Dines The Lisa A Case History

TIIB LISA: A CASEHISTORY •PATRICIA DINES HE LISA: A CASE HISTORY by' Patricia Dines. ll.n January;.1983; Steve Jobs and John Sculley declared that Apple "~as betting the future of the company" on their new Lisa. Jn May, 1985, the mother Lisa was put to pasture, as the Mac carried on the flame. What happefied in this two and one~haljyears? And what is to become of those who believed and bought the computer? Settle down, dear reader, lo hear a most interesting tale about the computer called the Lisa. · I -:·:· 1111 :Ill price :?f: ,~,a Applo belttightening . I I ,,,,. (~ ~ 0 January 19$3: The New Baby In January of 1983, after four years of work, Apple released the baby Lisa to the world..At $9,995, this new personal computer paradigm includ~ one megabyte of internal memory, a five megabyte hard diSk drive, two 5-1/4" disk drives; and six core software programs: LisaWrite to write, LisaDraw to illustrate, LisaCalc to calculate, LisaGraph to show those numbers to others, LisaList to store and sort information, and LisaProject to · map the journey. ;All integrated; Moreover, Lisa (an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Archi~ture") was the first personal com,puter to use; a 10 mouse, and its graphic interface, reminiscent of the Xerox Star, was deemed revolutionary in its price range. And it was the first major PC to have within its "command center" a 32-bit microchip (the MC68000), the same chip now used in the Mac. Because this chip could carry twice the load of the then-current 16-bit chip, it could carry the baggage of the now-famous "userfriendly interface." After four years of work (200 person-years) and $50 million of investment, the thoughts at Apple must have included: Would they like it? Would they see its power? Would they•buy enough? Well, two out of three isn't bad. The Lisdl'alk Report• Winter Issue 1985 THE LISA: A CASE HISTORY •PATRICIA DINES (1) Hey, Mikey ~ they liked it! In March, 1983, John Eckhouse commented, "Consumer interest [in the Lisa] remains high, as evidenced by the tremendous crowds that have gathered around Lisa at the few recent trade shows where it has been exhibited." Many a user saw for the first time a computer such as they had only imagined - one they actually felt excited about using. In the six months after the introduction, Apple's stock rose from 33-5/8 to 62-5/8. (2) And - they saw its power. "The arrival of the Lisa has revealed a new dimension in the processing of research data," said Apple User magazine. Said D. R. Goodman of the Bay City Business Journal, "Apple's Lisa featured advanced 'software integration'; but more important, Lisa was innovative in 'demystifying' the technology. Apple promised to make computing ·accessible to ordinary people, no matter how technologically naive - an advance that was expected to revolutionalize the industry." "family" of 32-bit computers, seeming to add stability to the . prospects of the Lisa. Yet even then Mac's name was starting to surface. B…