Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a cigarette pack? /s
It's a drug, shipped in a pack roughly the size of a desktop mouse :P
It's kind of like marijuana, except it will soon be illegal.
Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
101–110 of 186 posts
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#102I really, really, really wanted one of these when they first came out and my stepdad laughed in my face when I asked to borrow that much money for a computer "for college" when we had a perfectly functional Apple IIe at home.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#103This makes the new Mac Pro look like a bargain... especially after you adjust for inflation.
My dad paid $6k+ for a IIci in 89. I had no idea at 9 years old and really no appreciation for what kind of money that was. In 2000 I bought a Power Mac G4 for around $2k. Being young with lots of disposable income, I didn't appreciate then either what kind of money that was. It's only recently that I've started to understand what a computer costs as I've bought computers while paying living expenses.
In about the same year, my dad brought home a Macintosh SE for the family. I was very young and remember only a few things: it ran the game Dark Castle in b&w from a hard drive, and my father had pulled the entire system out of a dumpster at work(!). The machine had been used in some way on a defense or NRO contract, and when the project was cancelled, the entire thing was simply discarded. If I recall, one of the back corners of the case was slightly dented from its unceremonious toss into the dumpster.
As a kid I took it all for granted, but we never would have been able to afford such hardware on my dad's engineering salary at the time. The price for a new one adjusted for inflation today is jaw dropping.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#104Did much of Lisa even survive to become the Mac, or was it just in spirit? Considering you needed a Lisa to develop for the Mac for the first few years, it’s good that they made it.
QuickDraw, the 2D graphics library, is probably the biggest part of the Lisa that lived on in the Mac.
Additionally, the Lisa Desktop Library contains many similarly named routines to the Mac Toolbox. The Lisa Desktop Library was never directly exposed to third-party applications though. (The Lisa Toolkit exposed it indirectly.)
Lisa Desktop Library: https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/applelisa/AppleLi...
As an example, the Lisa Desktop Library has
PROCEDURE HiLiteMenu(menuId: INTEGER);
The Xcode 11 beta that just came out this year still has which includes...
extern void HiliteMenu(MenuID menuID) AVAILABLE_MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_0_AND_LATER;
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#105According to the wikipedia page for the Lisa, Jobs went to the team developing the mac, and changed the focus from a command-line machine to be a cheaper Lisa competitor, releasing the Mac 1 year after the first Lisa. How could Jobs get away with trying to cannibalize the sales from their flagship machine? It seems traitorous if true.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the future is AR, it's a good thing Apple is one of the leading companies in this area.
I would not say even their software AR is leading AR in general (assuming you are referring to ARKit). They have no hardware AR devices, correct me if I'm wrong. What are they leading?
I guess you're confusing AR and VR. VR needs dedicated hardware. AR doesn't. And Apple is one of the leaders in AR because they already ship state-of-the art AR devices in the millions.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#107Watching early Apple presentations and modern presentations shows the company prioritizing sales over innovation. Now we see a phone that is marginally better than the previous year, with taglines like "the best iPhone ever". The future is AR and gestures in my opinion, if keyboard input speed is ever an issue then a glove Swype interface would work. Many smaller companies have already set the stage nicely, such as t…
Gestures are not the future for one simple thing: physical fatigue.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#108According to the wikipedia page for the Lisa, Jobs went to the team developing the mac, and changed the focus from a command-line machine to be a cheaper Lisa competitor, releasing the Mac 1 year after the first Lisa. How could Jobs get away with trying to cannibalize the sales from their flagship machine? It seems traitorous if true.
Haha! They've made several movies and written books about this drama. Whether or not it was traitorous depends on who you view as being a traitor first, Steve Jobs or John Sculley.
I recommend reading Walter Issacson's book on Steve Jobs, or watch the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a good take on it.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#109This makes the new Mac Pro look like a bargain... especially after you adjust for inflation.
coincidentally I just looked these up the other day: Apple Lisa 1983 $9,995 ($25,143 in 2018 dollars) Apple Macintosh 128k 1/24/84 $2,495 ($6,000 in 2018 dollars) Macintosh II 3/2/87 $5,498 ($12,125 in 2018) Next Cube 9/18/90 $10,000 ($19,177 in 2018 dollars)
A Xerox Star makes the Mac look cheap at $16,000 in 1981 dollars, which would be roughly $40,000 in today's money.
Re: Apple Reveals ‘Lisa’, Its $50M Gamble (1983)
#110The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously.
There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on the 68000, a page fault was not handled properly if a register had incrementation set. So the Lisa compiler had to be dumbed down to not use that feature, slowing down execution somewhat.
If Motorola had fixed those problems sooner, the history of personal computing might have been very different. Intel's x86 machines, with their 16 bit address spaces, might have gone nowhere on the desktop.
Hence the cost-reduced Macintosh - no MMU, no memory protection, no CPU dispatcher. Also no hard drive. The original 128K Mac was a flop commercially. Not until memory cost came down and Apple got a hard drive into the product did it sell successfully. The IBM PC had a hard drive earlier, which got them going in business use. The floppy-only Macs were incredibly slow.