What an interesting set of replies. Good job SIGCIS! I'll respond to many of these points, but group them into a single message to avoid spamming you. (People who like clean inboxes: remember there is a digest mode available!). First off, this whole question would probably amount to one or two paragraphs in the project I'm working on. Like many aspects of personal computer history, it seems like there ought to be a rich secondary literature to draw on by now, but instead we're still reliant on classic journalistic accounts like Mortiz, Cringely, and Levy. Paul is right: of course I meant Macintosh II, not Apple II. Even the most contrarian historian would have to admit that the Apple II was good for Apple, at least initially. Jobs as industrial designer/emulator of Land. Interest points. As Mahoney liked to say, including his article on the importance of historical metaphor to the rhetoric of software engineering, nothing is unprecedented. But the actor's choice of precedent has very important implications for their actions. Industrial design is important here, and perhaps he'd rather have a box that captures his ideas and doesn't sell than a clunky one that does sell. OTOH, he was a patron and abuser of industrial designers rather than a designer in his own right. Some of the responses remind me that there were many other 68000 based machines in the mid-1980s, beyond the Mac and Lisa. Early Sun and Apollo workstations created a viable niche for graphics workstations. They, IIRC, had similar specs to the Lisa and were if anything more expensive - but targeted technical computing niches. This also points out the importance of expectations and business models. Lisa is called a failure because it only sold 100,000 units in two years, as Apple was expected to sell large volumes for mainstream business use. If a workstation startup had sold 100,000 units it would have been seen as hugely successful. For example, in 3Q 1985 Apollo, then the leading workstation firm, had revenues of about $55 million. That would be about 5,500 Lisas at the $10K launch price. So I suspect that in 1983, $10K is what it a powerful 32-bit networked graphics workstation had to sell for, and the problem was that Apple (and Xerox with the Star) were targeting the markets that couldn't yet support that price tag. Also, in the case of Apple at least, it didn't have the culture or sales machine to effectively target the market it chose. Some companies made comparable hardware more cheaply - most notably Atari in the "power without the price" days of the Atari ST (launched 1985, as Mac-like hardware was getting cheaper to build). This was cheaper than the Mac, added color graphics, and even had the hard drive port that the Mac was missing. It didn't sell at all well in the US, except to musicians who liked the midi ports, but was fairly popular in Britain, particularly with enthusiasts. I had one, and as Morten pointed out Apple was just too expensive for personal users in Europe. In Germany it was widely used by small businesses. The biggest problem was probably the cheap and dirty operating system - a Mac knockoff called GEM with a version of CPM underneath. This points to the importance and difficulty of OS development. The workstations tended to use UNIX-derived systems, which reduced the burden of development. In terms of hardware, the Lisa was as I understand basically a Mac with a bigger screen, networking, and a hard drive. It's the focus of the OS on personal interaction that makes them more profoundly different. Also, as Hansen mentions, the success of Apple in gaining third party application support, including PageMaker, which Cringely used to define the concept of a "killer app" (i.e. something you'd buy a Mac Plus, a hard drive, and a LaserWriter just to run). Although that particular combo must have cost as much as a Lisa, and surely a successful Lisa would have been at least as well placed to win adoption for desktop publishing. It is, however, an example of an application that couldn't run effectively on a DOS PC. Another 68000 machine, the Amiga, found success in video production. That leads us to the importance, as Kimon suggested, of taking the "fan" side of Apple seriously, in as much as something in the design and personality of the Mac did inspire a loyal following. That's borne out by Justin's memory of the students loving the underpowered little Macs. So maybe Jobs deserves credit for that - hard to separate out the perversity and the brilliance of the original Mac. In the big picture it's clear that all these 68000 based GUI machines of the mid-1980s were looking for viable niches, in part because straight forward spreadsheet and word-processing still ran faster and more cheaply on IBM compatibles. The GUI added a lot of overhead. So maybe it's inevitable that the mainstream standard of the 1980s would be something like the PC. OTOH, people in the industry at the time expected GUIs and multitasking OSes to become mainstream sooner or later. If Apple could have successfully established the Lisa as a high end business platform and moved it down-market later that would probably have given it a better shot at taking on the dominance of the PC in the late 1980s than its actual course of establishing the Mac as with enthusiasts and education markets and trying to move it upwards into the business mainstream. Best wishes, Tom