Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)

https://www.newsweek.com/apple-reveals-lisa-its-50-million-gamble-207032

by rbanffy • 7 years ago

158 179 7 years ago

Watching early Apple presentations and modern presentations shows the company prioritizing sales over innovation. Now we see a phone that is marginally better than the previous year, with taglines like "the best iPhone ever". The future is AR and gestures in my opinion, if keyboard input speed is ever an issue then a glove Swype interface would work. Many smaller companies have already set the stage nicely, such as the currently monocular Vuzix Blade (https://www.vuzix.com/products/blade-smart-glasses).

Edit: Guess HN thinks we're going to be carrying screens in our pockets forever.

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

The idea of having to wear a glove to type is horrid.

As with the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, I fully expect Apple to wait for things like smart glasses to evolve a bit before jumping into the fray with a mass-market application. Being one of the first-to-market has never been their thing.

netsec_burn3• 7 years ago

They are pretty far from first to market. I'd say Google was first to market with Glass, along with several competitors including Vuzix. Apple developed ARKit, which would work nicely with glasses technology. I agree a glove is a little too complex, but an eye tracking Swype would be a useful innovation.

tguedes• 7 years ago

If the future is AR, it's a good thing Apple is one of the leading companies in this area.

netsec_burn3• 7 years ago

I would not say even their software AR is leading AR in general (assuming you are referring to ARKit). They have no hardware AR devices, correct me if I'm wrong. What are they leading?

randomvectors• 7 years ago

While we are definitely going to have more AR, I'm not convinced that it's the future at all. But I guess that's the case with most people and most technologies until they become ubiquitous.

AR still seems like a solution looking for a problem.

dclowd9901• 7 years ago

Funny, I've felt the same thing about VR. With AR, I can think of a million practical applications. With any kind of VR that is short of full sensory immersion, I can't think of a single practical use.

dmitriid2• 7 years ago

Gestures are not the future for one simple thing: physical fatigue.

a1pulley• 7 years ago

My favorite part:

Instead of typing a sequence of commands on the computer keyboard; the user merely points to tiny "icons" or commands on the screen by sliding the "mouse" (a plastic control box the size of a cigarette pack) on the desktop beside the computer. As the mouse rolls, an arrow called a cursor moves across the screen. To erase obsolete information, for example, the user moves the mouse to point first at whatever is to be thrown away, and then at an icon in the shape of a tiny trash can...

rongenre• 7 years ago

What's a cigarette pack? /s

nikodunk• 7 years ago

It's a drug, shipped in a pack roughly the size of a desktop mouse :P

Reedx• 7 years ago

I guess that means people were more used to holding a pack of cigarettes than a pack of cards! Never thought about that before.

m4632• 7 years ago

I remember trying to teach someone to use a mouse, and having to move their arm back down onto the table. See, you can't hold it in mid air, you need to slide it across the mousepad. (and in this case it was specifically required, I believe it was a mouse systems mouse with an LED and a patterned metal mousepad)

BareNakedCoder• 7 years ago

Those doing customer support for consumers have some of the best stories. In the '80s, I heard one story about a bleeding-edge grandmother who was having troubles operating her newly purchased PC. One of her troubles turned out that she had placed the mouse on the floor and was trying to operate it with her foot. Why would she do that?! The mouse looked a bit like the foot control pedal on her Singer sewing machine :o

SilasX• 7 years ago

The mouse has a useful feature, in that it can be used while connected to an external power source.

emptybits• 7 years ago

And just a few years later in 1986, the "Scotty uses a Mac" scene from Star Trek IV: https://youtu.be/LkqiDu1BQXY?t=64

orionblastar• 7 years ago

You can say he tried to use Siri before Siri was developed. Talked into the mouse "Hello computer".

yellowapple• 7 years ago

Fun fact: "transparent aluminum" is a reality, albeit insanely expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride

icedchai2• 7 years ago

This makes the new Mac Pro look like a bargain... especially after you adjust for inflation.

gilbetron• 7 years ago

$25k after inflation. I had no idea it was that expensive!

cr0sh• 7 years ago

It was cheap, compared to the Xerox Star it was "inspired" by...

ttul• 7 years ago

The IBM PC in 1981 cost $4,500 to $8,500 in today's money. The original Mac would cost $6,000 if released today. Computers have become a great deal cheaper in the ensuing decades.

Chazprime• 7 years ago

My parent’s Mac II cost over $6000 at the time we got it. Compared to the IBM PCs at the time, the 640x480 hires display was stunningly gorgeous!

newsoul20192• 7 years ago

I am really curious about how anyone could afford computers at these prices in the 1980s. I guess my family was really poor then. We had a C64 and later an Amiga.

Theodores• 7 years ago

Bargain for whom?

According to the article Lisa was a $50 million gamble.

I just read somewhere about the 2000 engineers Google took on for the Pixel phone from HTC. Keeping the lights on for the buildings they are in is a $50 million gamble, that's without paying them or allowing for inflation. But you get the idea, $50 million was cheap for the product compared to what hardware tech costs to develop today, particularly if it has an operating system to write from the ground up.

Incidentally, the threat from IBM mentioned in the article. Peanuts turned out to be the ill-fated PCjr that had good graphics and a bad price point for the home market. Popcorn turned out to be the first PC based lug-gable computer from IBM.

Shebanator• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that $50M then is about $130M now, adjusted for inflation.

ghaff5• 7 years ago

the threat from IBM mentioned in the article. Peanuts turned out to be the ill-fated PCjr that had good graphics and a bad price point for the home market.

And a really lousy "chiclet" keyboard. I don't remember all the details of the PCjr flop but, as I recall, it was still quite a bit of money for a system that had a whole big bunch of compromises.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

In addition to inflation (which other commenters have already mentioned), don't forget to take into account the relative sizes of 1983 Apple vs today's Google.

m4632• 7 years ago

coincidentally I just looked these up the other day:

Apple Lisa 1983 $9,995 ($25,143 in 2018 dollars)

Apple Macintosh 128k 1/24/84 $2,495 ($6,000 in 2018 dollars)

Macintosh II 3/2/87 $5,498 ($12,125 in 2018)

Next Cube 9/18/90 $10,000 ($19,177 in 2018 dollars)

derefr4• 7 years ago

Now do SGI workstations!

GlenTheMachine2• 7 years ago

I bought a 25 MHz NeXTstation in 1990 for the low, low price of $3,995. $7,500 in 2018 dollars.

In hindsight I should have bought Apple stock. Oh well.

GeekyBear• 7 years ago

A Xerox Star makes the Mac look cheap at $16,000 in 1981 dollars, which would be roughly $40,000 in today's money.

voodootrucker• 7 years ago

I think the difference is between productivity gain. In these early days, you bought a computer or you had to use a calculator and paper. It's the difference between automating a dentist or realtors office or not doing automation.

Now, buying a new computer results in marginal productivity gains because likely it's just replacing another computer and maybe improving things or maybe just adding a touch-bar.

AstralStorm• 7 years ago

You mean adding fresh bugs and anti-usable features.

There are a few things you can do by adding expensive hardware, but they're generally limited to advanced media processing, like video editing and raytracing. Maybe a few medical tricks.

(Gaming does not count, it scales to generally available hardware.)

sircastor2• 7 years ago

My dad paid $6k+ for a IIci in 89. I had no idea at 9 years old and really no appreciation for what kind of money that was. In 2000 I bought a Power Mac G4 for around $2k. Being young with lots of disposable income, I didn't appreciate then either what kind of money that was. It's only recently that I've started to understand what a computer costs as I've bought computers while paying living expenses.

true_religion• 7 years ago

In 2000, you were 30 years old. That's hardly young :)

reneherse• 7 years ago

In about the same year, my dad brought home a Macintosh SE for the family. I was very young and remember only a few things: it ran the game Dark Castle in b&w from a hard drive, and my father had pulled the entire system out of a dumpster at work(!). The machine had been used in some way on a defense or NRO contract, and when the project was cancelled, the entire thing was simply discarded. If I recall, one of the back corners of the case was slightly dented from its unceremonious toss into the dumpster.

As a kid I took it all for granted, but we never would have been able to afford such hardware on my dad's engineering salary at the time. The price for a new one adjusted for inflation today is jaw dropping.

SwellJoe• 7 years ago

My dad and I found one at a garage sale when I was a kid. I bought, repaired, and resold mostly 8 bit machines, but found a big bunch of Apple Lisa stuff for not a lot of money, maybe $150. I didn't really know much about it, but it was interesting and I figured I could get my money back out of it. It had the computer, three external hard disks (2x5MB and 1x10MB), and some software and other accessories.

This would have been around 1988-1989, and the Mac had been out for a while; this seemed like a quaint old computer at the time. Since the Lisa wasn't quite Mac compatible, there wasn't really anything you could do with it...the software it had (early variants of stuff like Mac Write and Paint and such, called, I think Lisa Write, etc.) was what you got.

When I unboxed everything I found the receipts from when the original owner bought it all new. He'd spent something like $20,000+ on the whole setup. Computer was $10k, and each of the hard disks was several thousand dollars.

I sold the whole setup for about twice what I paid for it (I seem to recall about $300, but it's been a long time, and it wasn't super memorable...I bought and sold a lot of weird old computers back then), after cleaning it up and testing everything and tinkering with it until I was bored (I was a Commodore kid with a C128D and saving up for my first Amiga...Apple stuff was just a curiosity, not anything I wanted for myself).

Though I wasn't super into it at the time, it's one of the few things I kinda wish I still had all these years later. It has real historical significance that I didn't really appreciate at the time.

charlesism• 7 years ago

    > Jobs personally heads the MacIntosh development team

MacIntosh :)

ajross• 7 years ago

That (or McIntosh) is the correct spelling for the fruit breed (though not the clan name from which it descends).

I don't know at what point Apple settled on its non-standard spelling for the product, but it might well have been after this article was written.

leejoramo• 7 years ago

Steve Jobs could not get trademark on McIntosh but was able to negotiate for Macintosh

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/flashback-1984-apple-...

msla4• 7 years ago

MacIntosh :)

They'll probably program it in "C", and then in the 1990s move on to JAVA, with some software in PERL.

fiddlerwoaroof2• 7 years ago

I think the Lisa was programmed in Pascal

derefr4• 7 years ago

Was C ever really named "C" with the quotes? Was it supposed to be a reference—were "C-style strings" a key innovation of C over BCPL or something?

pjmlp5• 7 years ago

Apple platforms were mostly developed in Object Pascal and Assembly, until they added support for C and C++, with MPW and Metrowerks compilers.

Then it was mostly in C++.

Apple platforms never were big C fans.

russellbeattie• 7 years ago

Trying to understand Steve Jobs is an effort in futility I know, but I've never understood what he was thinking around this time. He refused to accept responsibility for his daughter when she was born in 1978, and even 5 years later, he was still questioning the accuracy of DNA paternity tests in Time Magazine and despite being a multi-millionaire, only grudgingly paying $500 a month for child support. But then he goes and names this computer after her, yet claims for years it wasn't named for her. Sure, he was pretty young (28) but that's hardly an excuse. Jobs wasn't just a pathological narcissist, he was just plain weird.

pinewurst• 7 years ago

Plus he lied to her about it when she asked him years later. It’s in her fairly recently published memoir.

adventured• 7 years ago

It was out of his control, foisted upon him. He didn't want the responsibility at the time, didn't want to focus his time on it. So for an immature 20 something, he took the route of deny deny deny to evade it. Lisa had noted with emphasis previously his pattern for having something less than no patience for things that took his time against his wishes (when he didn't want them to).

Combined with his emotional issues, rage, temper - it resulted in a manic back & forth. When he wanted to be magnanimous or kind, he could be, and it always had to be strictly on his terms and only if he didn't feel forced into it in any manner (to the far end of that spectrum, like he'd do it only when it was least expected, as an amplification device). If anything attempted to force his hand, or he perceived such, he very aggressively rebelled against it in all cases (you see that pattern over and over again throughout his history with people and business). It had to be on his terms, or there would be no terms at all. When he could reorient the context of Lisa (his daughter) to his terms, as and when he saw fit, then it became acceptable. You can see some of that behavior in action, in Lisa's description of what it was like to live with Steve when she was younger (my way or the highway atmosphere; he had to feel in control). He seemingly struggled to control his emotions for most of his life, which must have been wildly frustrating for someone like him. That lack of personal emotional control might explain a control over-compensation directed at other things in his life, the need to control everything else (and perhaps a behavior where if he felt in control of everything else around him, then he could keep the other things from setting off his emotions, which he couldn't control properly).

That's my read on it anyway.

sonnyblarney2• 7 years ago

"It was out of his control, foisted upon him. He didn't want the responsibility at the time, didn't want to focus his time on it. So for an immature 20 something, he took the route of deny deny deny to evade it."

???

'20 something' is well into adultland.

You want a good job? You want to vote? You want to be treated as an adult?

Then there's no such thing as 'out of his control', really.

For someone who's ostensibly responsible enough to run an entire company, being responsible for one's children is well within reason.

Everyone has challenges in their personal lives, it's 'never a cakewalk' - ok - but there are really no excuses for Jobs here. Point blank.

pm90• 7 years ago

He was doing a lot of drugs and had mental health issues.

taneq2• 7 years ago

Maybe she was named for the same muse that the computer was named for?

bluedino• 7 years ago

Did much of Lisa even survive to become the Mac, or was it just in spirit?

Considering you needed a Lisa to develop for the Mac for the first few years, it’s good that they made it.

outworlder• 7 years ago

Spirit. The Lisa was a MUCH more powerful computer than the first Mac - which is why you needed a Lisa in the first place. The Mac wasn't able to run much of anything developed for the Lisa. Mac software was written in machine language, as I recall the Lisa made more use of higher level languages, so even the tool chain would be problematic.

Check folklore.org for more stories of that time.

Crinus2• 7 years ago

Specifically, Apple Pascal: http://pascal-central.com/images/pascalposter.jpg (i want to recreate this in SVG and print a real poster out of it at some point).

Although AFAIK the original Mac was also programmable with Pascal (in folklore it mentions that the calculator, etc were initially written in Pascal as examples for the API).

mepian• 7 years ago

QuickDraw, the 2D graphics library, is probably the biggest part of the Lisa that lived on in the Mac.

valleyer2• 7 years ago

Additionally, the Lisa Desktop Library contains many similarly named routines to the Mac Toolbox. The Lisa Desktop Library was never directly exposed to third-party applications though. (The Lisa Toolkit exposed it indirectly.)

Lisa Desktop Library: https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/applelisa/AppleLi...

As an example, the Lisa Desktop Library has

PROCEDURE HiLiteMenu(menuId: INTEGER);

The Xcode 11 beta that just came out this year still has <Menus.h> which includes...

extern void HiliteMenu(MenuID menuID) AVAILABLE_MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_0_AND_LATER;

masswerk2• 7 years ago

Additionally to the other features mentioned, originally the file system, but without using any of the auto-repair abilities, the Lisa had. (This was soon to replaced by HFS+.)

webwielder22• 7 years ago

Losing only 5% market share 2 years after early 1980s IBM enters said market seems pretty good to me, actually.

webwielder22• 7 years ago

It’s interesting to me how well-reported this seems, or maybe how it seems informed by ensuing decades of literature rather than being reported in the moment. Apple’s mythos, Jobs’s showmanship, and the importance of Xerox PARC and Apple’s deal with Xerox were all established lore very early on. I guess it’s just bias on my part that it seems like things would have been less clear or known at the time.

macintux• 7 years ago

I think it was a distribution problem. Now we’re accustomed to being able to easily find any public information we want, but 35 years ago you had to work at it.

ma2rten2• 7 years ago

I was surprised seeing Steve Jobs wearing a suit in that picture.

cschmidt• 7 years ago

He had an Armani suit phase for a number of years.

sonnyblarney2• 7 years ago

Here is the release video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7YkTu5geuc

walrus01• 7 years ago

If you convert the retail price of a usable configuration of Lisa into 2019 currency it is pretty nuts.

It debuted at $9995, which is about $26,500 in today's money.

Quequau• 7 years ago

I really, really, really wanted one of these when they first came out and my stepdad laughed in my face when I asked to borrow that much money for a computer "for college" when we had a perfectly functional Apple IIe at home.

kristianp• 7 years ago

According to the wikipedia page for the Lisa, Jobs went to the team developing the mac, and changed the focus from a command-line machine to be a cheaper Lisa competitor, releasing the Mac 1 year after the first Lisa. How could Jobs get away with trying to cannibalize the sales from their flagship machine? It seems traitorous if true.

chasontherobot• 7 years ago

Haha! They've made several movies and written books about this drama. Whether or not it was traitorous depends on who you view as being a traitor first, Steve Jobs or John Sculley.

I recommend reading Walter Issacson's book on Steve Jobs, or watch the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a good take on it.

pickle-wizard2• 7 years ago

folklore.org is another good source. It is a collection of stories written by the team that created the original Mac (Most stuff written by Andy Hertzfeld)

oblio2• 7 years ago

V1 Jobs was known for being a selfish asshole.

V1 Jobs (post 97) was much the same, but with a bit of humility that allowed him to empathize enough to be able to make successful products.

Animats2• 7 years ago

The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously.

There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on the 68000, a page fault was not handled properly if a register had incrementation set. So the Lisa compiler had to be dumbed down to not use that feature, slowing down execution somewhat.

If Motorola had fixed those problems sooner, the history of personal computing might have been very different. Intel's x86 machines, with their 16 bit address spaces, might have gone nowhere on the desktop.

Hence the cost-reduced Macintosh - no MMU, no memory protection, no CPU dispatcher. Also no hard drive. The original 128K Mac was a flop commercially. Not until memory cost came down and Apple got a hard drive into the product did it sell successfully. The IBM PC had a hard drive earlier, which got them going in business use. The floppy-only Macs were incredibly slow.

pjmlp5• 7 years ago

Apple wasn't visible at all in Europe during those days, Atari, Amiga and IBM PC ruled this side of the Atlantic.

Now had Compaq not been so lucky, then the PCs might have indeed gone nowhere.

cntlzw• 7 years ago

I heard Apple was popular in Switzerland.

Angostura2• 7 years ago

Certainly in the UK (special case?), that's not the case . We certainly had Apple ][s at school and 6th form in the UK as the main machines - later replaced by BBC model Bs and back then there were summer camps doing computing for enthusiastic youngsters. Apple was again the computer of choice in the early days, to be replaced later by the ZX Spectrum.

coldtea• 7 years ago

Apple wasn't visible at all in Europe during those days, Atari, Amiga and IBM PC ruled this side of the Atlantic.

If you mean early eighties, yes. If you mean the whole of eighties, I'd say no. I remember lots of businesses with Macs in the late eighties/early nineties, especially for print businesses.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

Has anyone tried retrofitting a Lisa with a real MMU? Seems like it would be a fun project to build "the Lisa that could have been".

simonh2• 7 years ago

You would also need to update the compiler to use the MMU and backout instructions properly, and re-compile all the software to use it. It would also probably require some modifications to the OS and application code as well to get much advantage.

raverbashing2• 7 years ago

Wow, I wonder why Apple kept using their processors, it seemed it was more trouble than it was worth

notacoward2• 7 years ago

Because the 8088/8086/80286 had their own bugs, and 68K was a better architecture than x86. No segmentation, orthogonal registers and instruction sets, etc. This superiority probably peaked around the 68020, which started losing out to the 80386 the next year, and after that Motorola never quite recovered. The Pentium, which I imagine most here think of as a starting point, was really more of an endpoint in a complex battle between Intel, Motorola, NatSemi, and a whole bunch of RISC alternatives.

spamizbad• 7 years ago

The 68000 and 68010 were 32bit CPUs, released in 1979 and 1982 respectively. Intel didn't have a 32bit x86 CPU until 1985 when it released the 386.

At the time though, the 68K was regarded as the best general purpose CPU you could get and was sort of a "default choice" for building any reasonably high performance systems. Unix workstation manufacturers like Sun and SGI originally built their systems on the M68K platforms before their respective RISC architectures developed and matured.

With that said, it's totally reasonable to make the hindsight argument that Apple should have developed the IIgs line further, with its 16-bit 65C816, and then reevaluated the CPU landscape in the mid 1980s, where you had more mature 68K chips, 32bit x86 CPUs, and a plethora of RISC options. In that world, I could very easily see the Macintosh make its debute on a RISC or 386/486 platform.

Speaking of the IIgs: It's rumored that Steve Jobs requested they downclock the CPU (it only ran at 2.8mhz) to prevent it from seeming faster than the Macintosh.

Narishma5• 7 years ago

Small nitpick but the 8086 and 8088 had a 20-bit address space.

Animats2• 7 years ago

Not really. 16 bit addresses with a kludge to get to 20 bits, but not in a straightforward way.

usermac• 7 years ago

I recall Macs being AppleTalked together to move anything anywhere—it was magic.

userbinator2• 7 years ago

Not mentioned in the article, but one of the major contributors to its failure is that the Lisa was a very restricted environment that made it difficult to develop for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa#Third-party_softwar...

Contrast this to the IBM PC where people could easily get started programming in BASIC (included in ROM!) or Asm (MS-DOS DEBUG), for which many magazines of the time had listings. Of course not every user did, but certainly a lot of them started and eventually helped greatly grow the amount of software available.

The PC had a learning curve but the user was in full control, whereas the Lisa didn't have much of one but had many impediments that prevented users from becoming developers. This attitude persists in Apple today.

martyvis• 7 years ago

. To erase obsolete information, for example, the user moves the mouse to point first at whatever is to be thrown away, and then at an icon in the shape of a tiny trash can; at the press of a button on the mouse, the information vanishes

I'm trying to imagine most readers of a 1983 Newsweek magazine would read this and be turned off from computers for life

mindgam3• 7 years ago

Last line: "But win or lose, the age of "friendly" computing has begun."

Feels bittersweet to recall the age of "friendly" computing in these dark days of "antisocial" computing.

Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)

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