ngtwolf
Veteran Member
Late reply to this, but the Amiga was also multi-tasking, wasn't killed, but also didn't affect the PC's rise. I'm not sure multitasking was a general market consideration at that time.
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An Apple Lisa documentary in 2019?
- Thread starter classiccomputing
- Start date
Late reply to this, but the Amiga was also multi-tasking, wasn't killed, but also didn't affect the PC's rise. I'm not sure multitasking was a general market consideration at that time.
No one really understood Amiga though, for other reasons. I vividly remember seeing the Amiga as a very expensive alternative to the C64. It wasn't until I got to play with one myself almost ten years later that I saw the real value in it. Commodore (and Amiga dealers) didn't know how to sell Amiga. Apple knew how to sell just about anything. Plus, it wasn't until the 1990s when computers with colour displays were taken seriously at all. Ironically (in retrospect) Lisa had a huge advantage over Amiga due to this.
I remember thinking of multitasking as a mere curiosity with not that much practical advantage for a home user. Had I been exposed to Lisa at school in stead of Apple II, I'm positive I'd have seen the value.
When I saw Amiga demoed at the local dealer, I had no idea that it could multitask. All I saw was a really fancy colour display. And if I wanted a fancy colour display, I had quarters for the local arcade, not thousands for a home computer.
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ngtwolf
Veteran Member
The funny thing is, my first computer was also a commodore 64 but we had other computers in the house, apple ii clone (ace 1000), atari 800, etc... all color. I once had a Sinclair 1000 that I never used more than a few hours because of the monochrome display. Thus, when the Mac's came out, I had zero interest in them because they lacked color. When I decided I wanted a gui system, I went with the Atari ST due to price and color and my affinity for atari at the time.
David, I'm super stoked to hear that you will be doing a documentary on the Lisa !!!
One thing that I think would be very important to cover and something that has been LOST to "modern computing" is Document-Centric Computing. The Lisa was the FIRST to implement this (to my knowledge) in a commercial computer. This clearly differentiated the Lisa from other "PCs".
The end of the 90's spelled the end for Document-Centric computing with Taligent imploding and Jobs issuing a "bullet to the head" for OpenDoc and suddenly we were back to App-Centric environments exclusively. (b/c "Apps" are a business model not a computing model)
App-Centric computing keeps us in silos of "computing". Neither features nor data are easily (if at all) shared between Apps.
Doc-Centric turned that inside out allowing the user access to all features from the document they were working on b/c the "system" was the environment.
I know that there are an endless number of things you could cover in your documentary but please consider Document-Centric computing one of them. Few people even know it existed and this superior approach to computing has been LOST to todays computing systems.
...and that's very sad :-(
J
One thing that I think would be very important to cover and something that has been LOST to "modern computing" is Document-Centric Computing. The Lisa was the FIRST to implement this (to my knowledge) in a commercial computer. This clearly differentiated the Lisa from other "PCs".
The end of the 90's spelled the end for Document-Centric computing with Taligent imploding and Jobs issuing a "bullet to the head" for OpenDoc and suddenly we were back to App-Centric environments exclusively. (b/c "Apps" are a business model not a computing model)
App-Centric computing keeps us in silos of "computing". Neither features nor data are easily (if at all) shared between Apps.
Doc-Centric turned that inside out allowing the user access to all features from the document they were working on b/c the "system" was the environment.
I know that there are an endless number of things you could cover in your documentary but please consider Document-Centric computing one of them. Few people even know it existed and this superior approach to computing has been LOST to todays computing systems.
...and that's very sad :-(
J
classiccomputing
Experienced Member
Hi, and thank you for your enthusiasm. I absolutely intend on covering this important difference between the Lisa OS and then both the Macintosh System Software and Windows. The first 60% of the movie will be the history of the Lisa's development, it's OS and apps, marketing, "failure," Macintosh XL re-branding and ultimately its cancellation. The other 40% will be mostly split across what happened after that with the Lisa and with enthusiasts/collectors.
Forsythe
New Member
I’d love to see a detailed look at the UI of the Lisa. It had some features that weren’t available for decades on other platforms. I think the Lisa is severely under appreciated wrt to UI innovation.