81–90 of 186 posts
Did 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.
It’s interesting to me how well-reported this seems, or maybe how it seems informed by ensuing decades of literature rather than being reported in the moment. Apple’s mythos, Jobs’s showmanship, and the importance of Xerox PARC and Apple’s deal with Xerox were all established lore very early on. I guess it’s just bias on my part that it seems like things would have been less clear or known at the time.
This makes the new Mac Pro look like a bargain... especially after you adjust for inflation.
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It would have been closer to $200 around the time we got it!
I'm not even sure you can get a working real C64 for $200 now.
This makes the new Mac Pro look like a bargain... especially after you adjust for inflation.
This would have been around 1988-1989, and the Mac had been out for a while; this seemed like a quaint old computer at the time. Since the Lisa wasn't quite Mac compatible, there wasn't really anything you could do with it...the software it had (early variants of stuff like Mac Write and Paint and such, called, I think Lisa Write, etc.) was what you got.
When I unboxed everything I found the receipts from when the original owner bought it all new. He'd spent something like $20,000+ on the whole setup. Computer was $10k, and each of the hard disks was several thousand dollars.
I sold the whole setup for about twice what I paid for it (I seem to recall about $300, but it's been a long time, and it wasn't super memorable...I bought and sold a lot of weird old computers back then), after cleaning it up and testing everything and tinkering with it until I was bored (I was a Commodore kid with a C128D and saving up for my first Amiga...Apple stuff was just a curiosity, not anything I wanted for myself).
Though I wasn't super into it at the time, it's one of the few things I kinda wish I still had all these years later. It has real historical significance that I didn't really appreciate at the time.
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I am really curious about how anyone could afford computers at these prices in the 1980s. I guess my family was really poor then. We had a C64 and later an Amiga.
Most people couldn't. And businesses which could afford them wouldn't. Which is why Lisa bombed. But Lisa's pricing made the Mac more appealing. It wasn't exactly affordable, but you were getting maybe a third of a Lisa - including the new GUI, which was obviously the future [tm] compared to the Apple II - at less than a third of the price. Even at the prices being charged, the Mac and PC were competitive with previo…
Regarding the price, mind that the Lisa came with an integrated office suite (long before the success of MS Office) and was targeted at offices and professionals (think dentists). Which rendered it a somewhat curious "workstation for office work", at least from todays perspective, where eventually office machines became the epitome of cheap, bare-bones boxes.
The MRD mentions as potential users secretaries, managers, and executives (of Furtune 1500 businesses) as well as bookkeepers in general.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Apple_Lisa_MRD_Marketing_Require...
Trying to understand Steve Jobs is an effort in futility I know, but I've never understood what he was thinking around this time. He refused to accept responsibility for his daughter when she was born in 1978, and even 5 years later, he was still questioning the accuracy of DNA paternity tests in Time Magazine and despite being a multi-millionaire, only grudgingly paying $500 a month for child support. But then he go…
It was out of his control, foisted upon him. He didn't want the responsibility at the time, didn't want to focus his time on it. So for an immature 20 something, he took the route of deny deny deny to evade it. Lisa had noted with emphasis previously his pattern for having something less than no patience for things that took his time against his wishes (when he didn't want them to). Combined with his emotional issues…
???
'20 something' is well into adultland.
You want a good job? You want to vote? You want to be treated as an adult?
Then there's no such thing as 'out of his control', really.
For someone who's ostensibly responsible enough to run an entire company, being responsible for one's children is well within reason.
Everyone has challenges in their personal lives, it's 'never a cakewalk' - ok - but there are really no excuses for Jobs here. Point blank.
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Funny, I've felt the same thing about VR. With AR, I can think of a million practical applications. With any kind of VR that is short of full sensory immersion, I can't think of a single practical use.
> With any kind of VR that is short of full sensory immersion, I can't think of a single practical use. If you've ever had to use a hardware "simulator" to train on Big Hardware like a plane or submarine, using VR as a replacement is an "obvious win." Rather than dedicated rooms with all sorts of custom fake hardware that only a few people can use at a time, you can buy one classroom full of VR equipment, and then ev…
This 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.