30 years of the Apple Lisa and the Apple IIe

[D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com>]

by Benj Edwards
Jan 18, 2013 3:20 AM

At its annual shareholders’ meeting on January 19, 1983, Apple announced
two new products that would play a pivotal role in the future of the
company: the Apple Lisa, Apple’s original GUI-based computer and the
precursor to the Macintosh; and the Apple IIe, which represented a natural
evolution to the highly successful Apple II computer line.

One of these platforms met an early end, leaving behind technology that
shaped the entire industry. The other, built on proven technology from an
engineering genius, remained a reliable breadwinner during uncertain times
in the early life of the Macintosh and carried Apple’s most popular 8-bit
computer line to its natural conclusion.

Remembering the Apple IIe

The story of the Apple IIe began with Apple’s first high-profile failure,
the Apple III. Launched in 1980, the Apple III targeted the business market
with an over-engineered, high-priced machine whose Apple II compatibility
Apple purposely crippled in the name of market differentiation.

Around the time of the Apple III’s launch, Apple was so sure of the new
computer's success that it had halted all future development of Apple
II-related projects. But by 1982, as it became clear that the Apple II
wasn’t going away (in fact, it was becoming more popular than ever), Apple
scrambled to upgrade its aging Apple II line, which had last been refreshed
in 1979 with the Apple II+.

The result was the Apple IIe, which packed in several enhancements that
regular Apple II users had been enjoying for years thanks to a combination
of the Apple II’s plentiful internal expansion slots and a robust
third-party hardware community to fill them. Among those features were
80-column text-mode support, support for lowercase letters (yep, the
original Apple II and II+ supported only uppercase letters), and 64KB of RAM
standard (expandable to 128KB).

Most importantly for Apple, the Apple IIe drastically lowered the chip count
on the system’s motherboard from over 100 chips to 31, allowing Apple to
manufacture the computer at a lower cost while extracting a higher profit
from each unit.

Upon its release in 1983, the Apple IIe proved immediately popular, and it
soon became the standard Apple II model against which all others would be
compared. The Apple IIe’s reliability and backward compatibility with a
rich library of Apple II software made it a fixture at schools, where a
generation of American schoolchildren grew up playing Apple II-based
educational games such as The Oregon Trail, and eventually, Number Munchers.

Thanks to the IIe, the Apple II series remained a steady source of income
for Apple during an uncertain period in the mid-1980s when the Macintosh
wasn’t selling in the volume that the company had anticipated. Even after
the introduction of the vastly upgraded Apple IIgs in 1986, demand for the
Apple IIe remained steady, and Apple marketed a version of the IIe all the
way up until 1993, when the company finally pulled the plug on the
stand-alone Apple II line (the Apple IIe Card for Macintosh computers was
spared for two more years).

By 1993, when Apple discontinued the II series, the Macintosh was firmly
positioned as the future of the company. But those who used the Apple IIe
and the Lisa in their prime would not soon forget the fruitful impact both
systems had on the course of Apple’s history.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2025408/