Original subtitles

[silent]

Hello, I'm David Greelish, computer historian

and the producer director of this film.

I have a very personal connection with the Apple Lisa.

And so, I wanted to start this film off

with my story about that connection.

Let's go back to almost 35 years ago.

It's the fall of 1989…

…and I work for an Apple dealer in Gainesville, Florida,

where the University of Florida is located.

I had also worked at a few other computer stores

before, as well as Apple Dealers.

By this time though, my mind was made up that the future

of personal computing was with the Macintosh.

At least that's what I wanted to buy.

The store I worked at was called Mini Concepts, and

after I'd been working there for a while, I asked about buying a Mac

with my employee discount.

My dreams were dashed.

However, as I found out that I had no hope in affording one…

…even with my discount, which was modest,

it would've cost me about $1,600

for the cheapest Mac system at that time, a Mac Plus

with a generic external 20 megabyte hard drive…

…that's equivalent to about $4,000 in today's money.

So it might as well have been 10, $20,000 in 1989 to my 25-year-old self.

Well, one day a customer brought in what sort

of looked like an oddly larger Mac into

the store to be serviced.

I was sitting at a computer across the store from the

entrance, and I saw this guy struggling

to carry the computer through the front door.

When he left, I looked it over at the service counter

and then asked our computer technician about it.

He told me that it wasn't a Mac at all,

but an Apple Lisa, though, sometimes referred to as a Macintosh XL.

I was baffled, intrigued,

and just so surprised to discover this Apple computer

that I had never heard of before.

The more I thought about it over time,

the more fascinated I became.

A few days later, I was flipping through the pages of either a MacUser

or MacWorld magazine at the store, when suddenly I noticed it.

It was a regular ad in the back

that ran from a company called Sun Remarketing.

They were located in Logan, Utah,

and in their ads, they sold reconditioned Apple Lisas.

I decided to call them up, and request a catalog.

For about a month I dreamed of and thought very hard about buying one.

And the catalog I received, they were selling new old stock Lisas that were upgraded to run as Macs.

I could buy what was essentially a Mac Plus work-a-like

for just $1,095 dollars plus shipping.

When I decided to use my one credit card to make that purchase, I felt guilty just a little bit,

but only a little as I had just enough credit to buy one.

So right after the Christmas of 1989, I received my Apple, Lisa, like new.

As it arrived in its original box, with original packing materials,

it became both my first complete computer

containing a display, disk drive, and a hard drive,

plus it was my first Macintosh.

And on that faithful day in, uh, 1986, September of 1986… (SIC: 1989)

…um, the trucks would come in here

and would go up around back the brim of that hill up there.

So I remember the Lisas being buried just on the other side of the brim of that hill.

And I'm not sure how much space this takes here,

how many acres there are,

but if you're gonna dig, it would be on this end of it

and not back in that area.

But they all went there in the same place.

And I came out that day just to see what was going on,

and they were filming it…

…and they were making sure that they paid the truck, the, uh,

tractor drivers to drive over the equipment to make sure

that the equipment... that all of the Lisas were destroyed

or damaged so that nobody would come

and try to salvage a computer.

This is it. I know that it was in that basic area…

…where those trucks went.

On that particular day.

None of these buildings existed…

…and they had an entry point…

…but, it was just a shack at that point.

So these are all new buildings.

[Truck Noise]

[Truck Noise]

Herds are all up there to your right now.

[wind blowing]

[Truck Noise]

I knew about the Lisa before, obviously

before the Mac was out, but

before I was aware of the Mac…

…I had heard of the Lisa when I was in high school as this wondrous thing.

This almost, you know, workstation on a hill

that was gonna have this thing called the graphic user interface,

and was gonna be the latest and greatest.

And it was gonna allow you to do all this graphics, and design and artwork…

…and it was something that you were never allowed to touch

as a mere mortal, especially as a high school kid.

And then they released the Macintosh,

and that was the computer for the rest of us.

And my journey began.

Well, uh, up until the Apple Lisa…

…all we had were command lines on a monochrome screen.

You know, that's, that's what you had.

Whether it was an Apple, whether it was an IBM…

…it was all command lines with all these arcane, uh, words

and commands to make anything happen.

And you know what way, if you're, if you're doing an a,

a document, word processing, you had no way

to easily highlight or italicize or change fonts.

You had to use all these suffixes and prefixes.

And here comes the Lisa with the bitmap screen…

…the little icons.

What you see is what you get. It's just a miracle.

And then if you look at the software, that is really,

really the big inflection point for everything

that is to come afterwards.

So before that, you had Xerox PARC

and you had the Alto and the Star.

Um, but with the Lisa, you actually,

not only do you get windows and a mouse, you also get icons.

You get menus, um, you get a lot of features

that don't show up until much, much later.

Even in, in most recent Mac OSes.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪

♪ (happy music) ♪

This is a Macintosh.

It comes from a little company called Apple.

Apple was started in a small town in Northern California

by two friends, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak.

United by their common interest in technology…

…and dissatisfied with the attempts at

personal computers by others.

They knew they could do better,

and set out to make the world's first good personal computer

in the form of the Apple 1.

The Apple 1 became the Apple II.

The Apple II became the cornerstone of an industry

that would change the world.

In 1984, apple introduced Macintosh…

…and Macintosh thrusted the industry, forward into a new era.

Its style and ease of use, gave computers to the rest of us

and inspired the next revolution in computing.

♪ (instrumental music) ♪

♪ (instrumental music) ♪

♪ (gentle music) ♪

♪ (uplifting music) ♪

♪ (uplifting music) ♪

[silence]

[silence]

♪ (soft music) ♪

Of course, for the, for the Mac 128K, they didn't have

to reinvent the system of icons and the menu..

And the menu bar and all that.

It was part of the Apple, uh, system.

Apple, uh, part of the Apple Lisa system.

So of course, the the Mac was a,

was a derivative of the Lisa.

There's no, there's no way to get around it.

It was absolutely a derivative of the Lisa…

…Uh, (Jef) Raskin, you know, was, was gonna do something. He didn't want a mouse.

He, everything was gonna be with, uh, with keyboard shortcuts.

So obviously, I'm sure Steve Jobs was all

of a sudden coming onto the team

and, uh, saying, "Oh, no, no,

we're doing something completely different."

I'm sure wrinkled quite a few feathers.

Uh, that said, what he did…

…was make something that was as easy to use…

…or maybe even easier than the Lisa…

…but he made it affordable.

The Lisa is significant, uh,

because it, um, it sort of paved the way for the Mac, right?

Um, while many regarded as a failure or sort of a misstep,

it was, it was the Mac that kind of forced it out.

Um, but if it weren't for the Lisa,

there wouldn't have been any Mac, right?

It was the Mac was sort of almost lessons learned

of the Lisa, you know, how can we make Lisa cheaper?

And, uh, to make it cheaper, we have to make it simple, and

therefore we could, you know, do things more efficiently

and really force the team to kind of take the idea of the Lisa,

but implement it in a much more efficient way.

The Lisa was, I guess Apple didn't realize it at the time,

but the Lisa was the prototype for the Macintosh.

Uh, we were trying to build a, an office computer…

…and it was very graphical based, but it cost too much.

So it wasn't really a success, uh, in the marketplace…

…but it laid the foundation that the Mac became.

Mac became sort of the folks, Lisa,

the computer for the rest of us.

♪ (uplifting music) ♪

The Lisa was inspired originally by…

…the Alto at Xerox PARC.

Uh, Steve had wrangled a way to get over to, uh, Xerox,

'cause he was curious to see what they were working on.

And he met Larry Tesler,

who eventually came to work at Apple.

And he was absolutely fascinated by the idea…

…that you could have a user experience that was graphical,

because Steve's vision was that he wanted

to focus on non-technical people…

…and non-technical people needed to be, uh, captured

by the experience of using a computer.

'cause they had no idea why would they even want a computer.

And then he wanted the graphical user interface to be able

to do things that were highly creative, like desktop publishing.

You know, the initial goal was to take advantage of the 16 bit processor.

Um, and, uh, I knew that,

that we were gonna implement…

…some very sophisticated software on that processor.

So I pushed for the 68000, you know,

above the Intel world because of memory management.

Uh, the fellow that was reported to Tom in charge

of the hardware was really pushing for function keys,

you know, some of the things like that.

And, uh, you know, we were trying to figure out, you know,

what the interface would really be for that...

You know, can we could, could we create a new way of,

of people operating on a computer?

VisiCalc made Apple II successful.

I mean, it took us from somewhat a successful company to a,

you know, to a whole new level, right?

Um, but challenging, you know, for us, and,

and Lisa was, we were trying to do something

that never been done before, right?

There were no books, there were no people to talk to.

Uh, and so we were, we were, um, you know,

looking at pretty much everything.

And then we did have the opportunity to go to Xerox

because Xerox wanted to invest in Apple.

And the same words were used,

but was basically, you opened the kimono at Xerox.

Park, and we'll let you invest.

So there's a lot of stuff about that magical moment

where Steve Jobs asked Xerox PARC to sort of open the kimono as it were,

and see all the secrets, and then they stole everything that they had.

Well, that turns out not to be true, if you're a historian…

…uh, it turns out Apple actually paid for that visit and that technology.

And it also turned out that Xerox wasn't really interested in that technology at all.

Uh, and once I did, I was given a demonstration of

something that I had never seen before.

Um, basically there was a CRT, this tube, a bunch

of wires coming out of it, sitting on a plywood sort

of stand, and somebody put their hand on a little

sharp-edged Lucite box that had three buttons on it…

…and had a cord sort of attached back to that device.

And when they moved that little box on the table…

…something moved on the screen.

Uh, and that was the first time I'd seen anything like that.

Um, and, uh, right then it just clicked in my head

that this was a game changer.

This was gonna be the future of computing.

And just that quick little demo convinced me immediately it was a

place I wanted to be and something I wanted to be part of.

Around the time Apple went public…

…um, maybe a few months after that, Bill Atkinson

and I, um, become Apple Fellows.

Where I did the early prototypes and, um, of the 68K and, and, and development tools.

Bill was really kind of my customer…

…in addition to all the others.

But Bill was doing, um, all the graphics…

…and all the screen related stuff, all the pull down menus and things.

So what happened was, Bill and Steve

and I had gone up to Xerox PARC, uh, I wanna say…

…late '79, may maybe Bill can tell you exactly what it was.

And, you know, we saw what they were doing in terms of

screen and menus and wizzywig (WYSIWYG) and all that.

Xerox did a, a ton of research into human computer interaction…

…graphical user interfaces, uh, wizzywig document editing…

…uh, laser printing, networking with a machine called the Alto at Xerox PARC,

starting in their, in their, in their early seventies, 1973.

Um, and the, the Star is the culmination…

…or a culmination of that effort into a, what they…

…the Alto was never a commercial product,

but the Star was the, their first commercial endeavor into creating a, an office…

…uh, the office of the future.

It was envisioned that the Star would be one of many…

…computers in a, in a given office, uh, kind of centered

around laser printing, which is really Xerox's bread and butter.

You'd have a laser printer, a, uh, file server…

…and you would have a number of these, these…

…these Star machines in your office.

They would be networked together.

People could use these machines to collaborate

on documentation, send email to each other, laser print things, um,

and just manage their office in a,

in a mostly paperless way, except of course,

when they were printing on their Xerox laser printer.

The Star.. I mean, you were looking at $16,000 to get into the Star interface…

…minimum in 1981, '82,

because the Star basically ran with a network so

that it was sold with files servers, it was sold

with big workstations that drew a lot of amperage.

So it was a, it was purchased by government and banks, and people like that…

…whereas Lisa was targeted not necessarily at those organizations.

It was targeted at kind of a business, a medium-size

or small business where you wanted a system on your desk for one user.

Bill came back to Apple, started imitating it, right?

Um, Steve got excited about it.

Bill, Bill really got excited, and Bill's, you know, starting

to prototype the menus and things.

And, and I think the thing that, um, really caught fire was…

…you know, think simple things like the pull down menus, right?

You know, and so Bill was working away on that madly.

We just, we just saw some stuff that,

uh, we'd been thinking about.

Um, and in a, in a sense, we saw, you know…

…the future of what we would like Apple to look like…

…and we'd like to bring it down from a $40,000 computer down to a smaller computer.

After the UCSD Pascal system shipped on the Apple II…

…uh, Steve Jobs asked me to go work on this new project called the Lisa.

And, um, I had ported the graphics…

…for the Apple II into the, the UCSD Pascal system.

So I got to work on the graphics for the Lisa…

…and I was, um, the main user interface guy and, and graphics guy for the Lisa.

Well, some of the very early designs were

that it would be more graphically, uh, orientated

and would use a full bitmap display. On the Apple II…

…you could kind of put a character in a location…

…or they did have something called high res graphics

that was kind of a, a bitmap display, but it had its limitations.

And the display on the Lisa would be full bitmap.

And we wanted to be, um, more graphically orientated.

And, um, one of the things that I had to do for

that was figure out how to make that perform it enough

that you could actually do real applications with a full,

full bitmap, where you had to set

and clear lots more pixels to do any job.

Initially, the Lisa hardware was going

to be a bit slice processor custom to Apple…

…and nobody else in the world would have one

that had the same instruction set.

It would be, you know, custom bit slice.

And Rich Page saved the day because he found that Motorola had gotten good, uh,

good silicon on the first turn on the 68000…

…and which was a beautiful processor that had a big, wide address base.

And, uh, he encouraged, he…

…pretty much drove the decision to switch over to the 68000.

It was fast enough that optimized assembly language…

…could do the job fast enough that you didn't have to go

to some fancy bit slice, uh, um, processor to do it.

The Lisa was really the environment where.

Apple could experiment with what Steve saw on the Alto, which was object orientated…

…behavior, where you could have a window

and a panel come up in a dialogue box that would be objects,

they would be attached to tasks in the background.

They would have their own functions.

So the, the complexity of the Lisa OS was a multitasking system,

a true operating system, the Mac,

which was in some sense cobbled together more quickly…

…to run off of a floppy drive, wasn't multitasking,

it wasn't object orientated, it was a single application.

So the Mac, in a sense, is a, is an afterthought on the,

on the full architecture of the Lisa.

I think a lot of people think the Lisa is a failed platform.

It's a computer that came out and it was a big flop, and it meant nothing to history.

And I actually don't think that's true.

I think particularly when you look at the software in the

Lisa, so much of what's there, of course informed the Mac.

But there are also things that I think only now we're really like thinking through.

And, uh, and, and, you know, bringing into to modern software, one of the things I think about

when I think about the Lisa, and its software is the error messages…

…which seems like a maybe silly thing…

…but the Lisa just has these excellently written friendly…

…uh, you know, descriptive error messages.

It's not error code 603, operation failed.

It tells you exactly what's wrong…

…and how to fix it in friendly terms that anybody can understand.

Uh, what I have here is a binder of Polaroids, uh,

that were, that I took, um, from my Lisa prototype.

Um, there were only a few prototypes.

I had one at my home, uh, at the time I lived in Santa Clara.

And I would, uh, work on user interface issues.

I'd take a Polaroid picture and I'd get on my motorcycle

and I'd drive out to Apple and show people there.

And so there was this kind of back, and forth about the user interface.

And, uh, I ended up with a bunch of Polaroids kind

of documenting the piece by piece evolution of the Lisa…

…uh, user interface.

Um, this one shows the first characters on a Lisa display…

…and they are proportional width that is.

So we were used to on the Apple II characters,

all character, you know, "I" character, and a "W" character were the same width…

…and it was kind of lumpy.

But now we could have, because we have a full bitmap

display, um, this is a font that I handmade, and wrote.

So here I worked on, I redid the line drawing, uh, uh, algorithms to be much faster.

Uh, I, I worked out a polygon fill routine so

that we can make things like filled, um, um…

…in this case pie chart things.

I, I did, um, three dimensional graphics things.

So mapping 3D coordinates into a 2D, and drawing shaded things.

So this was the initial Lisa user interface

with black background and the, the, um, soft keys.

We started playing with windows.

This is the very first windows on, uh, Lisa.

This was not a window manager, it's just some one-off code

that I wrote to draw, uh, some overlapping windows.

What does it look like?

We were still using the full width, and the, and the hardware scrolling due to pointers.

But when you start wanting to put things in windows, you can't use that anymore.

So, uh, how to deal with a desktop clutter.

And we thought, well, let's introduce something called a tray.

You know, in a, in a, in a physical desk, you have in boxes

and out boxes and some kind of trays that you organize your work in.

So we invented something called the Tray…

…that you could make a document sort of zip into,

but you could quickly get back to it.

And, uh, that didn't last very long.

It wasn't until January of 1983, I still had not joined Apple, so

Steve and I were meeting almost every weekend

for five months as we were getting to know each other, either in

the East Coast or Silicon Valley.

And in this case, uh, Steve invited me to the Carlyle Hotel…

…to see the first Lisa that I saw, uh,

before the January 19th, 1983 introduction of, of the Lisa.

And I was very impressed, uh, and I got to see it at the same time that Steve was, uh, running a sneak program.

John Couch was, uh, running a sneak program…

…to show corporate, uh, potential buyers.

You know, what the Lisa was.

And everyone was impressed 'cause they'd never seen a computer like this before.

The thing about the Star…

…and the Alto, the Alto being the prototype of the Star that,

you know, eventually was sold... They tried to build, um…

…what became later as a workstation, and workstations didn't exist back then.

But if you look at the Lisa, Lisa's not really a desktop.

It's also a workstation.

It actually has a lot of design philosophy that you'll, you'll see later on.

And things like SGI Indys and Sun workstations, and HP workstations.

So all the RISC stuff that came later on…

…you can see kind of that in the hardware design at Lisa,

where you don't have just one CPU doing one thing…

…but rather you have three, or four CPUs in the machine…

…each one doing a very specific task.

And then you have one central CPU, which was the 68000 at Lisa doing the major thing.

And it's designed to be used by one user, not, um,

a whole bunch of users, even though it has a memory

management unit, uh, which, you know,

things like the original Mac did not have.

Um, what you didn't have with PARC was the whole, uh,

desktop manager thing where you have this, this virtual desktop in front of you

and you have documents that iconize themselves to, to be small…

…and then you can switch between them.

Um, you didn't have the same kind of dialog boxes.

You didn't have, I think at the very beginning

with the Alto, I'm not sure about the Star,

you didn't have overlapping windows, for example.

Um, so there was a ton of technology

that was actually built at Apple by ex-Xerox employees

that used to work on the Star, and, you know, then worked on the Lisa itself.

Yeah, I, I think that there really is sort

of no substitute for usability testing.

Um, you, you know, put your…

…best thoughts into trying to make something easy to use

and as simple as possible by thinking about it yourself.

But until you really get it in front of people

that aren't living with this thing every day, like you are…

…you don't really know if you've hit the mark or not.

And we certainly had a number of surprises.

Um, one story that, uh, I think Bill Atkinson likes

to tell a lot is the, uh, story of the…

…uh, dialogue box.

It would pop up, which is a way of kind of interacting

with the computer where it needs to get more information.

You choose something and it puts up a little window

and it gives you some information.

And typically there's like two buttons there.

One of 'em is "cancel"…

…and the other one is the sort of go ahead

and "do it", um, uh, operation.

That's what it's intended for.

And maybe it was

because of the font that we were using, um, in those days

or whatever, but, uh, a number of people saw that…

…second button, and instead of reading "do it", they saw "dolt"…

…and they said, what is dolt, I have no idea what dolt is.

Um, and so it, so we changed it to, okay.

Uh, and so that was one of the, the things that we learned,

and we had no clue.

For us, it was obvious, do it and do the operation.

Um, and I think, you know, I have

to think about it a little bit more, but I mean, even

to this day when I, um…

…am developing consumer products…

…I am surprised sometimes at, you know, the way that, uh,

people interact with those products.

You know, not, not exactly what we expected when we designed it.

In 1983, I was a member of the Boston Computer Society…

…and I attended this meeting where they demoed the Lisa…

…and it was the first time I had seen windows…

…and proportional fonts and the mouse,

and my mind was totally blown.

And I think everybody in their room had their minds totally blown.

'cause these, these concepts really…

…had just barely emerged from the lab at that point.

And, um, a year later, the Mac came out

and the, the Mac got a lot more coverage by the mainstream press…

…and was much more of a commercial success.

Well, I had bought a, uh, (Apple) lie back in 1983.

And so I went into the computer store to buy,

to get some software, and I looked over on the side

and there was a, this huge Apple computer sitting there.

It was a, it was a Lisa 1.

And I went over and looked at it, and I asked the guy, I said, what is this?

He said, oh, that's the Lisa. He said, you can play with it.

I said, how? He said, use the mouse.

And I said, what's that? And so then I used the mouse,

and I, I made, I clicked and the whole thing shut down.

So I thought I had ruined it. I left.

Oh, I was incredibly impressed.

You know, I came back a couple days later

and we talked about it, and I said, well, what's one of these cost?

And he says, oh, like $9,000.

And well, okay, you know…

…I couldn't give up a year's salary.

So I stayed with my Apple II-e.

Because you asked me, what's the single biggest mistake with Lisa.

Um, they wanted to support multitasking.

Wanna be, you wanna be able to use one app, move

to another one, come back, that takes a lot of memory.

And memory was pretty expensive…

…you know, in the early eighties…

…and that made the Lisa real expensive.

I can remember the first time I saw a Lisa computer…

…and I was 12 at a computer show in…

…Wichita, Kansas, uh,

back when they had computer shows, right?

And it was for, for a kid who had only really had experience

with Apple IIs and go to this computer show, and they're, it's littered with vendors

with all different kinds of computers.

I mean, this is back in the day when, you know,

there were dozens and dozens of different manufacturers that were cranking out examples.

And I can remember, you know, going around

and collecting the brochures for all the, for the Epsons

and the Kaypros and the whatever, and coming to this booth…

…and these people were gathered around looking at this thing.

And I, I walked up to it…

…and that was the first time I'd ever laid eyes,

or even heard about 'cause you know, in those days you didn't have the internet.

You didn't really know what was going on in the computer industry.

But first time I ever seen a Lisa in person…

…being demoed there…

…and, you know, it was, it was jaw dropping.

The, the screen, the things that they were doing.

I'm not even sure I could properly gather it all in,

you know, when you've never been exposed to something like that.

The guy said, "Hey, why don't you give it a try?"

And I was so petrified, I didn't even, I said, "No", no, no, that's okay.

"I'm fine." And I just kinda watched.

Uh, but that was, that was shocking to see that for the first time.

♪ (emotional music) ♪

♪ (emotional music) ♪

Alright, so I'm sitting here in front of, uh, two

of the pieces of equipment in my collection, my Lisa 2…

…and an original 128K Macintosh.

Both of these systems were for sale in 1984.

One looks a little more sophisticated than the other one.

Lisa again, introduced the graphical user interface to computing.

So this was the desktop, having an office metaphor.

You have files, you have folders,

you have a trash can to put things away.

You have a calculator, et cetera.

You had a mouse with a pointer to select things on screen…

…and you had menus, which gave you the choices of

what you could do with the operating system

or the documents you were working with.

The Macintosh now has a similar thing.

You have a smaller screen in this case,

but the same idea, black and white graphic user interface.

Mouse works exactly the same way, menus to choose

what you can do with documents.

There was no hard drive in the first Macintosh.

There was no hard drive in Macintosh's at all

until about four or five years after the product came out.

The Macintosh shipped with one floppy disk.

If you had enough money, you had two floppies,

and you could save your data on one drive without putting it in the other one.

If not, you swapped floppies a lot.

The Lisa, the Lisa I had an external

hard drive that sat on top.

The Lisa 2 has the hard drive inside,

or you can get the drive that sat on top.

So it had a hard drive back in 1983 when most people,

when hard drives were the size of things that

typically went in the cargo sections of airplanes…

…so much easier to save your work, and not have to swap things.

The Lisa is interesting in that it uses a metaphor called a document centric model.

Apple played around with this in the Macintosh in the mid 1990s with something called OpenDoc.

For those of those of you who are real geeks, and remember this thing.

With a document centric model,

you are working on the document as the main item.

And different programs can use it depending on what you need to do.

If you need to use a graphic part of it, you need to use it

a, uh, word processing part of it, et cetera.

The Macintosh has a program centric model.

You run a program and it opens a file,

and you do things on that file, and then you save that file.

You are running a program, and you create files with the program,

with the Lisa, you are working on a document,

and the program works in the background.

Well, it was very important when we introduced the first.

Macintosh that we'd be able to explain, you know,

where did Lisa fit into all of this?

Uh, because the Lisa sales were not well, doing well at all.

And so we incorporated the same three

and a half inch, uh, disk drive

that we had in the first Mac,

which the Sony disk drive into the Lisa.

Uh, we dropped the price significantly on the Lisa.

There was never any expectation

that we would recruit any of the money.

Uh, we knew that, uh, the development cost of the Lisa was

so expensive, uh…

…and even at the, its prior pricing, there was no way

to recoup the, the cost of it, even the development cost.

Uh, so we were essentially subsidizing it, uh, in order

to keep the focus on the Macintosh,

that the, that the Mac was really the future of the company.

But we didn't want to get people distracted by saying, well,

you told us a year ago that the Lisa was the future of the company,

uh, back in 1983 before I came to Apple.

So, uh, we didn't believe that was gonna be a fix long term,

but we said in the near term, uh, it, it at least, you know,

takes the eye off of this, uh, difficult to explain,

you know, why did we say the Lisa was the future

of the company in early 1983, and then in 1984, we say, "Nope,

the Macintosh is the future of the company."

So people would say, "Well, then where does Lisa fit in?"

You know, uh, it's so much more expensive than a Mac

and it, it doesn't do many of the things that the Mac could

at that time.

♪ (heartfelt music) ♪

♪ (heartfelt music) ♪

It was actually introduced as the Macintosh XL.

Uh, it, it was kind of a, a kluge, unfortunately, uh,

because the, the goal was to have a Mac emulator, you know,

in it that would run on the same 68000 processor.

Um, but the Lisa, and the Mac were completely different operating systems.

Uh, most people saw through that.

And the Lisa sales still didn't sell very well.

I think the important thing from my perspective,

looking back on, on the Lisa, is that there were

so many correct technical decisions that were made…

…by the Lisa team.

It was a superb technical team.

And, uh, but it was too early.

Uh, just like Newton was too early.

Uh, the first Macintosh was too early.

You know, Apple was willing to take big risks, and do ambitious things…

…but often way ahead of the curve in terms of what was,

uh, possible with the physics.

Uh, you know, we just weren't at a point

where microprocessors were able to do the heavy lift that they had to be able to do.

So, uh, the Lisa actually had…

…a really good multitasking operating system in it.

You know, uh, Woz has told me many times, you know, uh…

…even in recent years, he said that the Lisa…

…decisions on operating systems were actually much better than,

than the ones that were made on the Mac.

But the decisions on the Mac were made for a different purpose.

Steve wanted to get a price point…

…that could deliver a great user experience…

…and he didn't worry too much in those days whether he had,

you know, the, the right operating system.

In fact, some people argue that there wasn't really an operating system, there were a lot of tricks.

And, you know, some very clever engineers on the, on the Mac roof figured out how

to make it look like a real operating system.

But, uh, it was, it, it was relatively thin in terms of its real capability.

So over time, many of the ideas, uh, that were…

…imagined and executed with the first Lisa, found their way into the Macintosh.

So Lisa did, did have a, a big influence, uh,

over time on the Macintosh.

But, um, both the Mac in its first iteration

and the Lisa in its first iteration were way,

way too early from a physics standpoint.

You know, I actually, I, I have thought about that,

and, you know, I wasn't there.

Um, I, I think Steve Jobs turning his attention from the Lisa to the Mac can't have helped.

Uh, but quite frankly, it was a $10,000 machine in 1983.

Uh, the price dropped a little bit in 1984, but still, we were talking…

…it was not something the average person could, could justify buying.

And, you know, know, it's, it's... uh, especially…

…you know, with Apple being sort of, even at that time…

…a computer that was supposed to be for everyone,

it's a little bit hard to sell enough to actually make something worth it if you're, if you're $10,000.

In 1983…

…As I recall talking to people, I don't think

that Steve Jobs was the one who said, let's call it the Mac XL.

I think that was a marketing strategy.

The (Lisa) 2/5 had been discontinued. It was gone.

The (Lisa) 2/10, it had the internal 10 megabyte hard drive…

…which they called the widget, of course,

which sometimes it ran, and sometimes it didn't run.

And, you know, it would do crazy things.

It wasn't very dependable.

And, uh, then they, when they repackaged it as the,

as the Macintosh XL, all they did was…

…stickers were sent to the dealers,

and they would put a sticker on a Lisa case, the Lisa 2/10

and it says Macintosh XL.

They didn't really, they didn't really market it, uh, very much.

They just said, well, now the Apple Lisa is now the Mac XL.

You have this bigger screen and so on.

And, and then you, then, then it was gone.

They hardly marketed it at all. I was there in those days.

I mean, I was paying attention.

And there, it was in one issue of one of the computer magazines

and a couple months later why, it's gone.

So, you know, it was a four to five year effort to, to, to build this thing.

And you put that much time and energy, you know, heart

and soul, and we really were working just crazy hours.

Yeah. You, you know, when it doesn't become the big…

…you know, commercial success, yeah...

Part of you just sort of like, you know, it just feels…

…you know, pretty bad about it.

Um, then, especially when you think that, you know, if…

…if the thing had, you know, continued to be supported

for a few more years, took advantage of the, you know,

Moore's Law, the, and, you know, the doubling of processing power

and more memory, and then prices coming down

and stuff like that, you know, the, the thing, you know,

potentially could have been a commercial success, right?

But since we had this, you know, parallel activity

with the Macintosh coming, you know, into play,

it made more sense to go with that, even though in a lot

of ways, as I said before, is this big step backwards.

You can only run a single program at a time on the Macintosh.

And then, uh, Sun Remarketing stepped in.

My, my relationship with Apple started, uh…

…when I was in college, I filled out an application

that I saw in a magazine that said, become an Apple Computer dealer.

And, uh, nobody came to see me.

I just filled in the application.

They, they sent me a letter back saying, you're approved.

This was 1978.

And so at the time, my first order was minimum,

minimum order was six, um, Apple IIs, and that was

before the floppy disk drive was created.

Had to hook 'em up to cassette recorder to make 'em work.

And it took me about eight months to sell those six computers because it was so early

that nobody wanted to do anything with it.

But that was the basis of my Apple Computer dealership here in Logan, Utah.

And I ran that until, um, 1984…

…when they came out with the Macintosh.

And in '84, it, uh, was difficult to sustain that

because most of my sales went to Utah State University here locally.

And in 1984, when they came out with the Macintosh,

they set up the bookstore as an authorized dealer.

So all those sales dried up…

…and I thought, now, what am I gonna do?

Well, in, in the meantime, we had been selling

some Apple III utility software that we developed ourselves.

And I also knew that they made a comment that everybody

who had an an Apple III on their desk in Cupertino…

…they wanted, uh, they wanted those, uh, those Apple IIIs…

…gathered, and they wanted to replace 'em all

with Macintosh's because that was the future.

And so I knew they had, you know, 3,000 plus employees in California.

So I contacted 'em, and asked 'em what they wanted to do with all those Apple IIIs.

And they said, um, I don't know. What's your plans?

You know, and they, and, so I put a mail order catalog together,

and I sold a couple of them, and I'd call 'em back

and order some more, and I'd sell those, and I'd call 'em back and order some more.

And finally I called back, and they said, the guy that you're ordering them from is in prison.

He was keeping the money.

And so, um, so.

I needed that business.

That was my only source of income.

And so I, I hopped to a plane to, to California.

And when I got there, um, they introduced me to…

…a really nice guy named Jim Volkmar, who's still my friend today.

And he said, what's your plans?

You know, and he basically just listened to what I had

to say and, and supported it.

And, uh, ended up, uh, giving us about 3,500 Apple IIIs…

…that, on consignment, as we sold them,

then we make a payment to Apple.

And, um, Bill Campbell called up one day, and he says,

you must be doing a real good job because we give your phone number away

every single day, and they never call us back.

And I think he was just trying to butter me up,

because he says, now, I want you to take these Lisas.

And, um, I was a whole lot less familiar

with the Lisa than I was with the Apple III.

I knew that we had a lot of service challenges with the Apple III…

…and I read about how many challenges we were gonna have

with the Lisas and, uh, you know, but it was a consignment deal.

So I didn't see that there was a whole lot of risk in it, and, and, uh, agreed to it.

♪ (instrumental music) ♪

So for the first few months of the Lisa project,

we had some serious, serious challenges.

The, the, uh, Twiggy drives wouldn't function.

The Widget drives were nearly…

…universally broken, you know.

And so here we had these computers

that basically would not function

because they didn't have drives.

And so we, uh, we paid to find out a way

to come up with a SCSI interface so that we could put a SCSI hard drive on it

and eliminate the, uh, the Widget hard drive.

And, uh, they had already come out with the, uh, three, and a half inch floppies.

And so we just pulled any, any Twiggys that we found

and replaced them with the three and a half inch floppies,

and that worked out fairly well.

The aspect ratio, you know, where it wasn't a square pixel,

it was a elongated pixel, um, was, was a fairly simple fix

because we just had to burn ROMs so that we could, uh,

replace that, uh, aspect ratio.

♪ (uplifting music) ♪

Um, Apple came up with the ROM for the aspect ratio…

…but to do it on the Lisas that we had, we burned ROMs…

…and just in a ROM burner and, uh, you know, made

that modification on the Lisas that we sold.

And, uh, you know, that kind of made 'em sell able.

But they had MacWorks as a boot able, um,

environment so that you could use your Lisa, like a Macintosh.

And that's where all my, that's where all of our demands were.

They wanted to use the Lisa, like a Macintosh.

And so we set out on a project to try to figure out how

to improve MacWorks, call it MacWorks Plus, so

that it had the functionality of a Macintosh Plus instead

of, uh, just the 128K Macintosh that was available in the first one.

So that was really quite an effort,

and we, uh, we got that it was successful, it worked…

…and that's when, uh,

the sales really started rolling on, on the Lisas.

You know, the whole idea of selling used

and reconditioned Apple equipment first, the Apple III, and then the, the Lisas.

We, we later, you know, started buying wherever we could buy, and sell 'em as used…

…but it was kind of a difficult business model

because the demand was for new and current models…

…and most people call this up, and they wanted to buy a used new

and current model, which was impossible to come up with.

So, uh, the only thing that we could do was sell what we had.

And, um, you know, I guess that's the, the dilemma of anything that sold used is

that you can't do anything about your demands.

You can only do what you got.

Well, the main strategy was that we knew

that demands were along the lines of current product.

And so we wanted to make our products as current as possible.

We would do all that we could

to upgrade the operating systems…

…and all that we could to upgrade memory

or whatever, whatever else needed to be done, so that they were current.

And the later days of the business, we were buying, uh…

…USB cards so that we could add USB capability to machines

that didn't have them previously.

Well, my whole business was based on the concept of…

…you purchase this equipment, you need to keep it running…

…you know, we'll help you with service parts,

we'll help you keep it running…

…if you wanna buy a lower priced version

of what's in the marketplace currently.

That was kind of the whole thing

that I wanted to accomplish.

And so, yeah, I, I did not like the idea

that Apple was gonna take money from their customers…

…leave them stranded when it broke…

…not give'em any option to fix it.

I didn't like any of that kind of stuff,

and I wanted to build a business that would…

…that would offset that kind of an idea.

The business problem was that we got all

of these Lisas kind of as a surprise, you know,

here they come, and we didn't even have a place to put them.

So we were looking for storage places around the valley

so that we could store them.

And, uh, and then we started finding out that…

…the drives were a serious problem…

…that it only emulated the old version of the Macintosh.

So, you know, we spent quite a few months at the initial…

…settings just figure out how to make these things sell able.

And we were, we were on path to that.

It took us quite a while to do all the development

that was necessary to sell 'em.

And about the time that we got all

that development done is when they recalled 'em

and said, you can't have 'em anymore.

It was, uh, uh, as a business it was extremely difficult

because there was really, you know, the, the crew

that showed up that day looked like football players.

They, they were muscle, they weren't, uh,

corporate executives, you know…

…and their whole purpose in life was just

to gather all these machines up.

Now, when we received the Lisa, we just got boxes

and scraps and, you know, sometimes we'd open them up

and there'd be missing pieces and missing parts.

A whole bunch of keyboards and mice never came.

Power cords were a huge problem

because they didn't get shipped back.

And so we had to go source a whole

bunch of those kinds of things.

And when the, when the muscle came to remove all the Lisas,

they wanted a keyboard, a mouse, a complete system for,

for everyone that they took.

And it left us with hardly anything that was sell able.

I received, I can't remember a telephone call

or a letter saying that, uh, this is our inventory

we plan on taking it back.

And, you know, I, I didn't have much to say about it, just

that I didn't own the equipment.

So, uh, I just had to agree to it.

But I was surprised on that particular day when the,

the crew showed up.

They showed up with, uh, bins, uh, you know, the trash bins

that you roll in from the, from the county landfill.

And they put'em in my loading dock…

…and they had, uh, a requirement to get a certain number

of machines, and they wanted the machines

to be totally complete with keyboards and with mice.

And every one of them have all the memory cards,

and every one of 'em have all the, the drives

and everything associated with them, which was, you know,

I was complaining about that

because I didn't receive these machines…

…complete far from complete.

And yet they were taking every mouse in the house

that they could find and every keyboard

that they could find, which was gonna leave me with, uh…

…you know, basically a box…

…and nothing else that, uh, that was compatible with it.

Where was I gonna get Lisa keyboards?

You know, that was a specialty item.

And so that was extremely difficult.

And then, um, it took them, the, I think it took a couple

of days to get all of them loaded up and,

and moved to the, um, to the landfill.

I went to the landfill…

…and I could see that they were there with their cameras…

…and they were filming the whole thing.

And they, they, they, for,

they paid the landfill people extra money…

…to actually run over them so

that they were damaged in the landfill

before, uh, before they left.

And they had that all on film.

And, uh, because of, you know, paying landfill employees,

one of the landfill employees thought it was newsworthy…

…and called the Herald Journal, the local newspaper…

…and they sent a crew out to film and to take pictures.

And so I think that, uh, without that…

…landfill employee calling and, and,

and telling the local newspaper it might be something

that they, that never got out.

So I was pretty upset that day.

I can remember, uh, sneaking onto the truck

to recapture some mice and memory boards.

Well, somebody said something about recouping tax credits,

but I don't think that that made a lot of sense.

Um, they, maybe they had some imports for some

of the components that they could recoup tax credits for,

but no, I think that this was purely a ploy to get'em off the market

and not to have to compete in the Macintosh world…

…with themselves.

That Steve Jobs was instrumental in this whole thing.

(Okay) And he was, uh, he was, I think it was before he left.

Yeah, he, I know that, uh, I had some other people tell me,

I, I didn't have any direct, um, correspondence with Steve,

but I had other people tell me that he didn't like the idea…

…that they were selling anything used.

He thought that everything used was competing against the new.

They had a, uh, requirement to gather a certain number.

And, uh, I think that the idea was that it would leave us

with a few hundred, but the few hundred

that they left us were so far from complete…

…that it wasn't, it wasn't worthwhile.

I remember about 3,500 that came…

…and I remember about 2,700 that were retrieved.

♪ (soft music) ♪

We became known a little bit as somebody to go

to if you're interested in the collectibles.

And we tried to, you know, bill ourselves that,

because we felt like there was a little bit of market demand that way.

But yeah, I knew that because of the rarity of them that, uh…

…that they would have some collectible value.

And it seems like the first customers that had that kind

of interest came from Japan…

…at the point when we still had some inventory…

…from Japanese customers.

Yeah. There was people that were productive with it. Mm-Hmm.

One of my favorite stories is that, uh…

…when I first got Lisas, um, I was approached

by Stephen R. Covey, the author of Seven Habits

of Highly Successful People.

And he was interested in writing a book,

and he had a, uh, seminar that he was teaching…

…and he said, I'll tell you what, allow you to come

to my seminar for free if you'll give me a Lisa.

And so I gave him the Lisa, I loved the seminars.

We went once a month for a year…

…and he assigned us a book in between each seminar…

…and he himself taught it.

But anyway, the, the Seven Habits

of Highly Successful People was written on a Lisa.

After the Lisa, we set up a,

a deal called the University trade-in program…

…where we partnered with Apple's sales reps…

…and we told universities, you know, clear out your lab…

…we'll buy it all back.

And, um, we'll,

and then the Apple guys will replace it with new product.

And so we were quite successful in getting lots

and lots of, uh, university pre-owned equipment…

…and we ended up selling nearly a hundred million dollars

worth of used equipment over a 25 year period.

And so it was good while it lasted…

…but then at the very end, um, it died

because Steve Jobs basically said, you know,

we're gonna sue you for copying our, our operating systems.

And I said, for 25 years, I've been putting operating systems on everything I've sold.

I don't know what you're talking about.

And he says, well, we're cutting you off as a dealer,

so you can't buy parts from us anymore.

And, you know, it was just one thing after another.

I sold it to Cherokee Data…

…but basically all they got was my mailing list.

And then they, they stopped doing it after a few years too.

So...

And, uh, then I guess the, the last big deal was, uh…

…I contacted, uh, Sun Remarketing when they were starting to get out of the business…

…and I asked them if they would consider selling…

…what all they had left as, as one lot.

And so, uh, they agreed.

And so we came to a price and then they shipped them.

I had'em ship'em on a tractor trailer…

…several pallets of them.

And, uh, so I, oh, I still have…

…like about 30 Lisas left.

I guess at my height, I must have had 150,

or at least that many. I had so many of them

I had two storage units rented where I had Lisas,

nothing in them, but Lisas and Lisa of parts.

They got into trouble with the Lisa

because of the $10,000 initial price.

I think that sort of killed, uh, popular interest.

It was the military, the government, banks, businesses…

…and universities that bought the Lisas.

Uh, a normal person would not, uh, come out

with $10,000 to get one.

So I think that although there was a rise in its popularity

when it was offered for a thousand dollars…

…it was really too late for it.

And all the enhancements that had been envisioned

for it were canceled, you know, upgraded processors,

upgraded, uh, screen, uh, upgraded memory, upgraded capability.

Mm-Hmm. That was all dropped.

And so it didn't, except for independent engineers…

…engineering companies that, you know, like, uh, like, uh,

James MacPhail up in Canada with Sigma Seven Systems…

…you know, there was the accelerator…

…and then MacWorks Plus II.

Those came out, and they, they sort of kept the Lisa up to date…

…but it wasn't any effort from Apple to do that.

Oh yeah. The Lisa 1 had the Twiggy drives.

You can, uh, and so what makes the Lisa 1

or the Twiggy drives and the Lisa 1 face plate.

Okay. If you take off the Lisa 1 face plate…

…remove the Twiggy drives change three EPROMs…

…and clip one resistor, it's a Lisa 2/5.

Every Lisa 2/5 was starting, started life as a Lisa 1.

Okay. The Lisa 2/5 was called a Lisa 2/5

because A: It wasn't a Lisa 1 anymore.

They called it a 2.

And the 5 was because it came with a five megabyte hard drive external to it called the Profile.

And it had a three and a half inch Sony floppy drive.

The (Lisa) 2/10 was still a Lisa 2,

meaning it wasn't a Lisa 1…

…and it had a internal 10 megabyte hard drive.

Okay. And it didn't have the stupid battery pack on the I/O board.

Alright. And that was it.

It had an internal parallel port where the, uh, the, uh,

the Widget was connected…

…and it didn't have an external parallel port.

The motherboard was different in that it only had, the two,

the, the Macintosh XL…

…and (Lisa) 2, this is (Lisa) 2/10, is the same thing…

…okay. It had an internal parallel port…

…and just two external serial ports.

The Lisa 1, the Lisa 2/5 used the same motherboard…

…and they had an external parallel port

and had two external serial ports.

When they started, uh, Apple started touting the Macintosh,

uh, I mean the Lisa 2/10 as the Macintosh XL…

…they issued and sold to dealers a screen mod kit…

…to allow you to install that.

The dealer, they didn't want a, a a user to install it.

'cause you could electrocute yourself.

The dealer would install that, which would change the aspect ratio of the screen…

…to match the square, uh, Macintosh pixels.

And that at the same time, made it impossible for the users…

…to ever run the Lisa office system again.

And so they didn't have to support anything like that.

Well, I was always really interested in the Lisa,

and then back in the early days of the internet

when there were bulletin boards and…

…and classified ads, uh, I saw some, uh, people…

…advertising, uh, Lisas for sale as, uh, groups.

Like they didn't want 'em anymore or a school.

And so I would contact them…

…you'd call 'em on the phone in those days.

And I would set up, I would say, well, if I come,

if I drive down and get them, what can I have 'em for?

So they would say, well, if you can have 10, we got 10, you can have'em for $500.

And I'd say, okay, I'll drive down.

So I would drive here or there to get it.

And I saw an opportunity.

I thought that, that I could refurbish them.

And with the capability of the Lisa, I could maybe…

…make some money reselling them because I liked the Lisa.

I like to work on 'em. I could repair them.

And, uh, so I ended up, I guess the first time I, I,

there was a guy in Florida

and I bought, uh, 15 Lisas with spare parts.

Sun Re... That was after Sun Remarketing.

I, I was a minute competitor. (Okay) Right.

And, um, so I would, I would get, I got Lisas

through buyouts from, uh, schools and from other collectors.

And then, uh, uh, I guess I had maybe, I don't know…

…30 or 40 Lisas during that time.

And I was refurbishing them and selling them.

And then, um, I, the opportunity came

to get some stock from the old Lisa plant in Carrollton, Texas.

A guy down there in Dallas had bought a bunch of that stock, and had it in storage.

And so I made a deal with him and went down

and got a big rental truck load of them.

I must have brought back 60, or 70, including five Lisa 1 systems…

…and then all kind of spare parts.

So then, then I, I really started working on that.

And I was, I was fixing power supplies and, and,

and I was selling quite a bit of them.

I was initially selling them as computers that could be used in a business.

So, but no, none of my customers seemed interested in that.

They wanted it because they liked the idea of it…

…and the fact that they thought they could never own one…

…and I would refurbish them, you know, I, I would,

I would remove the dreaded screen mod if they didn't want

that, or I could put the screen mod in.

If you have the screen mod installed, you can't run the Lisa Office System anymore.

If you try to run.

MacWorks on a Lisa without screen mod, it would run fine…

…except the images were slightly elongated in the vertical, uh, axis.

But if you, uh, took, if you put the screen mod in,

then Macintosh software looks just like it would on a Mac.

Plus, but you could no longer run the Lisa.

Office System Software…

…it won't work.

The initial ROM in the Lisas was for 400K,

the 400K Sony (floppy) drive…

…Sun Remarketing invented the 800K ROM that would allow you

to run certain, but not all 800K (floppy) drives.

And for that, they, they found one called…

…I guess, what was it called?

The Copal, C-O-P-A-L.

And, uh, it was hard to find.

I don't, they had a bunch of them, but

after that was gone, none, not many of the Apple 800K drives would work.

But we found that you, you can modify an Apple SuperDrive…

…three and a half inch drive…

…and it would work as an 800K drive in a Lisa.

♪ (uplifting music) ♪

My customers, even from the very beginning,

were not interested in having it…

…in having a Lisa as a work computer, they wanted,

as a collectible, they wanted to be able to do

as much as they could with it.

They just liked the idea of having this…

…seminal machine that was really the first, uh, co, uh,

uh, computer for the public that have it,

that had the user interface and integrated software.

In the mid to late nineties…

…I had enough Lisas that I wanted to try to experiment with,

with upgrading to, uh, an accelerator

or a MacWorks Plus II.

And there was an old Dafax, remember the Dafax company, uh…

…they would advertise those,

and I, I learned that it was James MacPhail

of Sigma Seven Systems up in British Columbia, Canada…

…who had done the work on those.

And so James was definitely the genius

behind all that engineering.

So I contacted James

and I, I told him, I said, I'm trying to get this, uh…

…accelerator to work and so on.

And he was concerned that I was just trying to get him to…

…to help me make money.

And I said, oh, no, no.

I said, uh, I'm trying to get it to work for a friend, and I'm just, I'm mystified.

And so he said, well, okay.

So he started helping me with that.

And, and then I, I worked,

I asked him about MathWorks Plus II,

which takes a daughter board, in fact, you know, to, to, to run that.

And it gives it, uh, really enhanced capabilities

of you can run System 7 and so on, on the Lisa.

And then, uh, then we started, uh, uh, talking about how we…

…we needed a, a dependable mass storage device for the Lisa.

All you had was the Profile and a Widget…

…and they were bombing out and wearing out.

And sometimes you'd start 'em up

and it sounded like a B-17 revving up.

And it was, uh, they were just horrible devices.

And so we came, we both came up with the idea together

of having a solid state device.

And so James designed that on his own, the X/ProFile.

He designed it and came up with some prototypes, which I tested here.

And then we realized that, uh, if you wanted

to install it in the old ProFile case…

…that the ProFile power supply was so unstable

and erratic, that the voltages varied all over the place,

that you'd have to have a voltage regulator in order

to install it in the ProFile case.

So he invented a voltage regulator board…

…that you put in, uh, in between the, uh, X/ProFile

and the, the power supply.

So you can use then an external X/ProFile…

…with your Apple III.

♪ (heartfelt music) ♪

♪ (heartfelt music) ♪

♪ (heartfelt music) ♪

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So as I've started collecting more, most collectors begin

to understand that their collection size is really only

limited by the amount of space that they have.

There's a fine line between hoarding and collecting.

I think everyone can, can agree with that, for those of us who are collectors.

Um, I've limited things to Macintosh because that's what I've used as my personal system.

And there's a lot of other people

who collect other types of computers, you don't need to do everything.

However, the Macintosh didn't come out of nowhere.

The Macintosh came out of an effort to develop a, a computer with

what was then a groundbreaking thing called a graphic user interface.

A, you know, desktop office metaphor menus, windows icons, the mouse, all of that.

The Mac was not Apple's first product to do this.

Apple's first product to do this was the Lisa.

The Lisa was the first thing that the general public saw of

what became the general paradigm for computing.

The graphical user interface, having an office metaphor,

having menus available, not having to type commands in on the command line.

It was very groundbreaking…

…a lot of what happened subsequent to

that wouldn't have existed if the Lisa didn't exist.

And then by the time I started using computers, the Lisa was long gone.

It was out of production.

It had been discontinued, you know, some unknown quantity of 'em were buried

in a landfill in Utah, and people were selling them.

They were re-purposed as Macs and things like that.

So I kind of always wanted one just to know

what it was like and to play with it.

I'd had the desire to get one, add one to my collection.

For that reason. Even though I specialize in Macs,

this is really the, this is the first Mac, if you will.

This is the first system of this vintage, of this lineage.

The Lisa operating system is not the Mac operating system.

It doesn't work one-to-one, it takes a little getting used

to, but it's the essence of that design.

And the Lisa had things in 1983 that the Mac didn't get until after the year 2001.

So as a Mac collector, if you really want to know

where the Mac came from, it's impossible not

to include the Lisa in your thinking.

This is the coolest thing I have.

Um, so this is a Lisa one, uh, miniature

that's been 3D printed by Charles Mangen.

And I got into this through Adam Summerfield, who, um…

…basically wanted to have a working, uh, Lisa miniature.

And there's actually a little Raspberry Pi that's in here.

You can see the, uh, connectors for over here.

And you can see a little cable sneaking on the back here.

And so you could have a Raspberry Pi that uses the…

…one of the Widget slots to hold an SD card…

…and, uh, boot up, uh, Raspberry Pi OS,

which runs LisaEm And then you would see it on this little

tiny display, uh, which would've been great if it had a little bit more resolution.

But you know, you can always use the HDMI port instead.

So this is a board I recently picked up.

So this is a Vintage Micro soundboard…

…and it's called Lisa DAC.

And what this does is it allows your Lisa,

to make the same sounds as the original Mac.

And this is something that Vintage.

Micros just recently made.

And this is a brand new remake of the original board.

Um, and I've yet to play with this.

And what I plan to do with this is I want to take one

of my Lisas and turn it into a Mac, uh, WorksPlus…

…platform, and then, uh, turn another one into running…

…maybe just Uniplus and Xenix,

and then the other one to just running, uh, Lisa OS.

So this is, uh, one of the only rarities that I own.

Uh, for Lisa, this is a sub and comets poster.

It came up around the time of the Lisa 1.

It shows this little nice pattern.

Uh, you see the dots that were used in their marketing copy

and their documentation, and then there's one comet

for every one of the apps that they have.

There's a little piece of one with a glowing white screen there and a mouse.

I don't know if too many people opened them up

and, uh, looked at what was on the inside of it.

But it was, uh, it was ex... it was built

to be extremely easy to service.

You know, you could use a thumb latch to open the back.

You could slide the tray out, you could pull any card

that you wanted to, drop any card in that you wanted to.

Um, you know, they don't make computers like that anymore.

If you have a computer that needs service,

you're forced into sending it off.

And so because it was serviceable, it,

it gave us a little bit of a ability to sell.

So this is MACCA…

…Um, as I started accumulating computers, this was an old…

…wasn't even a finished room, kind of a bonus room in the house.

And, uh, eventually the computers just kept stacking up in

big piles all over the place as I got 'em in.

And so at, at some point, I decided, well…

…let me renovate the room, make it a proper space to sort

of display everything and, uh, get rid of the stacks.

So there are, in this room alone, um…

…probably 150 or so, computers stacked floor…

…to ceiling on these shelves.

Uh, at the side sides here, you got your, your iMacs

and your different fruited colors.

And then just a variety throughout the years.

My collection spans almost the entire history of Apple.

I don't have an Apple I, I don't have a Lisa 1,

but I have pretty much every single major model case variation in between.

Walk you down the line here.

There's the, the original Macintosh from 1984.

I've got a couple of those kicking around here,

and then some, some of the early Macs from that era.

You know, the Macintosh II, of course, the,

the very first really expandable Macintosh was slots.

So these are kind of collectible, the, the Macintosh dealer sign.

Um, mine's not in perfect condition.

Got a little chip in the glass there, but these are sent

to dealers when the Macintosh came out just to,

I don't know, you put that in the window to, so Macintosh is here.

Uh, not sure how many of these were made,

but they're, they're pretty collectible these days to find one…

…um, still working,

it's a lit underneath with a little fluorescent bulb,

and of course, just kind of lights up

and shows the colors of the, the Picasso Macintosh logo.

So this corner is sort of a junk pile of all things Apple.

Uh, the desk, of course, the, the Lisa 2,

I don't have a Lisa 1,

but there's, there's my Lisa 2, um, up in here, of course,

a few, few figures of, uh, of the founder, um…

…iPods now, um, pretty much obsolete, um,

but a variety of iPods throughout the years, including the…

1,000 songs in your pocket for a mere $399.

And just a, a bunch of different Compact Macs, and various towers.

And, um, the stained glass here is pretty interesting.

Um, I'm told it hung at Apple headquarters

and somebody, somebody employed their…

…had commissioned an artist, a stained glass artist to make this.

Uh, and so it's just, just beautiful…

…the workmanship into that.

First, if we start on the left hand side of the room…

…what I've got on this table is the desktop

and tower models of the Macs that I own.

Um, any particular favorites?

I would say my particular favorite of these has gotta be the, uh, 6500.

I really love the case design on that one.

It was a great gaming system because it had a built-in subwoofer.

Coming along to the backside of the room, I have, uh,

my Mac Plus signed by Jimmy Doohan, Scotty from Star Trek.

Uh, that was fun getting that.

And, um, Blue and White G3, Color Classic.

These are, this back wall has kind of got my, my favorites.

And there's also a nice representation

of the different processors

and some of the different, uh, uh, more unique case designs

that Apple did over the years.

Uh, particularly like the G4 iMac, and the, the 20th anniversary Mac.

This is my Apple lie that I bought in high school.

Uh, still have, it still runs.

This is my monitor computer pet that I bought the same year.

So this thing is what, 40 years old,

30 years old, something like that.

Uh, over here on this side, uh, I've got my,

unfortunately not working, Lisa 2 and Apple III…

…and the Macintosh TV that I do have that is working.

I think the Lisa is a very collectible computer.

I think it's very sought after.

Of course, it's not the easiest thing to find, uh,

of course, if it's, uh, a Lisa 1…

…very, very hard to find.

I, I would wonder, I don't know the numbers of how many

of each were produced…

…or, uh, you know, how many were destroyed.

I do believe it's a very collectible system.

I would say somewhere between, depending on what it comes

with, uh, low end,

really low end would probably be a thousand, I would say.

If you're gonna get a nice one, probably $2,500, $3,000.

So what this is, is something quite curious.

This is Gypsy, the computer Oracle,

which is actually a Ouija board.

So they couldn't use the term.

Ouija, 'cause that was trademarked.

And you can see that it's showing a screen on either the Mac…

…or the Lisa XL, uh, showing the letters

and numbers that your, uh, hands would be moved by spirit

to spell out names or to communicate from the beyond.

But instead of your hands moving across, uh,

the Ouija board, uh, your, the mouse would move

and would move a cursor to pick the different letters so

that the, uh, ancestors could speak to you.

And if we open this up…

…but here's the board, which does not have the letters

and numbers on it, because that's what's gonna be on the screen.

And you are going to be using your, your mouse…

…right launch, locked into here, and you'll move it.

I'll just give you a little demo here.

So if I was running my Lisa, Lisa XL version…

…and I'm running on this mouse mover…

…which has ball bearings, so

that it's very light to the touch.

So here it's like, ah, spirit is moving me... A…

…you know…

…L I S A, I am Lisa.

So this mouse mover.

So it's where spirit meets, you know, tech…

…nerds becoming finely cool, for once.

If you gave your heart to Mac

and Lisa, here's your reward.

So yeah, so here is the Xerox Star workstation, uh,

with a mouse, with an optical mouse on, its, on its pad.

And wonderful keyboard design

where you can use a center, bold, italics, designed

for document layout, big networked workstation, uh,

big hard drive, talks to servers, talks to printers,

network attached, printers.

This is the Xerox documenter system on the 6085…

…sold in thousands of organizations.

Big, big screen, 19 inch monitor, pretty good for 1985.

You know, full services, worldwide networking, Ethernet.

Here's the modular design of the Star floppy drive,

networking, removable modules.

Really, really good engineering.

But again, an expensive system, for mostly larger organizations.

Okay, so here we have, uh, some of the new boards that,

uh, Sapient Technologies is, uh, producing.

Actually, I build them, uh, all of them.

Uh, here's the new 2, uh, Lisa 1/5, as we call it…

…I/O board.

Call it that because you can use it as an, the Lisa 1 or the 2/5.

And you notice there's no, uh, battery pack corrosion

that could ever, ever, uh, be present here.

Uh, it has a feature here. We'll see this jumper.

You can switch, uh, if you've changed the jumper…

…you can switch between the functionality for a Sony three

and a half inch drive, or the Twiggy drives.

When you switch the Twiggy, the R47 resistor is activated…

…and then it will run the part of the EPROM that controls the Twiggy drive.

Alright, so there's that.

Then here's the, here's the new, uh, CPU board.

You can use either, uh, a combo ROMs for a, uh,

they include Twiggy drive functionality,

or what I have here, the usual H ROMs, which we see on, um…

…on, uh, all the, the more or less standard Lisa systems.

Here we have a power on light, which is always useful

to know when you're powered up.

And, uh, there were some features with the, uh, the Lisa

that were never, uh, implemented for the, uh…

…the ones that were sold.

Here's a reverse video…

…video... you can switch from, uh, black to white…

…as the, uh, the back lit part of the video.

And some of the, um, programmers, uh, refer, uh, prefer the, uh, the white background.

So that was implemented here. Here is one of our new boards.

My fingernails aren't long enough.

Here's the new, uh, quad port serial board…

…which is a reincarnation of the old Tecmar board.

And with this, you can, uh, run Xenix, Lisa Xenix

and Lisa UNIX and network, uh, multiple systems…

…and also have a network between your Lisa…

…and old PC, a Mac 128K, and even your new MacBook.

We decided not to recreate the original 512K…

…uh, Lisa RAM cards.

Uh, that's, uh, not very much RAM.

Sun Remarketing came out with a two meg.

RAM card, and when I bought out a lot of their, their stock…

…I got a bunch of these cards.

And so these, if you can, if you can get the, uh,

the SIMM holders, which are the hardest thing to find…

…are much more, I think, appealing to Lisa owners.

So I can build these two megabyte cards instead of those.

So, uh, we don't plan to, uh, recreate that.

'cause I've, I've got quite a number of these, uh, blanks.

Well, I'm a Mac developer, and I think the, the ideas

that are in the software on the Lisa are just fascinating.

Um, you can run, you can run the software in an emulator,

but I, I like the experience of seeing

how things worked on the original

hardware, you know, when they were new.

I like hearing the hard drive spin up.

I like, uh, waiting five minutes for the thing to boot because it's slow.

Um, I, I, I,

I like feeling like somebody would've felt when they were

using one new, I noticed that when, when the Lisa's running,

it's loud, um, there are fans, the Widget hard drive is…

…cranking away and it's not silent.

Um, and you know, I, I actually think that's interesting

because even from the very beginning, Apple seemed to care a lot about silence.

And I think the machine, the Lisa was, was such a, you know…

…powerful machine that they, they, they couldn't do it, right.

They couldn't get what they needed feature-wise in sort

of a silent fan less, uh, kind of computer.

Yeah, I'm, I'm quite an Apple collector, so focused on the Mac and the Apple II.

Uh, I like NeXT computers as well.

I kind of consider those like honorary Apple computers.

Bill and I were a little bit independent of, of Lisa, and, and Macintosh, right?

In other words, I was building some hardware

and mostly software to support the 68000 development,

whether it be Lisa or Macintosh.

And Bill was supporting the graphic user interface first

for Lisa later from Macintosh, right?

And so Bill, and I were kind of in between, now he was, over time,

he was a little more central to the Macintosh team…

…and I kind of stayed in the mid, in the middle…

…which is a little awkward because, you know, there was a…

…at some point there was a little bit of friction between…

…the Lisa team and Steve, right?

Mostly John and Steve, right?

So, you know, I worked at Apple for almost seven years,

and then I was at NeXT for almost seven years…

…and I think I was the last of the NeXT founders to leave.

Okay? So I kind of worked with Steve for 14 years.

Um, a lot of people…

…didn't make it past six months with him, right?

There's a long list of people probably that…

…never made it past six months.

So he wanted people that would be willing to challenge him

and, and fight with him and argue with him.

Now, he wouldn't always accept it…

…but that's what he wanted, right?

My view was Steve was democratic…

…and what I mean is he treated everyone equally.

Or if you're a little cynical, you could say he treated everyone equally badly.

And that was kind of a problem because

there was Steve, and then there were senior people,

then there were less senior people.

And the problem with the less senior people is they

didn't have much experience with interacting with him.

And so if he comes into somebody's cubicle

and starts yelling at them, if they hadn't really had much…

…practice interacting with him, it,

it kind of scared them, right?

And so one of the things that happened with the Lisa team was

Steve just sort of treated everyone the same.

And, and he, you know, he went in to the team, and interacted with some of them.

He was kind of yelling at them.

And I think what happened was a few of them complained back up to John,

and, and at some point John made the mistake, I think, of…

…sort of uninviting Steve…

…from the project up to that point.

The project had Steve's, you know, support, and approval

at the point where he wasn't involved anymore.

The project kinda lost his support.

And I'm not suggesting he kind of…

…fought against it…

…but I think he, he didn't support it as he did before.

And I think that was unfortunate.

You know, it is pretty clear to everybody that…

…it didn't make sense for Apple to offer both of these products

because they were similar, but not the same.

Um, you know, the Lisa…

…operated a little bit differently than the Mac.

And so it, you know, and then obviously with the price point it ended up at it,

you know, was, you know, not selling and stuff like that.

Although the same actually could be true for the Mac as well.

The Mac came out quite a bit higher price than

what was originally expected as well.

And, you know, that was a, you know, a barrier for a lot of people.

The Mac was a success from the start in terms

of people understanding it was important and loving that,

but it was not instantly a great business success.

And that Apple's initial projections failed to come true.

It was $2,500.

So it was pretty expensive by the standards at the time.

And it took a few years for things like desktop publishing

to emerge and become the killer applications that,

that led companies to invest in the Macintosh.

So even, even the Mac was not an enormous business success.

Immediately it, the Apple was still a successful company

because the Apple II, um, was so dominant.

And I mean, it's pretty amazing that the Apple II dates back to 1977…

…but well under the eighties it was still really successful…

…and, and an important, uh, profit center for the company.

And it, it lasted into the early nineties, which seems hard

to believe, uh, now

that a a 1970s microcomputer could still be selling in the

early nineties, but particularly schools were, so standardized on the Apple II,

that they just kept buying them.

I'm, I'm sure Apple did not expect the Apple II, to still be the profit center.

It was for as long as it was, it, it, it probably expected…

…the Mac to become the center

of the business more quickly than it did.

I love the fact that the vintage computer festival exists.

I, I got interested in computers in 1978, uh,

when I was in junior high school into the, at the time…

…I kind of felt like I was a late comer to computers.

'cause I realized they'd been around for about three years…

…and all these decades later.

Um, it's fun to think about the fact that those of us

who were into them back then got to live, live a little bit

of history, even though we didn't realize it at the time.

I think we were just ahead of our time. You know?

Um, I used to have a philosophy in those days, which was,

um, code as if memory is free.

And yeah.

And you know, I mean, you know,

code lasts a lot longer than the hardware, right?

The hardware's kind of continually upgraded,

but software that you're right tends to hang around.

Why would we still have COBOL?

Why would we still have some of these, you know, languages around?

And maybe we just, uh, got a little bit ahead of the ahead of the game.

Maybe we were too ambitious in what we were trying to do.

Um... and

I think, you know, I think with the, the, the beauty of Steve is that, um…

…I think Steve, it wasn't as if Steve would think smaller…

…but I think he would've thought more consumer.

Uh, and I think we were trying to, we were trying to,

we were sort of saying, well, look, we own the consumer market, right?

How do we get the business market?

One of the things that Apple did early on is it gets back to, you know,

it's more fun to be a pirate than join the Navy.

Think about our '84 commercial, our '85 commercial…

…we made IBM the enemy.

Culturally, they're the enemy, right? (Mm-Hmm)

We're the hackers. You know,

these guys march and they're the British.

We'll pop 'em off as they come by.

And one of the things I, I thought about is we made them such

an enemy that when the time came to partner

with 'em, we couldn't partner.

We're the enemy, right?

And so we left the whole, you know, business world

and community wide open for Microsoft

to just march right in there with many, many years later, right?

I mean, it, it's interesting.

In my book, I was looking at the, at the timelines,

and I'm going, it took us…

…probably two years longer than we,

when I made the shift away from a traditional interface

to the, to the graphical interface

to get the product out the door.

It took Microsoft three years looking at it. (Mm-hmm)

Having it as a start. It only took us two…

…you know.

Steve Jobs, uh, is absolutely, uh…

…the great genius that everyone imagined him to be.

You know, many times people get, um, you know, remembered…

…at being greater than they really were.

The case of Steve. He really was as, as as great as…

…as people want to remember him.

Uh, and he and he made brilliant, uh,

decisions about innovation.

And I always love the definition of genius as someone

who can, uh, see the obvious 20 years ahead of the rest of us.

And Steve had that ability…

…and he, um, made decisions that made good sense, uh,

in terms of vision, but he was not an engineer.

Uh, and in those days, they used to call it, in Silicon Valley,

the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.

And it was because Steve didn't feel bounded by the laws of physics.

And so, uh, he often, you know, overestimated what was,

was possible, even though, um,

he had this brilliant team knowing it was better than Steve. Jobs in terms of recruiting talent

and getting them to do things.

And he was an amazing task master.

You know, he would drive people crazy.

Uh, but at the same time they loved him, and, you know, wanted to please him.

And he was unique.

He still is, you know, unique as, as a, a role model.

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I never had second thoughts about canceling the Lisa.

I don't think anybody else did.

And fortunately, um, some of the engineers went on

to do other great stuff at Apple, for example, Larry Tesler,

uh, became the, uh, head of the Newton team.

Larry Tesler was the one who worked

with Hermann Hauser at Cambridge University to develop the, our microprocessor.

This became the first low powered floating point processor

that is built into every smartphone device today,

including iPhones and Android phones.

So, uh, the talent that worked at Lisa either ended up at Macintosh, or ended up on Newton.

In 1987, there are still, uh, uh, quite a few thousand Lisas that had never sold.

And, uh, financially, uh, our CFO Joe Graziano said, "Hey, we ought to take a write off on this.

But, uh, you know, they, they have to be destroyed."

I think today those Lisas are probably worth many times

what, uh, they sold for at, at list price.

Um, and there are a few of them in the computer museum

and there are collectors of the original Lisa.

Well, that ends another episode of the RetroMacCast with James and John…

…until next week. Remember, it's not old...

It's retro!

My personal Apple Lisa was a very important computer in

my life, as it provided me with my entry into the world of the Macintosh.

The story of the Lisa is the origin story for all

of contemporary personal computing.

It was essentially the mother of our modern computing interface.

Yes, there were other developmental computers with a mouse

and a graphical user interface, plus even a computer

with these things that was sold commercially by Xerox.

However, the Lisa had something none of those had that further ties it

to our modern hardware. The micro processor.

With that distinction, the Lisa was the first true personal computer

with a graphical user interface, mouse combination.

It might not have been a market success,

but it was certainly a phenomenal cultural success in its

influence on personal computing.

The Macintosh's lineage is tied to it.

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