Talk:Apple Lisa

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I deleted a duplicate link to the same article.

Any objection to renaming this to Apple Lisa? --Brion

  • Rather than objecting, I think it's an excellent idea. -- April
  • I agree. We may need "LISA" for a gravity wave observatory, if the ESA gets NASA to put up their share of the money. Vicki Rosenzweig

Done. --Brion 12:41 Aug 28, 2002 (PDT)

How many Apple Lisa were built and/or sold ? ( I want to compare that number to the 25,000 units of the Xerox Star mentioned in the Xerox PARC article ).

According to [1], "It is thought that roughly 11,000 Lisa 1's and 70,000 Lisa 2's (including Macintosh XL) were produced." — David Remahl 22:28, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The Lisa OS provided non-preemptive multitasking. It is a common misconception that it had preemptive multitasking, but that was only avaiable on the Lisa if you ran one of the Unix ports, such as Unisoft. --Brouhaha 21:50, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Blakespot: How is it that you claim that it is "easily verified" that the Lisa had preemptive multitasking? The Lisa operating system documentation very definitely claims otherwise; Lisa applications have to periodically yield the CPU just as was historically the case on the Macintosh. But assuming that the application is written correctly, this is transparent to the user. This is also explicitly stated to have been a deliberate design decision in the invited paper "Architecture of the Lisa Personal Computer" by Bruce Daniels, published in Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 72 No. 3, March 1984, page 335:

   The CPU is multiplexed among the runnable processes by using a priority based nonpreemptive
   scheduling algorithm.  This nonpreemptive scheduling policy guarantees correct access to shared
   resources, such as the bit-mapped display, by interactive processes without the performance penalty
   of having to explicitly lock and unlock these resources for each access.

Since Bruce Daniels was one of the developers, I consider this to be an authoritative reference in the absence of more details on your "easily verified" claim. Are you possibly confusing "preemptive multitasking" with some other concept? I'm inclined to revert your change unless you can explain why the IEEE article and the Lisa OS documentation are wrong. --Brouhaha 02:17, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I know the truth about how the Apple Lisa got its name. One of my uncles told me (he works for Apple.) He said that it was named after Steve Jobs' daughter, so I reworded it to make it clear that somebody around here knows the truth (while still keeping to NPOV policies.) Scott Gall 10:20, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Many Apple employees (and former employees) that worked on Lisa "know the truth", yet just as many vehemently deny the story about Jobs' daughter as confirm it. It's going to take more than a single anecdotal report from one (unnamed thus unverifiable) employee to confirm it. Thus I've reverted the change unil there is something more authoritative. --Brouhaha 19:19, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Officially, the LISA was "Local Integrated Software Architecture". This has to be accepted since it is all that Apple are likely to officially admit. I'm troubled by "shrouded in mystery" as it is cliched and not really accurate. The truth is fairly simple: it had an official definition, obvious unofficial significance which possibly came first and option three is thrown in for humour. Mattisgoo 01:42, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Mattisgoo, your conclusions are correct. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.107.133.3 (talk • contribs) .

Where are the other LISAs buried? which landfill, and have any of them been dug up? --????

Reportedly somewhere in Utah. I've always thought that the story was somewhat dubious. When Apple renamed the Lisa 2/10 to be "Macintosh XL", and supplied it with the square pixel mod preinstalled and MacWorks on the hard drive, it sold quite well. They were doing this to try to clear out the inventory, and reportedly they ran out of them. If that's true, why would they have buried any?

Secondly, they had an existing business relationship with Sun Remarketing, which purchased and resold other Apple obsolete/overstock items. Sun Remarketing continued to sell Lisas for some time after they were discontinued, so it's not clear why Apple would have buried any Lisas rather than just selling them to Sun Remarketing.

It's another one of those mysteries that will probably never have a satisfactory explanation. --Brouhaha 20:08, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Free hard drive?

In 1984 at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple announced that they were providing free 5 MB hard drive upgrades to all Lisa 1 owners.

I don't think so - what we earlier got were free replacements for the Twiggy drives in the form of 400kb 3.5" hard shell floppies. Can anyone verify the above statement? Leonard G. 05:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nice Image

Any chance of anyone identifying the different parts of the Lisa in the photo? — Frecklefoot | Talk 22:18, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

That's a Profile (Apple's external hard drive, probably 5MB) sitting on top. Two Twiggy slots on the right, keyboard below, no mouse is visible in this photo. GeoFan49 08:56, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cost of parts?

Just how much did the Lisa cost Apple to build? I recently saw an interview with Woz where he talked about the majority of the cost of the machine was from RAM alone. (Don't ask me what program -- G4 Icons? History Channel's Modern Marvels: 80's Tech?) --Navstar 03:57, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Theoretically there was a 512KB configuration of the Lisa, but I don't think they actually shipped any since the Lisa Office System wouldn't run on it. A 1MB Lisa contained two 512KB memory boards each of which had 64 DRAM chips (4164 64Kbit DRAM, or equivalent). Those probably cost Apple about $3 each in 1983, so that was $384 for just the RAM chips. The only other single component in a Lisa system that would have cost more than that was the HDA of the external Apple ProFile hard drive. --Brouhaha 19:49, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Odd memories of the Lisa

One of the odd things about the Lisa was that it was designed to be easy for the casual user to upgrade by adding new hardware - the back panel had a microswitch on it such that if you removed the panel while the computer was running, it would automatically shut itself down. We didn't know that and after we'd pulled the back off to add memory or something, we tried to check the machine was working OK before we put the panel back on again. The computer wouldn't run and we couldn't understand why. Thinking we'd broken it, we shipped it off to be repaired - since we'd packed it all up with the back panel re-installed, when the Apple service department got it, it booted right up and ran first time. This actually happened twice before we realised what was happening!

Ours was used in an office environment - running UNIX and with four users logged in over serial ports. SteveBaker 03:33, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Implied Link to the shuttle disasters

Deleted the last sentence from the section about NASA's use of Lisa, which implied that Lisa's discontinuation was somehow responsible for the shuttle disasters. Thirdgen 06:18, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Internal memory?

The article mentions:

At a time when 96 kibibytes of RAM was considered an extravagance, much of the Lisa's high price tag—and therefore its commercial failure—can be attributed to the large amount of RAM the system came with. Most personal computers didn't begin shipping with mebibyte-sized RAM until the mid-to-late 1980s.

However, I can't find any reference to how much internal memory the system actually contained. This paragraph makes little sense without this information. Could someone who knows this please add it to the "Hardware" section? 130.89.167.52 12:32, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ignore this...

Just noticed the notice at the top. !@#$ Maiq the liar (talk) 23:41, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Non-square pixels

In the Macintosh XL article, I noticed the following:

Because of its roots as a Lisa—and unlike all other Macintosh computers—the Macintosh XL did not use square pixels.

Did the Lisa really have non-square pixels? How non-square were they, and was this common at the time? Is it worth a mention in the Hardware section? - IMSoP (talk) 15:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC)