Not having seen or used a Lisa, what do people think about the NeXT as influential? It wasn't an Apple product until bought (an acqui-hire of sorts)

I used Sun-2 and later workstations, and it looks like they were comparable with Lisa, with the additional plus of a DisplayPostScript UI base. Where that gets interesting is that both a Unix base and DPS were part of NeXT.

But we are talking consumer versus research computers, different markets.

I managed Suns and Macs for a department, and there were interesting and useful similarities, particularly the SCSI bus and even the keyboards before USB. I really appreciated the Unix bases. Our department chairman said "Students will be using Windows when they graduate, so why macs?" I calmly stated that by the time they graduate, Windows will have stolen features from mac, with a time lag, so they'll be prepared.

Apple's history sure had some interesting twists and turns.