
The Different Fate of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh - tosh
https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/different-fate-apples-lisa-macintosh-design-matters/
======
Animats
The Lisa cost too much in 1983. It competed with UNIX workstations such as the
Sun II, and was almost as expensive. Sun and Apollo had nice desktop
workstations with a megabyte of RAM, monitors in the 19 inch range, and hard
disks. The Lisa had a dinky screen and an unreliable hard drive. Apple's one
foray into the disk drive business was a dismal flop. Which is why the
Macintosh was so late getting hard drives.

What Sun didn't have was a usable GUI. The BSD crowd never comprehended how to
do a GUI. Sun went through about three in-house windowing systems, including
Sun Windows, before ending up with MIT's X-Windows, which sucked less than
anything Sun could write.

The original Macintosh was a huge failure. Really slow, 128K of RAM, and no
hard disk. IBM was shipping the PC/AT at the time, which had 640K of RAM and a
20MB hard drive. The original Macintosh had one floppy drive. Most users got a
second external floppy drive, but external hard drives were not supported.
Sales were very low. Lots of press coverage, but it was "the world's greatest
toy computer" and "a machine for the intensive study of wait icons" for the
first two years.

It wasn't until 1986, when the first Macintosh models with hard drives and
more RAM came out, that the product line started to sell. With enough engine
to make it go, the Macintosh GUI started to perform usably.

But it was years too late; the IBM PC was the industry standard, and Apple's
desktop market share dropped below 10%.

~~~
dhimes
And now we can muse about why Mac never overtook IBM-style machines. I had a
Mac Plus with Paradise system external scsi hard drive and it was great (1986
IIRC). 1 MB ram, etc.

A couple years later I was talking to a secretary in grad school, and asked
her why she didn't prefer Macs. She said she typed 100 words a minute and
always had to wait for the Mac to catch up- making it unusable.

Back then, secretaries really had control of office equipment. All typing was
done by secretaries- from hand-written copy by the authors.

So, at least part of why Mac may have failed to overtake DOS machines was that
they _only_ had a great GUI, at a time when processors were too slow to redraw
the screen quickly, and they had no "character mode" which would have allowed
the secretaries to use them. Thus, companies wanted DOS (except for graphics-
Macs were used by graphic departments).

~~~
bluedino
Accounting controlled the computers. What accounting software was there for
the Mac?

~~~
kristianp
Filemaker was around back then as well as something called Microsoft File [1]

[1]
[http://lowendmac.com/software/f/filemaker.html](http://lowendmac.com/software/f/filemaker.html)

------
systemBuilder
Wow what a horribly wrong article. I was there (at Xerox OSD) in 1984 when the
Mac was released.

in 1984 you could hire a secretary for one year for $10,000 and give her a
$600 IBM selectric typewriter. The star 8010 computer was 10 years too early,
and way too expensive. Also Xerox had their head up their ass about bitmap
draw programs and refused to release their internal "doodle" program. Apple
made "MacPaint is fun!" the primary selling point of the Macintosh. it was
used in every print advertisement where they showed a floyded picture of a New
Balance shoe being edited (... Not!)

The Macintosh used a software virtual memory system and quickdraw picture
language and file resource forks to cut the ram requirements by a factor of 4.
This made it possible to sell the computer for $2500. At that price point the
computer did something quite new (wyswyg word processing AND printing on
memorywriter) and was priced like an IBM PC.

~~~
eschaton
Don’t forget that the Xerox hardware was slower than even Lisa, being built
atop a microcoded implementation of the Data General Nova instruction set
running at a very slow clock rate. An 8 MHz 68000 was about 1 MIPS.

------
jecel
The Lisa had a very bad start, but by the time it had become the Macintosh XL
it was way more competitive. The fact that you needed one if you wanted to
develop for the Macintosh initially made it sure it couldn't be a complete
failure.

But whenever Jobs is involved, you have to take into account personal motives
as well as business and technical ones. He was still angry about having been
kicked out of the Lisa project due to his age (the board decided that it was
the most important Apple project and needed someone more experienced to run
it). When a company reorganization brought the Lisa (now Macintosh XL) under
his control, he used old sales numbers to stop the purchase of new parts and
then when they ran out "unexpectedly" due to rising sales he simply cancelled
the product, which was now possible as native development on the Macintosh had
arrived.

By the way, I have no idea how the story I just described fits in with a large
number of Lisas being destroyed and buried. I think these were older models.

~~~
reaperducer
_By the way, I have no idea how the story I just described fits in with a
large number of Lisas being destroyed and buried._

If you ever had to use a twiggy drive and those weird-ass floppy disks long-
term, you'd want want your Lisa destroyed and buried, too.

There's pioneering, and there's WTF.

------
meatsock
the article has an image captioned 'A screen shot of the Lisa Office System
3.1 (actual resolution)' but the image is from a Mac. The Lisa didn't have an
apple menu and used a different font.

~~~
mikestew
Pretty sure the Lisa didn't have a "Macintosh Finder", either.

I suppose it _could_ have been the version of MacWorks for the Lisa that
booted a version of Macintosh System 5(?) to run MacWorks XL.

~~~
joezydeco
If you're talking about this image...

[https://www.inexhibit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/Apple-L...](https://www.inexhibit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/Apple-Lisa-OFfice-System-3.1-screen-shot.jpg)

...it's definitely in the Lisa aspect ratio and not the Mac (which was about
3:2). And there's also a window named "MacWorks System Disk", so yeah.

~~~
amyjess
For the record, it credits Nathan Lineback's GUI gallery as the source. Here's
the actual source page:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/lisa3.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/lisa3.html)

> Using the Macworks software, the Lisa can also run Macintosh software.

> This screen shot shows the Lisa emulator running the Macintosh operating
> system using Macworks. Supposedly with a little bit of hardware tweaking a
> real Apple Lisa can run up to MacOS 7.5.5.

> This lets the Lisa run the vast amount of software developed for the earlier
> Macs. Which was a good thing as there was apparently very little software
> developed to run natively on the Lisa OS.

~~~
riccarbi
Hi everyone,

I am the guy who wrote that article. Though you have pretty demolished my
English ;), I want to thank you all. I apologize for my bad English; yet, your
attention, suggestions, and remarks really will help me writing better
articles, as well as to improve those I have written in the past.

About the grammar / spelling errors. Yes, English is not my first language; I
am Italian and, though I'm always trying to make my best to avoid errors and
typos, I am aware that something wrong will always come out in my texts.
Sometimes it is just a typo (such as weather / whether) which is rather easy
to amend.

Sometimes what's wrong there are short pieces of texts, phrases, or even
entire paragraphs that I wrote thinking in Italian and writing in English,
thus clearly revealing that English is not my first language. These are much
harder for me to catch, since their grammar is often not totally wrong,
strictly speaking; yet, they sound odd or even absurd to a native English
speaker.

About technical / historical inaccuracies: I am not an IT engineer, I am an
architect, and a professor of product design and computer aided design; I am
more a tech enthusiast than an IT professional, though I am also an amateur
programmer and someone who likes to build his own computers since the 1980s.
Therefore, I focus my articles more on product design than on technology; even
if I always try to collect as many technical details as I can from reliably
sources, I can, and often do, make mistakes. Again, your remarks are highly
valuable to me, because they help me correct those inaccurate / wrong
information I am giving to my readers, though I made them bona fide.

As amyjess correctly pointed out, the screenshot of the Lisa is from the
Nathan Lineback's GUI emulator website, I know it's not the best example to
show; unfortunately, I haven't able to find a single screenshot of a real Lisa
with an acceptable image quality so far. A friend of mine who has been Apple's
product manager for both the Lisa and the Macintosh still has a functioning
Lisa; I'll ask him to let me take a photo of the GUI on the real machine to
replace the one I used.

I didn't included the iMac intentionally; by and large, the article is
essentially a comparison between the Lisa and the Mac, and I deem the iMac
design too different from theirs to be part of that comparison. Yet, I am
currently writing an article exclusively focused on the iMac.

The circumstances in which Jobs left the Lisa team. Aside from my horrible
grammar error :(, I agree with you, daotoad. That point needs to detailed a
little more. Therefore, I rewrote the whole paragraph and added a reference.

I sincerely apologize for the mistakes I made in that article, hope it looks a
bit better now. Again, guys, thank you so much for your help.

~~~
smhenderson
Spelling and grammar aside I really enjoyed the article and I appreciate the
effort you put into writing it.

------
daotoad
Who edited this?

Nobody.

"weather this name is an acronym or..." An image labeled "A screen show of the
Lisa..." which has multiple items clearly labeled as coming from a Mac...
"Furthermore, Jobs had leaved the Lisa team..." Odd unattributed quotes from
??? The article asserts that Macintosh product design was key to its success.
Then shows an original Macintosh with a Mac Color Classic 2 (a machine that
hardly had an impact) but completely ignores the original clear iMacs (the
computer which was part of revitalization of Apple and whose design owed much
to the original Mac).

~~~
sp332
It doesn't look like anyone who works at the site has English as a first
language. [https://www.inexhibit.com/about-
us-2/](https://www.inexhibit.com/about-us-2/)

~~~
Klover
The English proofing tools for MS Word, and likely competing platforms, should
be able to catch most of those. Those are the green squiggly lines. Stylistic
choices I am fine with, as long as they're readable. Grammar and spelling
errors should not be so prevalent if you respect your writing and your
audience.

