Re: Apple II-Or Come on people, It's a 20 year old computer

["ruud.dingemans" <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl>]

Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
> In article <395042D8.F250D99A@wanadoo.nl>,
> ruud.dingemans <ruud.dingemans@wanadoo.nl> wrote:
> 
> >> I've never seen a more impotent computer than the Apple Lisa....
> >
> > Hey, a bit more respect for the grandmother of all modern personal
> > computers, ok.
> 
> FYI: the majority of today's modern computers did NOT evolve from the
> Lisa.  Many people frown on this, but "the grandmother of most modern
> computers" happens to be the IBM PC.

Pffft. Come on, you don't think a 4.77 Mhz command-line driven 8088 is
more like a modern
personal than a mouse/GUI-driven Lisa, don't you?

The Lisa is the grandmother of all modern personal computers, if only in
spirit; for grandfather, it's the Alto.

> No it didn't.  The original idea was stolen by Apple from Xerox, so
> Lisa wasn't the original computer with a GUI.

(Sigh) Another newbie trying to show off some bits of historical
knowledge thinks he's got the whole picture.

Xerox did NOT invent the graphical computer, and did NOT invent the
mouse-driven computer. Go back *another*
ten years, to Doug Engelbart's lab at SRI, and then come tell us about
"the original ideas".

Also, Apple did *not* steal the ideas from Xerox; they DID use some
parts of it, so you could say they copied things; but the basic ideas
had already been demonstrated in 1968, the pre-Xerox era. And it was
Apple that designed half of all GUI ideas that got
copied by just about everybody, later on.

> And the Lisa was simply too expensive to start a "revolution" on the market -- the
> Macintosh did that.

The Mac was an extension of Lisa tech that made it affordable. But it
was the Lisa
that put the GUI onto personal computers. Not the Mac, since it came
along one year later. The Lisa simply
came first and it spawned the Mac - not the other way 'round.
  
> That won't leave much of a revolution to the Lisa, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

> > (Besides, this thing had some *cool* hardware specs that the Mac
> > didn't have at the time.)
> 
> Possibly -- I never immensed myself into the architecture of the
> Lisa.

Then maybe you should; dig up one at Logan, or read up on the tech
specs, and marvel.

This *was* one cool machine (and yes, I've got one). I'll only mention
auto-save at auto-shutdown,
multitasking, protected memory thru a custom MMU design (remember: this
was *before* the Mac!), 
three expansion slots, 1 MB RAM and a completely
modular/extendable design. Oh yeah, and then there was a GUI and a
mouse, too. 

> Lisa.  I noted that, besides being expensive and slow, it also broke
> a tradition from the Apple II:  the Lisa, and later the Mac, were much
> more closed systems.

> The tradition of being an open system was carried over by the PC line
> of computers 

Sigh. Lisa had *three slots* and it's based on a modular breadboard
design - you could take out the cpu, i/o and RAM cards separately (try
that on the IBM PC). Don't talk to me about completely closed systems
unless you know
what you're talking about. The Mac was closed (and deliberately so), the
Lisa was not.

> pathetic when people advicating the Mac, Atari and Amiga got together
> to hotly debate *which* GUI was the "best"....

Hey, all of these were better than Windows, certainly in the beginning
and in many ways
they still are.

> 
> Today, things have calmed down a bit: all modern computers use a GUI
> of some kind.

Yeah, and the Alto (grandpa) and Lisa (grandma) spawned this all. It's
not the IBM PC that was among the greatest
revolutions in personal computer design. That honor mostly goes to the
Apple II, the Lisa, the Mac and the Alto.

Regards, RD