Some responses re Lisa/Mac
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
I'm finding this discussion of counterfactual history fascinating, but I am more intrigued by the discussion of what, exactly, constitutes a "failure" (apologies to Bob Dylan). That topic arose in a recent paper I gave about a failed information retrieval system developed by Calvin Mooers, in which I argued that although he failed commercially, he nevertheless made significant advances in computer science, upon which a lot of modern computing depends. One member of the audience remarked that my discussion of failure/success may not have much explanatory value for historians (I can give more details off-line). More relevant to this discussion is a recent exchange on Quora over the failure of the IBM operating system OS/2 as it went up against Microsoft Windows. The discussion goes well beyond the journalists who wrote about it a decade ago. Here is the link: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-IBMs-OS-2-project-lose-to-Microsoft-given-that.... Best, Paul Ceruzzi ceruzzip@si.edu<mailto:ceruzzip@si.edu> 202-633-2414
A really interesting comparison is between the Lisa and the NeXT Computer (“Cube”), the two machines Jobs worked on just before, and just after, the Mac. Both were overly expensive, overly capable. NeXT Cube started at $6500 but a complete system ended up around $10K after peripherals. Both had problematic removable storage (Lisa’s Twiggy floppy drives, NeXT’s magneto-optical disk). Both had object-oriented frameworks (Lisa ToolKit, AppKit) Both ran 68000-based processors (the NeXT used a 68030) Unlike Lisa, the NeXT was originally targeted at a much smaller niche market, academia/higher education. That was partly so NeXT could leverage the expertise that Dan’l Lewin, who had been started Apple’s effective Mac education sales strategy, could provide. I was also because NeXT had to sign a non-compete agreement with Apple to settle a lawsuit stemming from the fact that Jobs had recruited several Apple employees (including Bud Tribble from the Mac team, and Rich Page from the Lisa team) to help him start NeXT. But it also affected the design of the machine, by building in cutting edge technologies straight out of academic computer science. NeXT’s OS was based on Unix, which was important to the academic market, which was already using Unix workstations from Sun and Apollo. It also used the Mach kernel, developed by Avie Tevanian and others at CMU. And in embracing object-oriented programming throughout the OS, it was buying into one of the hottest trends in computer science in the late 1980s. Eventually NeXT expanded beyond the education market when they signed a deal with BusinessLand, which was, at the time, the nation’s largest reseller of computers directly to businesses. They also started courting institutional and enterprise customers, and by 1992, national security agencies were using NeXTs, as well as Wall Street banks. But the NeXT was sitting in a very liminal place in the computer market. It was sort of a PC, and sort of a Unix workstation, but wasn’t ideally targeted at either market. Despite the non-compete agreement, Jobs wanted the NeXT to be a better Macintosh, with third party applications for end users, and courted developer support from Lotus to make the Improv spreadsheet, as well as desktop publishing and other applications traditionally associated with the Mac. But at roughly $10K an installation the NeXT couldn’t compete against the existing installed base of Macs and IBM PCs. But he was also selling to higher education and was pitching the NeXT as a way for university researchers to quickly write applications that could be used in the classroom or for research using NeXT’s object-oriented Application Kit. So in that sense NeXT was competing directly with Sun. But though NeXT embraced some open technologies, it never really focused on the kinds of scientific and engineering applications that Sun did. It was treating workstation users like PC users. Randall Stross spends a significant amount of his book comparing NeXT and Sun’s strategies. Ultimately NeXT’s hardware business failed, and the company shut down its automated factory in Fremont, ported the NeXTSTEP OS to Intel, and became a software company selling primarily to enterprise and government. Exactly the kind of business Steve Jobs was not interested in. But after their initial failure, they stayed afloat long enough to get acquired by Apple for their technology.
On Apr 26, 2017, at 8:37 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
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.
Regarding NeXT, I owned a Cube, some NeXTstations, and Canon object.stations all running NeXTSTEP — it was my primary desktop environment all during the 1990s. It was the best platform for years — nothing else came close. I did everything on it: email, Web browsing, writing code, pumping out big desktop-published documents with a NeXT laser printer, doing graphics galore, etc. It was a fantastic machine for getting work done. One could argue that Hansen’s conclusion that “they stayed afloat long enough to get acquired by Apple for their technology” is a rather large understatement. NeXTSTEP’s DNA quickly permeated Apple’s Mac operating system to the degree that it essentially *became* the operating system (Mac OS X), which not only looked like NeXTSTEP (even down to the Dock on the desktop) but more importantly under the hood *was* for all intents and purposes NeXTSTEP with an upgraded Objective-C code base. Even today, any seasoned Mac or IOS developer is intimately familiar with a vast library of function calls that start with the letters NS. I have often quipped that in many ways, it was *NeXT* that acquired Apple, not the other way around, and to do so for a mere $400 million, was perhaps the best “acquisition" in history . . . - Brian Brian Dear PLATO History Project Santa Fe, NM brian@platohistory.org <mailto:brian@platohistory.org> p.s. Having used Apple Lisas at work on a daily basis in 1984 (I was at Hazeltine Corporation then), I can attest to the machine’s slowness but also utility. We pumped out many a document, flowchart, and project graph thanks to the Lisas we used. Sure, it cost a fortune, but it did the job well, and I was not aware of anything in the PC world at the time that could have come close to the productivity boost we had with the Lisas.
On Apr 27, 2017, at 11:58 AM, Hansen Hsu <hansnhsu@gmail.com> wrote:
A really interesting comparison is between the Lisa and the NeXT Computer (“Cube”), the two machines Jobs worked on just before, and just after, the Mac.
Both were overly expensive, overly capable. NeXT Cube started at $6500 but a complete system ended up around $10K after peripherals. Both had problematic removable storage (Lisa’s Twiggy floppy drives, NeXT’s magneto-optical disk). Both had object-oriented frameworks (Lisa ToolKit, AppKit) Both ran 68000-based processors (the NeXT used a 68030)
Unlike Lisa, the NeXT was originally targeted at a much smaller niche market, academia/higher education. That was partly so NeXT could leverage the expertise that Dan’l Lewin, who had been started Apple’s effective Mac education sales strategy, could provide. I was also because NeXT had to sign a non-compete agreement with Apple to settle a lawsuit stemming from the fact that Jobs had recruited several Apple employees (including Bud Tribble from the Mac team, and Rich Page from the Lisa team) to help him start NeXT. But it also affected the design of the machine, by building in cutting edge technologies straight out of academic computer science. NeXT’s OS was based on Unix, which was important to the academic market, which was already using Unix workstations from Sun and Apollo. It also used the Mach kernel, developed by Avie Tevanian and others at CMU. And in embracing object-oriented programming throughout the OS, it was buying into one of the hottest trends in computer science in the late 1980s.
Eventually NeXT expanded beyond the education market when they signed a deal with BusinessLand, which was, at the time, the nation’s largest reseller of computers directly to businesses. They also started courting institutional and enterprise customers, and by 1992, national security agencies were using NeXTs, as well as Wall Street banks.
But the NeXT was sitting in a very liminal place in the computer market. It was sort of a PC, and sort of a Unix workstation, but wasn’t ideally targeted at either market. Despite the non-compete agreement, Jobs wanted the NeXT to be a better Macintosh, with third party applications for end users, and courted developer support from Lotus to make the Improv spreadsheet, as well as desktop publishing and other applications traditionally associated with the Mac. But at roughly $10K an installation the NeXT couldn’t compete against the existing installed base of Macs and IBM PCs. But he was also selling to higher education and was pitching the NeXT as a way for university researchers to quickly write applications that could be used in the classroom or for research using NeXT’s object-oriented Application Kit. So in that sense NeXT was competing directly with Sun. But though NeXT embraced some open technologies, it never really focused on the kinds of scientific and engineering applications that Sun did. It was treating workstation users like PC users. Randall Stross spends a significant amount of his book comparing NeXT and Sun’s strategies.
Ultimately NeXT’s hardware business failed, and the company shut down its automated factory in Fremont, ported the NeXTSTEP OS to Intel, and became a software company selling primarily to enterprise and government. Exactly the kind of business Steve Jobs was not interested in. But after their initial failure, they stayed afloat long enough to get acquired by Apple for their technology.
On Apr 26, 2017, at 8:37 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com <mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com>> wrote:
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.
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.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a popular quip among Apple people. Brian, given your personal experience using both Lisas and NeXTs, how would you compare the two?
On Apr 27, 2017, at 12:31 PM, Brian Dear <brian@platohistory.org> wrote:
One could argue that Hansen’s conclusion that “they stayed afloat long enough to get acquired by Apple for their technology” is a rather large understatement. NeXTSTEP’s DNA quickly permeated Apple’s Mac operating system to the degree that it essentially *became* the operating system (Mac OS X), which not only looked like NeXTSTEP (even down to the Dock on the desktop) but more importantly under the hood *was* for all intents and purposes NeXTSTEP with an upgraded Objective-C code base. Even today, any seasoned Mac or IOS developer is intimately familiar with a vast library of function calls that start with the letters NS.
I have often quipped that in many ways, it was *NeXT* that acquired Apple, not the other way around, and to do so for a mere $400 million, was perhaps the best “acquisition" in history . . .
The two machines emerged in very different eras, so it’s hard to compare them as they’re not very similar in any regard other than, in my opinion, uninteresting ones like them sharing Motorola CPUs. I viewed the Lisa as a special machine you used for a specific, but limited, set of applications. If you had to crank out a huge PERT chart, it was great. We used an attached dot-matrix printer, that would sit there and print out long fanfold pages of sections of the chart, that you would then carefully line up on a wall for a floor to ceiling layout of some big project we were working on. It could do word processing and other tasks, but I never considered the machine to be a general-purpose computer, mainly because it lacked a wide array of applications. Also, Lisas were standalone machines at least in our office; we did not network them to anything (not even sure it could do that). But for getting specific tasks done, it was a useful tool, though slow. But then everything was slow in 1984. As for NeXT, it had the benefit of years of Moore’s Law advances beyond the 1978-82 timeframe when the Lisa was designed. And in the 1980s, one year alone of Moore’s Law was a gigantic step forward. The result of all those advances in technological development were instantly obvious: the NeXTcube offered much more speed, storage capacity, and flexibility. Plus, unlike the Lisa, with NeXT, there was an active, enthusiastic third-party developer community (I too was a developer, having attended NeXT DevCamp in ‘91, and exhibited at NeXTWORLD at the Moscone Center in '93, including getting the chance to a beaming, proud Jobs who roamed the exhibit hall and met all the companies before the public was let in). I bought and used many NeXTSTEP apps, including the great Lotus Improv spreadsheet, graphics and other productivity apps from Stone Design and Omni Group (like OmniGraffle which I still use on a Mac), and countless others. The NeXTcube really was a great workstation: I could communicate with anything else on the LAN, as well as remotely connect to other services for telnet or ftp or gopher or web stuff. It had great sound and built-in music support. The quality of the grayscale display was superb. The magneto-optical removable disks were weird but handy and I still have them (and I still need to get data off of them!). - Brian
On Apr 27, 2017, at 2:33 PM, Hansen Hsu <hansnhsu@gmail.com> wrote:
Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a popular quip among Apple people.
Brian, given your personal experience using both Lisas and NeXTs, how would you compare the two?
On Apr 27, 2017, at 12:31 PM, Brian Dear <brian@platohistory.org <mailto:brian@platohistory.org>> wrote:
One could argue that Hansen’s conclusion that “they stayed afloat long enough to get acquired by Apple for their technology” is a rather large understatement. NeXTSTEP’s DNA quickly permeated Apple’s Mac operating system to the degree that it essentially *became* the operating system (Mac OS X), which not only looked like NeXTSTEP (even down to the Dock on the desktop) but more importantly under the hood *was* for all intents and purposes NeXTSTEP with an upgraded Objective-C code base. Even today, any seasoned Mac or IOS developer is intimately familiar with a vast library of function calls that start with the letters NS.
I have often quipped that in many ways, it was *NeXT* that acquired Apple, not the other way around, and to do so for a mere $400 million, was perhaps the best “acquisition" in history . . .
Don't lose sight of the fact that the only mass storage for the Mac was a single floppy drive, so memory overlays could not be swapped out to a hard disk. So "everything was slow in 1984" is not at all accurate. Brian Berg On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 2:43 PM, Brian Dear <brian@platohistory.org> wrote:
The two machines emerged in very different eras, so it’s hard to compare them as they’re not very similar in any regard other than, in my opinion, uninteresting ones like them sharing Motorola CPUs.
I viewed the Lisa as a special machine you used for a specific, but limited, set of applications. If you had to crank out a huge PERT chart, it was great. We used an attached dot-matrix printer, that would sit there and print out long fanfold pages of sections of the chart, that you would then carefully line up on a wall for a floor to ceiling layout of some big project we were working on. It could do word processing and other tasks, but I never considered the machine to be a general-purpose computer, mainly because it lacked a wide array of applications. Also, Lisas were standalone machines at least in our office; we did not network them to anything (not even sure it could do that). But for getting specific tasks done, it was a useful tool, though slow. But then everything was slow in 1984.
As for NeXT, it had the benefit of years of Moore’s Law advances beyond the 1978-82 timeframe when the Lisa was designed. And in the 1980s, one year alone of Moore’s Law was a gigantic step forward. The result of all those advances in technological development were instantly obvious: the NeXTcube offered much more speed, storage capacity, and flexibility. Plus, unlike the Lisa, with NeXT, there was an active, enthusiastic third-party developer community (I too was a developer, having attended NeXT DevCamp in ‘91, and exhibited at NeXTWORLD at the Moscone Center in '93, including getting the chance to a beaming, proud Jobs who roamed the exhibit hall and met all the companies before the public was let in). I bought and used many NeXTSTEP apps, including the great Lotus Improv spreadsheet, graphics and other productivity apps from Stone Design and Omni Group (like OmniGraffle which I still use on a Mac), and countless others. The NeXTcube really was a great workstation: I could communicate with anything else on the LAN, as well as remotely connect to other services for telnet or ftp or gopher or web stuff. It had great sound and built-in music support. The quality of the grayscale display was superb. The magneto-optical removable disks were weird but handy and I still have them (and I still need to get data off of them!).
- Brian
On Apr 27, 2017, at 2:33 PM, Hansen Hsu <hansnhsu@gmail.com> wrote:
Couldn’t have said it better myself. This is a popular quip among Apple people.
Brian, given your personal experience using both Lisas and NeXTs, how would you compare the two?
On Apr 27, 2017, at 12:31 PM, Brian Dear <brian@platohistory.org> wrote:
One could argue that Hansen’s conclusion that “they stayed afloat long enough to get acquired by Apple for their technology” is a rather large understatement. NeXTSTEP’s DNA quickly permeated Apple’s Mac operating system to the degree that it essentially *became* the operating system (Mac OS X), which not only looked like NeXTSTEP (even down to the Dock on the desktop) but more importantly under the hood *was* for all intents and purposes NeXTSTEP with an upgraded Objective-C code base. Even today, any seasoned Mac or IOS developer is intimately familiar with a vast library of function calls that start with the letters NS.
I have often quipped that in many ways, it was *NeXT* that acquired Apple, not the other way around, and to do so for a mere $400 million, was perhaps the best “acquisition" in history . . .
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/ listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
participants (5)
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Brian Berg -
Brian Dear -
Ceruzzi, Paul -
Hansen Hsu -
Thomas Haigh