"That was really the day the Lisa died"

May 31, 2023 12:15 AM

From the Verge -- Lisa's Final Act: how Apple invented its future by burying its past. Text introduction - the video, Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial (30 minutes). The beginning fills in the history of the Lisa and Steve Jobs' involvement with it. The part some of you might be interested in begins with Chapter 5: The Lisa Professional.

A summary, for those who don't have the time to watch a half-hour doc with 13 minutes of preamble and aggressive Youtube ads. Bob Cook made a successful business reselling and providing support for Apple IIIs, so Apple offered to give them their remaining stock of the Lisa, the predecessor of the Macintosh, that launched at $10,000 and subsequently failed in the market, especially when it soon faced competition from Apple's own successor, the Macintosh. Bob made a deal where he took them, fixed them up and upgraded them, and sold them through his company Sun Remarketing as the Lisa Professional. They even devised new software for it, made interface cards so they could use upgraded disks.

Then Apple went back on the deal, demanded their computers be taken to the dump (by their deal they were still their property until they were sold), where they were crushed and buried despite being new machines. The story make a very minor splash locally at the time, despite that Sun Remarketing had made national news before with their efforts. The destruction was overseen by intimidating goons. The reason Bob Cook suspects was to get the story of Apple's notable failure out of the press.

Apple responded to The Verge's request for comment with: "We are declining to participate."

Previously, on the Lisa's birthday.

posted by JHarris (20 comments total)

Damn. The environmental waste alone makes me furious.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 2:35 AM on May 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

I worked at a business that bought a Lisa for use as its main office computer, so I got to play with it and compare it head-to-head with the original tombstone Macs when they came out a year later.

The original Mac was obviously a toy Lisa.

The Mac graphics were a little snappier than Lisa's. The Lisa graphics had been implemented in Pascal while the Mac's Quickdraw library was 68000 assembly code from the incredibly talented Bill Atkinson. Somewhat weirdly, the Lisa display also used non-square pixels. But the main reason was that although both machines were based on the same 68000 CPU, the Mac's was clocked faster: 7.8MHz compared to the Lisa's 5.

The main UI difference was that while the Lisa could have multiple applications open at once and let the user switch freely between them like any modern windowing OS, the Mac could run only one. This was a direct consequence of Jobs's insistence on hobbling the design with the minimum viable RAM on cost grounds. The Mac came with only 128K of RAM, only twice that of the already obsolescent 8-bit Apple II, while the Lisa had a whole megabyte which at the time looked pretty much unlimited. This was also the main reason why the machine was so expensive.

Mac OS did have a notion of "desk accessories", tiny mini-apps like the Calculator that could be overlaid on a main app, but because these had to look like device drivers to the OS and therefore run with severe RAM and CPU usage constraints, they couldn't do much. It wasn't until the third-party Switcher application arrived that Mac OS even began to offer as pleasant a user environment as the much more balanced Lisa design.

I think Jobs killed off Lisa because its ongoing existence would have made Mac look like the toy it so clearly was by comparison, and his ego just couldn't afford to let that happen regardless of how bad it was for Apple to turn the entirety of the Lisa development effort and much of its manufacture as well into pure sunk cost.
posted by flabdablet at 2:43 AM on May 31, 2023 [21 favorites]

Somewhat weirdly, the Lisa display also used non-square pixels.

(Dusts off the old knowledge…)

CRT displays (i.e. analog TVs) have (had?) rectangular pixels because each one was made from 2 vertical scan lines, making them twice as tall as they were wide.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:44 AM on May 31, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, nah. Analog TV never had pixels at all, just scan lines. You're trying to fit a square peg into a round flying spot.
posted by flabdablet at 4:10 AM on May 31, 2023 [9 favorites]

On CRT displays (especially monochrome) you can have whatever horizontal resolution you want, so if you want square pixels you can have square pixels. The Lisa's pixels were narrower than they were tall, so they'd have needed to slow down the pixel clock, or monkey with the number of scanlines per frame.

(Accepting that systems of that era were fighting against severe hardware limitations and interdepencies, so that may have been easier said than done)
posted by grahamparks at 4:40 AM on May 31, 2023

The Commodore 64 also had non-square pixels. This was an asset in keeping fixed-width characters 8x8. Also the multicolored mode doubled pixel width, so you'd end up with more square-ish pixels that way.
posted by rikschell at 4:49 AM on May 31, 2023

The Mac came with only 128K of RAM, only twice that of the already obsolescent 8-bit Apple II, while the Lisa had a whole megabyte which at the time looked pretty much unlimited. This was also the main reason why the machine was so expensive.

(Disclaimer: I was 12 when the Lisa came out, and really don't know as much as the below may make me seem.)

The Commodore 64 had 64K of RAM in 1985 for $149, for it's suspected a cost of $50. A megabyte is 16 times that, $2,384, or $800 in cost assuming everything else is equal. That's a pretty big assumption yes, but $10,000 is such a lot that people had to have suspected gouging. The price difference was so huge.

The Lisa and Mac both used black and white monitors so yeah, it depends mostly on the rate at which the graphics hardware can convert RAM values into pixels, and of course how much memory you want to devote to the display. Color monitors would be different, since the color information is horizontally sensitive due to the RGB mask.
posted by JHarris at 5:22 AM on May 31, 2023

> CRT displays (i.e. analog TVs) have (had?) rectangular pixels because each one was made from 2 vertical scan lines, making them twice as tall as they were wide.

God I feel old.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:14 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

for "The Heart of the Apple Lisa".

Tune for "The Heart of the Appaloosa".
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:36 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Apparently Lisa didn't have any third-party applications, just the office suite that came with the machine at purchase.

Also, the Xerox Star had come out two years before the Lisa, and that was the first true ground-breaking personal workstation of the 80s. Both the Lisa and Mac were inspired by that development from the Alto.

Lisa was a horrid system that deserved the death it got. Mac got hacky in places (like using the high 8 bits of the 32-bit pointers for bookkeeping) but its secret sauce was the development of its APIs. That's why I plunked down $6000 for one in 1989 vs. half that for a semi-equivalent Amiga or 386 box.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:39 AM on May 31, 2023

Lisa was a horrid system

We'll have to agree to disagree. At the time I disliked working with it a lot less than I disliked working with its contemporary Macs. Once I'd got used to having multiple applications active and accessible at the same time, it was really hard to give that up and that's why I jumped on the Amiga 1000 as soon as it came out.

Twiggy disks were just weird, though.
posted by flabdablet at 7:05 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Honestly, this seems like a big nothingburger of an "investigation." They try to cast doubt on the idea that it was just a tax writeoff, but that's probably what it was, in the end; Warner Bros Discovery just threw away a $90 million Batgirl movie for the writeoff. The real mistake seems to have been their promising to give away the leftover Lisas to this guy in the first place--that just doesn't seem to be very good business practice. (I mean, yes, I get that it's a big waste of what seems to have been a good computer. I mean, purely from a business perspective.) A few other things:

- $10,000 in 1983 would be $30,000 today. I understand that computers now are vastly less expensive than they used to be, but... jeez. By comparison, the "God Box" option in Ars Technica's DIY guide is specced at $3,794, although if you go on Apple's site, you can spec out a server at over $50K.

- They spend a lot of time talking about Steve Jobs, because there's a sort of anti-cult around him to go with the regular cult, but he was gone by the time that the decision was made to destroy the Lisas; John Sculley is barely mentioned, and absolutely no one from Sculley's Apple is pointed at, even though they were the ones to actually make the decision.

- The bit at the dump was kind of dumb, as if they were going to grab a couple of shovels and start digging. Of course they're not going to try to delve through three decades' worth of garbage for it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:47 AM on May 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

The real mistake seems to have been their promising to give away the leftover Lisas to this guy in the first place

Apple was trying to move its own leftover Lisa stock by modifying and selling Lisas themselves, but they were realizing a loss on every single unit they moved. Offloading the excess stock for free solved a variety of problems for Apple. They didn't have to figure out how to dispose of them (commercial hauling costs money). They didn't have to continue supporting Lisas. And they got Bob to do some of their market building for them, since every new Lisa Professional was still a new Mac that used the same Mac software as their other offerings. Bob got to make a profit because he was doing work that Apple simply couldn't be bothered to do on an obsolete product that many of the Big Heads at apple wanted to see the back of, permanently.
posted by 1adam12 at 10:26 AM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a game console and not a computer, but didn't Mattel hand off the Intellivision to some company that bought up all the remaining stock and continued to sell it for years (like, well into the NES era) via mail order after it was officially discontinued?

The market for technology was way more segmented/stratified back then. I could see it being standard practice to recoup losses on a discontinued product by pouring it into some out of the way niche where it's not likely to be noticed by your primary customers.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:15 PM on May 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Mac came with only 128K of RAM, only twice that of the already obsolescent 8-bit Apple II, while the Lisa had a whole megabyte which at the time looked pretty much unlimited.

Yes but a few months after the 128K Mac came out, Apple brought out the Fat Mac with 512K of RAM. It cost about 10% more than the 128K version but most people thought it was worth it. Of course, I had already invested in the 128K version, thus learning to never buy an Apple product when it is first released, but instead wait a few months until a better version comes out for close to the same price.
posted by TedW at 3:21 PM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

I remember there was a reselling store here (Banks?) back in the late 80’s selling stock Lisa’s for $99. I wanted one for the history but was broke.
posted by misterpatrick at 4:12 PM on May 31, 2023

I had a Fat Mac. I also had to get a special fan to put on top to cool it down from the awesome computing power.

learning to never buy an Apple product when it is first released, but instead wait a few months until a better version comes out for close to the same price

I bought a Macintosh IIvx at the beginning of its slightly-over-a-year availability, when "vx" stood for "very expensive." It quickly became "very extinct."
posted by kirkaracha at 4:46 PM on May 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

I put 1Mb in my Mac 128k, started by pulling the DRAMS and replacing them with 4x larger ones to 512kB then piggy backing another set to get to 1Mb

I also discovered that one could actually buy one's own hard drive (this was a radical concept in 1984, actually owning an actual hard drive) - I think it was ~10Mb for maybe $100 - I had to wire it in to the ROM socket

All that turned a clunker into something useful
posted by mbo at 11:40 PM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

> The Commodore 64 had 64K of RAM in 1985 for $149, for it's suspected a cost of $50. A megabyte is 16 times that, $2,384, or $800 in cost assuming everything else is equal.

Ahh, finally something I actually have personal experience with.

In about 1980, my dad bought us an Apple II+. It came with 16k ram and we had the fun times of hooking it up to the TV for the display and using an old cassette recorder kicking around the house as the storage device.

I immediately bought another 16k of ram. If I recall, the cost was somewhere just over $100 - maybe about $125?

Pretty soon we call got very tired of the cassette player thing, and dad broke down and bought the floppy disk drive. You couldn't load the disk operating system and use high-resolution graphics simultaneously unless you had the full 48k of memory, so I broke down and ordered another 16k. It seems like the price had dropped a bit - maybe just under $100 this time?

Anyway if you assume a price of $100 for 16K memory, then 1024K is $6000. That is roughly what this resource estimates as well. Obviously that is only a rough figure as various factors such as a requirement for especially speedy memory could drive the price up.

So my guess is, that is the kind of price people kind of had stuck in their heads (your average person wasn't quite keyed to the continual exponential dropping in price of computer components at that time) and that is how they could get away with selling the idea that that 1024K of memory was the bulk of the reason behind the $10K cost.

Not many years before, that had indeed been true.

By 1983, though, the actual price of 1024K of memory was more like $2000-$2400. And by the next year it was closer to $1000.

Flip side, don't forget that the 5MB hard drive alone went for something like $1600 in 1983.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the original Lisa had somewhere north of $5000 or $6000 of actual component cost in it. Maybe even more if they were putting 1982 components into their 1983 product - which is likely. Price of 1024K of memory in 1982 was as high as $4400.

(NB. My poor kids have to hear this same story about the price of memory every time I happen to buy any RAM. First 16K of RAM was about $100, pretty soon it was 16M for the same price, then 16 gig. That is an increase of over 1 million X in capacity for the same price. Pretty impressive however you think about it.

I'm still waiting for 1 terrabyte of ram to hit the $100 mark though - then we'll be at a 1 billion X increase.

Right now we're at about 64 gig for $100, so we still have a way to go - and the downward slope in pricing has leveled out quite a bit since 2010.)
posted by flug at 12:48 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

As mentioned above I think I bought a 10Mb drive for just ~$100 in '84 - it was a dodgy surplus space somewhere in the Bay Area and I had to add my own (very dumb) disk controller
posted by mbo at 2:33 AM on June 1, 2023