Living with an Apple Lisa [video] | Hacker News Reader

Living with an Apple Lisa [video]

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61 pointszdw14 comments

Video doesn't really touch on it, but one of the niceties about the Lisa over the later MacOS is that it had multitasking. Many years before System 7 and the Macintosh got it. And it had memory protection. Something the Macintosh wouldn't get until it replaced its OS entirely with OS X 20 years later.

It was technically superior in so many ways, and it's a bit sad that instead of Apple evolving it and getting its price down, Jobs was allowed to basically kill the project after he was taken off of it and replace it with an inferior clone.

>it's a bit sad that instead of Apple evolving it and getting its price down

A PC ram expansion board with 64k cost $350 in 1983 and upgrading it to 512k probably cost another $1,000. ($1,000 and $3,300 or $4,000+ for 512kB in today's bucks)

A significant portion of the cost of the Lisa (and later Macintosh and Amiga and everything else) was DRAM.

But RAM prices were falling rapidly and three years later when the Macintosh Plus was released with 1MB standard, page 57 of Macworld's January 1986 issue lists a 1 megabyte AST RamStak expansion board for the Mac XL (Lisa) for $829 ($2,400).

Even the Amiga 1000, remembered today as a revolutionary multitasking powerhouse, shipped with 256k standard in late 1985 and the 256k expansion that BARELY (fight me, I was there) enabled multitasking with 512k of RAM in total retailed for $200 ($600) bumping the price up to $1,500 ($4,500).

Cost was probably the most important thing to focus on, to spur adoption. Regressing to 128k though? That was garbage.

Macintosh should have been a stop-gap effort until they could scale production of the hardware LisaOS needed.

Instead of turning the Lisa 2 into a "Macintosh XL", they should have shipped a "macbox" runtime for the LisaOS platform that let it run Mac applications inside the LisaOS runtime.

When they went to 68020 and RAM dropped in price, evolved LisaOS should have been the answer, not System 7.

My view of the history is that Steve wanted to take the Mac simultaneously in two directions: Get the “classic” Mac cheaper and more capable for home users, and build out a “Big Mac” line of workstation/business machines.

Both of these eventually happened despite him getting fired, but the Mac II series was only a workstation in the hardware sense.

IIRC, Steve had negotiated the UNIX license for Apple before he left. Given where NeXT went, I wonder if a Steve-driven “Mac II” would have included the OS rearchitecture that was otherwise delayed a decade by his absence.

I mean A/UX was effectively that, and it's Apple's fault for not properly maturing it into a general purpose product for all Apple customers?

I understand part of the reason was the license cost was so high?

You put your finger on Apple’s big problem in the inter-Steve era: Product.

They had all the pieces, or certainly the smart engineers and designers to build the pieces that were missing, but nobody with a strategic product vision to make the pieces fit.

The most serious indictment of their product thinking or lack thereof: They planned originally to do a total software compatibility break with PowerPC. Power Macs were a success rather than a disaster because a few engineers ran a skunkworks emulation & hardware design effort to build the bridge from 68k.

A classic example of worse is better. The Lisa was better in every way except price, but improving the underpowered Mac over time was a better business strategy than finding economies of scale with the Lisa.

It's true that the latter approach was never actually tried, but looking back on the tech trends it seems clear it would have taken at least 10 years before the Lisa became affordable. (Next is a reasonable proxy for Lisa-level technology.) By that time the market would have forgotten about it. The Mac captured a market from day one.

I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.

Yes this is exactly my point. The Mac was a semi-expedient branching point in an effort to get an idea to market, but that's not really the sum of it. Choices were clearly made for personal and political reasons, and it cost Apple 10 years later when it had no answer for Windows NT or Unix.

And I don't think it was about "worse is better" -- they shipped the org chart, really, forked a new team under Jobs to make a "like Lisa but cheap" but it wasn't just "but cheap", it was 100% incompatible, and sacrificed on basic engineering fundamentals.

It also makes no sense to me. The Lisa hardware was expensive, but I think LisaOS could have been made to run on less expensive hardware by jettisoning features, and then picked up again later. Instead because of personalities and org chart they went and made a completely incompatible other-thing that looked like LisaOS without being it, duplicating effort and creating internal ill will, and short circuiting potential futures.

Anyways, Jobs profited it off it twice. Ego satisfaction with shipping the Mac, and killing off the Lisa -- his grudge/nemesis. And then again when Apple was forced to come to him 10 years later and buy NeXTstep because of what Jobs had done in 84.

Larry Tesler is spinning in his grave somewhere.

Another weirdness was that for the first couple of years of the Mac's existence you had to have a Lisa if you wanted to write code for it. The Mac had so little RAM that it couldn't run a Pascal compiler. For this reason, when I bought a Mac in 1984 I also bought a Lisa with a huge 5MB (!) hard drive.

You bring up a great point though: Whatever happened to LisaOS? Did anybody archive the source anywhere or did it completely vanish?

Just two years ago Apple released it under a very strict non-commercial use "be careful how you look at this" license, to the CHM:

https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/chm-makes-apple-l...

I briefly looked at it, it's a pile of Object Pascal and M68k asssembly. I haven't looked to see if anybody has managed to make it compile in any kind of available-today compiler yet.

https://info.computerhistory.org/apple-lisa-code

https://github.com/azumanga/apple-lisa

The story of some many cool technologies, not only the Lisa.

Here's a head-to-head video demonstration of the Lisa and the Xerox Star 8010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcOvRBQ7pE And a dedicated video on the Star: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE .

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