Remembering Lisa

It was sixteen years ago that Lisa was birthed. She was stunning. The first ever computer with a GUI (or graphical user interface for the older generation,) and two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives with one huge external 5 Meg hard drive. Humming with 1 MB of RAM and the Motorola 68000, blazing at 5 MHz, Lisa was a bargain at $10,000. Or was it?

Lisa set up the stage for Macintosh and even though it is Apple’s most well known bomb, in reality it was an incredible machine. It’s easy to work on motherboard (just slid right out from the back) and ingenious use of the mouse was nothing like that in computing history. Sure, 10k was a lot of money, but it was positioned toward the business community and was never meant to be a home computer. That was the idea of the Macintosh.

I never saw a Lisa in RL, but everything I’ve read about them make me wish I had. It was truly a mark and testimony of how brilliant Apple engineers where. Remember, it was 1983 when it was released and had been in development since 1978! While most call it a failure, I don’t think it was. Even though the Mac and Lisa were developed separately, Lisa knowledge did bleed into the Mac group (some engineers even went to the Mac team.) Yea, Apple ended up burying all the unsold Lisas in a mass grave of landfill (what would that mound be worth now?!) but did it hurt Apple like what happen to Osborne? No. Apple’s doing just fine, thank you, and I will always remember the Lisa for what it was. A truly great computer.

Correction: Whoops, not sixteen years ago, but twenty-three years ago on that release. Silly me, I figured the first number on a Windows Calculator. ;) Thanks RB for enlightening me of my error.

[tags]gui,lisa,bomb,(learn to add)[/tags]