26 Jun
1997
26 Jun
'97
10:23 a.m.
Also I think I read somewhere that they purposefully
designed it to look
like a "business-like" dumb terminal to get around the "hobbyist/home
computer" reputation of the Apple IIs. I'd also guess that secretaries
(who the machine was designed for) would feel more comfortable with a new
system if it looked like their old one.
That seems to make sense.
Actually, I've always felt that they didn't do
ENOUGH with the 68000.
They clocked the poor thing at 5Mhz... it could have happily taken 8,
but the story goes that at the time they were designing the Lisa, the
68000 wasn't out yet. So Motorola gave them a 68000 "emulator" which was
a box with a bunch of discrete components in it that did effectively what
the chip would do... but it only ran at 5Mhz.
The very first 68000s, the XC series production samples, are 4 MHz. The
emulator probably was only designed to support up to this speed. Apple
was probably pushing things at 5 MHz.
In using my own Lisa, it really isn't that
sluggish. Especially if you
compare it to a Mac 128 or 512. The filesystem on the Lisa is VERY
advanced and allows for recovery from errors that'd hork other
filesystems. It has memory protection which keeps it from being as
flakey as the early Macs (and later Macs :), and it truely multitasks
instead of just lame task-switching like it's Macintosh cousin.
Oh yes, it did have a real operating system (OK, the memory management
was not great, but considering Motorola had not introduced the 68K MMUs,
not bad).
However, the Lisa still lives on. Every time you pull
down a window
you're using Lisa technology. Lisa was also the first to have an
integrated office suite which could cut-n-paste between apps. Xerox
provided much of the inspiration, but Lisa polished the GUI into a usable
system. It's really quite impressive for a machine designed 78-81 and
released in 82.
With a little more horsepower, it really could have been something special.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net