I barely remember Lisa. She got knocked out by the Mac.
Very cool retro commercial.
Looks like they hadn’t finalized the mouse design yet. Looks so different.
I don’t recognize the software. It’s a flowcharting package? Pretty advanced for 1983.
Friend in college was a beta tester for Apple and had a Lisa our freshman year (1985). I’d used an Apple II for years and found the new Lisa GUI fantastic. We had Macs in our computer labs (we brought disks with the operating system and programs) but the Lisa was fun too.
Cool commercial.
Apple was pretty far ahead with their GUI and mouse in 1983.
Most people were still keying in commands in CP/M or maybe a very early version of DOS.
I remember PIP fondly.
Unless you’d been using a Xerox Alto for several years by then like I was. 10 years behind is hardly “far ahead”.
You do know that they stole a lot of their GUI from Xerox, don’t you?
My sister worked at Xerox as an engineer during that time. They had GUI interface, advanced interoffice email and networks, many other advanced technologies and zero interest in pursuing it. They did have lots lifted from them but they also had no clue what they were sitting on
Xerox is mentioned in several documentaries about early computing.
Xerox potentially missed out on a lot of money. Steve Jobs invested a lot of R&D and advertising into creating a market for Apple computing.
I never understood the appeal back then. I was a mainframe user. Liked entering commands. CP/M and DOS mirrored how I worked and thought. It took a long time for me to accept Windows. I’ve never owned a Mac or any Apple product. I’m sure they make great products.
What’s also kind of odd to me is that the dog seems to be a pit bull, unless I’m going blind.
That isn’t true in the slightest.
Yeah, pit-bull-type dog. But it’s not odd. The American Pit Bull Terrier was a favorite in American popular culture and advertising, used in movies, posters, newspaper ads, and TV for many years until the modern wave of pit bull prejudice began. That’s usually considered to have started with the 1987 Sports Illustrated cover story:
http://crypticphilosopher.com/2012/07/where-pit-bull-prejudice-began/
…and this commercial is from 1983, hence pre-prejudice.
I only know about the Lisa from the Aaron Sorkin / Danny Boyle 2015 film Steve Jobs.
That movie put a question in my mind that I considered starting a Thread about but I never got around to it. Since some of the discussion in this Thread has already followed some tangents about this period in computer history, I’ll try to put my question into this Thread to see if anyone can explain it to me.
In the movie, when launching the Macintosh Jobs is frequently met with the objection “It doesn’t do anything!”
Based on popular expectations in 1984 about what a personal computer would do, what exactly did the accusation “It doesn’t do anything!” mean?
To add onto what zbuzz said: They licensed the GUI fair and square. Xerox famously invited them in, showed them around, and especially showed them their work on GUIs, and then Apple paid Xerox for the use of the concepts with pre-IPO stock. I am by no means a Steve Jobs fan, but it wasn’t his fault that Xerox didn’t have the slightest idea of how to monetize the work the PARC was doing and allowed other companies to bring the GUI to the public.
Apple also extended the GUI concept, with drag-and-drop and icons, for example. I, personally, think the Macintosh concept was the wrong path, and am generally opposed to the One Apple Way implicitly promoted by the extreme rigidity and lack of configurability of Apple products, but they weren’t just Alto clones and they weren’t stolen in any reasonable sense of the word.
You’d have to ask Sorkin, since he made it up. My guess is that, if he were honest, the answer would be “Who cares what it means? It plays well.”
That movie is a fictionalized account of the story of Apple and Steve Jobs. The basic outline is accurate (that Jobs was a jerk; he worked at Apple, was kicked out, and returned; he oversaw the design of various computers along the way; he had a daughter he didn’t pay much attention to), but the words are Sorkin’s and were never spoken by the people behind the characters in the movie.
The point is that Apple squeezed into a desktop what until that point was into a minicomputer, at a fraction of the cost. Still cripplingly expensive for most home users and many businesses, but it pointed the way.
Many computer users of the time probably thought similar to aceplace57, that GUIs were a luxury that, while making some functions convenient, lost the flexibility and dynamism of a text-based interface. Apple invested a lot of sweat into breaking that mindset, and making computers a much friendlier concept, and more of a home appliance than an intimidating machine.
Hence, the Macintosh, which was the successor of the Lisa. It may not have been too successful at first - technology (in the form of expensive RAM) made it still inaccessible to many home users, but it set a standard and Apple’s reputation.
Of course there were several other computers appearing at the time with GUIs - the Amiga, the ST and so on - but Workbench and TOS were pretty threadbare, basic interfaces at best. System/MacOS excelled in the comprehensiveness of the things it could do, and the documentation was thorough and the software environment well-supported. Rating by technology only tells a fraction of the story.
well, it was true enough that Xerox eventually sued Apple.
It wasn’t true enough for them to win though.
I know. I have a pit bull (and I"m sorry, I don’t want to hijack this into that discussion. We have a long enough thread in the pit for that), but it was really surprisingly jarring for me to see one in just a ho-hum man & his dog in the office type of commercial. It’s interesting for me to see how much perspectives have changed.
It’s also true in that Apple did not “invent” the WIMP GUI in any sense.
There’s a famous book about the starting up of Xerox subtitled The Billions Nobody Wanted. It details how Chester Carlson went to all the big business machine companies offering to sell his patents and was turned down. He found a small company in Rochester, NY that wanted them and billions ensued.
The tale of later Xerox vs. Xerox PARC deserves a similar book. Xerox tried to get into the computer business and bought an IBM 360 clone maker SDS. That went belly up and Xerox got computer shy.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the country, the people at their research lab were doing great things. When it came time to market their products: GUI workstations, Ethernet, Network file and print services, Xerox HQ said no. That was computers and they didn’t do computers. (They later changed their mind but they were too late.)
Idiots.
Apple heard about their GUI and stuff and asked Xerox HQ (not Xerox PARC) for a tour of PARC. HQ ordered PARC to give the Apple people a tour over PARC’s strong objects. HQ basically didn’t know what PARC had done.
Apple copied what they saw. They did not have permission to copy it. They did not license to copy it. Xerox considered it theft and sued. (You don’t sue people if you licensed it to them. Is that clear?) Apple got a tech naive judge and won.
In 1984 I was the writer for a small Silicon Valley startup. The Compugraphic company was offering a package with a LISA and a laser printer, for $24,000 (that’s around $56,000 in today’s money—for a single computer and a single printer). We passed on that opportunity, and early the next year, when the Apple LaserWriter appeared, as well as PageMaker and a third-party hard drive, we were able to buy some Macs and get into the WYSIWYG publishing world at 1/5 the unit cost.
Apple paid Xerox for the idea and then created their own substantially different version of it. Nothing was stolen.
You can sue anyone for anything. You’re trying to make it sound as if bringing a case against someone is evidence in itself that the suit has merit.
eta- Apple didn’t “pay” for the idea, as has been noted about the stock purchase, but I trust you get my meaning
The Lisa definitely had multiple problems.
The Xerox Altos were made in small numbers (and in two versions: I and II). But even then the cost per machine was surprsingly reasonable. IIRC, the PARC people said that they could be made in bulk for about $6k each. That would have been a really low price. Except when Xerox got into selling actual workstations it was ~$50k buy-in to start plus $16k per additional workstation. (Once stuff gets targeted for business, prices go up for odd reasons.) Not exactly priced to sell.
(And the “Star” was pretty crappy. The much older Alto was just … cooler. Despite the removable disk platters, etc.)
Do note that these were intended for medium-large sized offices. A medium sized office only needs one laser printer, etc. Definitely not for home users.
I’ve often read that if Xerox had marketed the Alto right away there would be no Apple computer company today. I’m not so sure, especially regarding timing, myself.