Old Apple promo film from 25 years ago.
I find it interesting that it presumes that the viewer knows what a "Lisa" is. Perhaps the Lisa was more famous in 1984 than today? (Lisa was the first commercial computer with windows and mouse*, but too expensive at $10,000, and failed. The Mac was almost an underground movement within Apple, designed to kill the Lisa, and Steve Jobs hijacked the project after he got kicked to the sideline by the CEO.)
Coincidentally I just today got the new documentary Welcome to Macintosh. It's good.
*TTL corrects me: Xerox came first.
Hangar points to the Mother of all Demos. (I love the book Insanely Great.) There's even a video.
15 comments:
Lisa was the first commercial computer with windows and mouse...
That's incorrect. The first commercial computer with windows and mouse was the Xerox Star.
Many people mistakenly believe that Apple invented the WIMP interface. Not only is that not true, but it is difficult to name any significant inventions by Apple in the field of information technology.
I knew somebody would bring xerox up. it's true apple got the basic ideas there. But I'm pretty sure Xerox never made a commercial system out of it.
But I'm pretty sure Xerox never made a commercial system out of it.
Huh? It was very much a commercial product. We even had one in our school.
According to Wiki "about 25,000" units were sold. So, not a huge number. But years later Apple Lisa didn't do much better. Again, according to Wiki:
Apple threw away approximately 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory.
Surprise surprise. What I have read is that the guys working in Xerox PARC were deeply frustrated that all that original research was never turned into anything commercial.
Yeah, both the Lisa and the Apple III were dismal failures.
It's funny, I've read two or three books about the history of the PC, and I was sure Xerox never made it into a commercial product. Either I'm slow or the books had omissions.
History books often repeat the same mantra copied from other history books. If the first one gets it wrong all others get it wrong too. No one bothers to fact check anything these days.
I vividly remember when I first saw the Xerox Star in 1982. It was immediately obvious to me that the user interface was something new. Yet, I don't remember being particularly impressed about it or thinking it was anything revolutionary. Which of course it was. I remember asking about the gadget the operator had under her right hand. She said it was "a mouse". I was sure it was just a name she had given it because obviously a computer peripheral couldn't really be called a mouse. That would be ridiculous.
Yes, computer terminology is a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, mostly the latter.
Like TWAIN: Technology Without An Interesting Name. Really.
... OK, not *that* really.
http://tr.im/d54w
The claim that any corporation "invented" the personal computer is also totally ridiculous. I had built a Z-80 based S-100 computer well before Apple became anything significant.
P.S. Dang Google has lost my identity! WTF?
Hey, my first PC was Z80 based too.
We were thinking of getting the kit version of the ZX81, but by the time I'd saved up enough the prebuilt was down to 50GBP and then the Spectrum was out. I sometimes wish I were a few years older so I could say I was there at the beginning.
Last time I got to write some new software it was on a Freescale RS08 based micro processor. I love playing on 8 bit machines. 63B RAM, 2KB Flash, 4 I/O pins...
I love playing on 8 bit machines [...]
You're more patient than I am! ;-) My current toy is an ARM7-based device from ATMEL (AT91SAM7X256) with *plenty* of resources, and I love it! To hell with paged RAM and other idiosyncrasies of smaller devices! :-))
The claim that any corporation "invented" the personal computer is also totally ridiculous.
...but the subject is WIMP interfaces (windows and mouse) - not personal computers in general. See the Mother of All Demos as a good focal point for the WIMP invention.
The first mouse I saw was on a Three Rivers PERQ
(also better picture) workstation which I got to play with briefly when at an interview at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire in, I think, summer 1982. I had been aware of the Xerox work for a couple of years at that point so was quite keen to get the feel of using the mouse.
..but the subject is WIMP interfaces
Watch the video. It almost begins with the claim that Apple invented the personal computer. They invented only fancy marketing for nerdy products, and nothing else.
Funny you should mention Daresbury, I was just talking to a friend about Lewis Carrol yesterday.
So Hanger, what took you to a physics lab in my home county?
Bert, I used to enjoy the Arm, last project I did though was on an Acorn A5000, their first non-motorola solution, was either an ARM2 or AMR3. Great fun. The project migrated to an Acorn RISC PC with dual ARMs, great fun, though I never got tasked with making it run parallel.
The most fun I had was a CT3600, it was a neat deal, 8 RISC Engines and 16 DSP's all in one package with PLD's for IO. First time I ever wrote code which coded in ROM (not PROM) on the mask of the chip.
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