Apple Lisa

~ the obit ~

the lisa came out the year before i was born and was discontinued before i turned three. it sat in the part of computing history i can read about but cannot personally remember, on the same shelf as the xerox alto and the commodore pet. by the time i was old enough to know what apple was, it was the company that made the mac, and the lisa was a footnote in every retrospective.

apple announced the lisa on january 19 1983 at $9,995, a price that translates to over thirty thousand dollars today. it shipped a gui and a mouse two months before xerox's own star, plus protected memory and cooperative multitasking the rest of the industry would not have for years. those ideas had been quietly running at xerox parc since the late seventies. lisa was the machine that took them and tried to sell them at retail. the problem was the price. fortune 500 companies were the only realistic buyers, and most of them had already committed to ibm's pc.

by the time apple cancelled the line in august 1986, somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 units had shipped. the leftover stock was famously buried in a logan utah landfill in 1989 for a tax write-off on inventory. by then the macintosh had already taken every idea the lisa pioneered and shipped it for a quarter of the price.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the lisa was the machine where apple learned that engineering excellence is not a business plan. it had every feature the later mac was famous for, and several the mac would not have for another decade. protected memory did not return to apple until os x. cooperative multitasking did not arrive on the mac side until system 7. file metadata, document-based design, the menubar at the top of the screen. all lisa.

~ what really happened ~

steve jobs was pushed off the lisa team in 1980 and given the macintosh project as a consolation. he ran the mac as a competing internal project and shipped it cheaper and faster. it was positioned to undercut lisa from the inside. when the mac arrived in 1984 the lisa had eighteen months left. apple rebranded the last revision as the macintosh xl in 1985 at $4,000 and quietly retired the name.

~ the long tail ~

the logan landfill story has outlived the product. apple paid sun remarketing to dispose of 2,700 unsold units and claimed the tax write-off. the trucks went to utah. surviving lisa machines now sell for ten thousand dollars at auction. apple still references the project in its own institutional history but does not ship a single line of lisa os code anywhere. it was the most expensive lesson apple ever paid for and the architecture that taught it how not to build the mac.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »