Lisa's scores

If you think about it, though, the case design is quite nice for sitting on a desktop. It's footprint is at least half that of an IBM PC, if you discount the dedicated space required for the mouse. 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. 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. 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. The only other machine to squeeze as much out of a 68K would have to be the Amiga 1000 & 500. And it had helper processors to help keep meanial things like graphics, sound and disk access from bothering the CPU. The one thing that the Mac has over the Lisa, however, is SOUND. The Lisa's sound system is about the same as the Apple II. Beep, Boop. 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. Overall, it was the Lisa's pricetag that is most responsible for its demise, I think. At $10,000, it was considerably more expensive than a similarly configured (1M RAM, 10M HD) IBM PC, which was probably $5,000-8,000. 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. Saw one on TV once, but I'm not sure what the Alto's processor was. But as I recall, it's GUI wasn't as flashy. Not a rotten peach... but I had to say a few words about my favorite machine. My girlfriend Holly was quite upset when I started calling her Lisa after purchasing my Lisa 2/5. But if anyone has a working Lisa Lite board(floppy controller), I'm in the market for one. :) *ling