It was thus said that the Great starling(a)umr.edu once stated:
BTW, Allison, the Lisa wasn't actually a PROTOTYPE for the Mac. Rather it
was the sister machine to the Mac. The Lisa and Mac projects stemmed from
the same research, with the Mac project splitting off from the Lisa
project shortly after its inseption. I'm not sure of all the politics
behind the separate projects but apparantly they had quite a bit of
competition between the two. The Lisa project was supposedly comprised of
mostly older guys that'd worked for HP, IBM and other "old school"
companies and did things the "old school" way. The Macintosh project was
allegedly new guys that weren't steeped in the old traditions of big
machines and just did things less methodicly. This is evident if you take
appart a Lisa and a Mac side by side. The Lisa has a motherboard with CPU
on daughterboard design, like an old mini or something... nice and modular
with thumbscrews... no screwdrivers needed. Steve Jobs supposedly
supported the Lisa throughout this battle, naming the machine after his
daughter (it also stood for something... Logically Integrated System...
Uhhh???). He felt it was the better machine with better software and
would prevail over the Mac and the IBM PC. However, when things started
looking bad for her, he jumped ship and started pushing the Mac.
The LISA was the computer designed after Apple had a peek at Xerox PARC.
I'm not sure who ran the department, but I think it may have been Jobs,
trying to work on the Apple ][ replacement. Jobs has always denied the
machine being named after his (illegidament) daughter (although it is
rumored that he did anyway).
The Macintosh was originally the brainchild of Jef Raskin and the initial
design was an information appliance based originally on the 6809 (my
personal favorite 8-bit CPU) and text based.
But, politics being what they are, Jobs was more or less forced from the
day to day operations of running the company, as Mike Markula felt that what
Apple didn't need was a loose Jobs running around [1]. So, to keep Jobs out
of the way, Markula took the Macintosh from Raskin and gave the project to
Jobs, who then wanted to make an information appliance with a GUI, using the
LISA GUI/OS as a base.
Raskin left shortly thereafter (around '81 or '82) to do his own thing,
while Jobs bullied his crew to make the Macintosh into what we know and love
today. When introduced, it was intended that Macintosh development would be
done on a LISA, as it was a much more capable machine, but the price killed
it.
Now, speaking of Jef Raskin, he later went on to make the Swyftcard for
the Apple ][. I've heard the description and ever since, I've been wanting
to either obtain a working Apple ][ with a Swyftcard (plus the
documentation) or failing that, just the documentation alone would be of
interest to me. Has anyone here ever worked with the Swyftcard? I'd like
more information about it.
-spc (Wish more companies did documentation like Raskin did ... )
[1] From what I've read, Jobs is an egotistical bully who would go
around, talking about other employees behind their back, and even
go up to an employee and call their work "shit" and that "he could
do better". Not the type of person I would work for. He would
rub people the wrong way, and Markula felt it would be better for
the company (not to mention morale) if Jobs wasn't around.
Not that I blame Markula any.