Apple Lisa 1

----- Original Message ----- From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf(a)siconic.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 1:57 PM Subject: RE: Apple Lisa 1 would've %deity% be even Festival ---- http://www.vintage.org mputers ] http://marketplace.vintage.org ] This site mentions 10,000 for the twiggy, and 80,000 units sold for the Lisa 2 series: http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apple/lisa2.php Twiggy! Unfortunately for Apple, Lisa had an achilles heel. Or two. Yes she was groundbreaking, but bugger me did she cost - $9999 - although when you add up the individual cost of the components and technology it wasn't THAT bad. After all, how much did 1mb of RAM cost in those days? The 2nd and 3rd problems were to be her downfall. She used proprietary 880K double sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives called 'Twiggy' because they were so thin (named after the 60's model of the same name). While they were an excellent design in themselves they were prone to repeated failure apparently because of the unique way they read data from the floppy. An extra read/write hole was created opposite the 'normal' one; rather than have a read/write head on either side of the disk surface at the front like the DEC RX50 the Twiggy had one side reading from the front and the other side reading from the back! 3rd and final problem was that there was little software available other than Lisa Office System 7/7 which contained the aforementioned applications. She also took ages to boot. Things were helped with the ProFile external hard drive from the Apple 3, which could store a whopping 5 MEGABYTES of data....hell of a lot in those days....but not by much. Only 10,000 were sold. Apple's answer was a free upgrade to the Lisa 2, which lost half the memory and the Jobs-designed Twiggy drives (Apple never made another floppy drive themselves) replacing them with a single Sony 3 1/2 inch 400K floppy that still talked to the Twiggy routines by virtue of an interface card called the 'Lisa Lite'. Also there were now 3 models of Lisa - the bog-standard 2, the 2/5 (with the Profile) and the 2/10 which had the original megabyte of RAM and an internal 10mb hard drive called the Widget. They also slashed the cost to $3495 according to the bumf I've got here, or $4495 if you wanted the 2/5. It must've worked because Apple sold upwards of 80,000 machines. I also wish the people I bought mine from had forked out the extra grand for the 2/5 *g*. Lisa 2 could only run MacWorks since LisaOS needs more available at any one time that a 400K floppy could provide, Lisa 2/5 couldn't run all of the OS owing to not having the full complement of memory, Lisa 2/10 could do it all but still cost over 5 and a half grand. TZ