microsoft Project built in. Apple wasted an enormous lead in computing – Ego Steve’s desire to control everything & allow no-one else to use his operating system meant that Microsoft & IBM had a free hand to innovate, and we can now see the result…

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- John Biggs - September 5th, 2008 at 10:57 pm GMT+5
  
  where is it now, GF? dig it out!
  
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