The Lisa Personal Computer: Apple’s Influential Flop

The Apple Lisa was the more expensive and less popular precursor to the Macintosh; a recent piece at the Computer History Museum called Lisa “Apple’s most influential failure”.

Apple’s Macintosh line of computers today, known for bringing mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to the masses and transforming the way we use our computers, owes its existence to its immediate predecessor at Apple, the Lisa. Without the Lisa, there would have been no Macintosh — at least in the form we have it today — and perhaps there would have been no Microsoft Windows either.

The video above from Adi Robertson at The Verge is a good introduction to the Lisa and what made it so simultaneously groundbreaking and unpopular. From a companion article:

To look at the Lisa now is to see a system still figuring out the limits of its metaphor. One of its unique quirks, for instance, is a disregard for the logic of applications. You don’t open an app to start writing or composing a spreadsheet; you look at a set of pads with different types of documents and tear off a sheet of paper.

But the office metaphor had more concrete technical limits, too. One of the Lisa’s core principles was that it should let users multitask the way an assistant might, allowing for constant distractions as people moved between windows. It was a sophisticated idea that’s taken for granted on modern machines, but at the time, it pushed Apple’s engineering limits - and pushed the Lisa’s price dramatically upward.

And from 1983, a demo video from Apple on how the Lisa could be used in a business setting:

And a more characteristically Apple ad for the Lisa featuring a pre-stardom Kevin Costner:

• Adi Robertson
• Apple
• computing
• Kevin Costner
• Lisa
• video

Broad Band, Claire Evans’ book about “The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet”

I’m looking forward to reading Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire Evans. Addie Wagenknecht recently did an interview with Evans about the book.

The easy thing is to say that Broad Band is a feminist history of the Internet. That’s what I’ve been telling people. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a history of the Internet told through women’s stories: boots-on-the-ground accounts of where the women were, how they were feeling and working, at specific, formative moments in Internet history. It emphasizes users and those who design for use, while many popular tech histories tend to zero in on the box. I’ve always been fascinated with what happens after hardware hits the market; it’s what we do with it that counts.

When I first heard of the book, I thought immediately of Halt and Catch Fire, a connection that Adi Robertson picked up on as well.

Robertson: It’s funny how much this book reminded me of Halt and Catch Fire.

Evans: Yes! Oh my god. One of my great regrets about the timing of me writing this book is that Halt and Catch Fire is over now, and I can’t con my way into a consulting job on that show. It was so fun being deep in the process of researching arcana and internet history and then seeing these little nuggets appear in a more glamorous form on my favorite TV show. It kind of felt surreal. But definitely made me feel like I was headed in the right direction.

• Addie Wagenknecht
• Adi Robertson
• books
• Broad Band
• Claire Evans