It was technically superior in so many ways, and it's a bit sad that instead of Apple evolving it and getting its price down, Jobs was allowed to basically kill the project after he was taken off of it and replace it with an inferior clone.
It's true that the latter approach was never actually tried, but looking back on the tech trends it seems clear it would have taken at least 10 years before the Lisa became affordable. (Next is a reasonable proxy for Lisa-level technology.) By that time the market would have forgotten about it. The Mac captured a market from day one.
And I don't think it was about "worse is better" -- they shipped the org chart, really, forked a new team under Jobs to make a "like Lisa but cheap" but it wasn't just "but cheap", it was 100% incompatible, and sacrificed on basic engineering fundamentals.
It also makes no sense to me. The Lisa hardware was expensive, but I think LisaOS could have been made to run on less expensive hardware by jettisoning features, and then picked up again later. Instead because of personalities and org chart they went and made a completely incompatible other-thing that looked like LisaOS without being it, duplicating effort and creating internal ill will, and short circuiting potential futures.
Anyways, Jobs profited it off it twice. Ego satisfaction with shipping the Mac, and killing off the Lisa -- his grudge/nemesis. And then again when Apple was forced to come to him 10 years later and buy NeXTstep because of what Jobs had done in 84.
Larry Tesler is spinning in his grave somewhere.
You bring up a great point though: Whatever happened to LisaOS? Did anybody archive the source anywhere or did it completely vanish?
https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/chm-makes-apple-l...
I briefly looked at it, it's a pile of Object Pascal and M68k asssembly. I haven't looked to see if anybody has managed to make it compile in any kind of available-today compiler yet.
A PC ram expansion board with 64k cost $350 in 1983 and upgrading it to 512k probably cost another $1,000. ($1,000 and $3,300 or $4,000+ for 512kB in today's bucks)
A significant portion of the cost of the Lisa (and later Macintosh and Amiga and everything else) was DRAM.
But RAM prices were falling rapidly and three years later when the Macintosh Plus was released with 1MB standard, page 57 of Macworld's January 1986 issue lists a 1 megabyte AST RamStak expansion board for the Mac XL (Lisa) for $829 ($2,400).
Even the Amiga 1000, remembered today as a revolutionary multitasking powerhouse, shipped with 256k standard in late 1985 and the 256k expansion that BARELY (fight me, I was there) enabled multitasking with 512k of RAM in total retailed for $200 ($600) bumping the price up to $1,500 ($4,500).
Cost was probably the most important thing to focus on, to spur adoption. Regressing to 128k though? That was garbage.
Instead of turning the Lisa 2 into a "Macintosh XL", they should have shipped a "macbox" runtime for the LisaOS platform that let it run Mac applications inside the LisaOS runtime.
When they went to 68020 and RAM dropped in price, evolved LisaOS should have been the answer, not System 7.
Both of these eventually happened despite him getting fired, but the Mac II series was only a workstation in the hardware sense.
IIRC, Steve had negotiated the UNIX license for Apple before he left. Given where NeXT went, I wonder if a Steve-driven “Mac II” would have included the OS rearchitecture that was otherwise delayed a decade by his absence.
I understand part of the reason was the license cost was so high?
They had all the pieces, or certainly the smart engineers and designers to build the pieces that were missing, but nobody with a strategic product vision to make the pieces fit.
The most serious indictment of their product thinking or lack thereof: They planned originally to do a total software compatibility break with PowerPC. Power Macs were a success rather than a disaster because a few engineers ran a skunkworks emulation & hardware design effort to build the bridge from 68k.
leoc•6mo ago