Talk:Apple Lisa

message: I deleted a duplicate link to the same article.
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Any objection to renaming this to Apple Lisa? --Brion
* Rather than objecting, I think it's an excellent idea. -- April
* I agree. We may need "LISA" for a gravity wave observatory, if the ESA gets NASA to put up their share of the money. Vicki Rosenzweig
Done. --Brion 12:41 Aug 28, 2002 (PDT)
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How many Apple Lisa were built and/or sold ?
( I want to compare that number to the 25,000 units of the Xerox Star mentioned in the Xerox PARC article ).
:According to , "It is thought that roughly 11,000 Lisa 1's and 70,000 Lisa 2's (including  Macintosh XL) were produced." — David Remahl 22:28, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untitled comment 

message: The story of LISAs being buried in landfill - unless verifiable - sounds suspiciously like something actually done by Atari, not Apple.
Atari_video_game_burial in the mid-1980's.
Perhaps misheard as "Apple buried something" instead of "Atari buried something" - similar to how people "remember" seeing Bugs Bunny at Disney theme parks ?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.25.123.158 (talk) 22:51, 28 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm very sure this happened.  Atari may have done something similar - but for sure a bunch of Lisa's wound up in landfill. SteveBaker (talk) 03:35, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Landfill ? Atari, not Apple, surely ? ( and don't call me surely... )

message: In 1984 at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple announced that they were providing free 5 MB hard drive upgrades to all Lisa 1 owners.
I don't think so  - what we earlier got were free replacements for the Twiggy drives in the form of 400kb 3.5" hard shell floppies. Can anyone verify the above statement? Leonard G. 05:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Free hard drive?

message: Any chance of anyone identifying the different parts of the Lisa in the photo? — Frecklefoot | Talk 22:18, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Nice Image

message: Just how much did the Lisa cost Apple to build?  I recently saw an interview with Woz where he talked about the majority of the cost of the machine was from RAM alone. (Don't ask me what program -- G4 Icons? History Channel's Modern Marvels: 80's Tech?) --Navstar 03:57, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Theoretically there was a 512KB configuration of the Lisa, but I don't think they actually shipped any since the Lisa Office System wouldn't run on it.  A 1MB Lisa contained two 512KB memory boards each of which had 64 DRAM chips (4164 64Kbit DRAM, or equivalent).  Those probably cost Apple about $3 each in 1983, so that was $384 for just the RAM chips.  The only other single component in a Lisa system that would have cost more than that was the HDA of the external Apple ProFile hard drive.  --Brouhaha 19:49, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cost of parts? 

message: One of the odd things about the Lisa was that it was designed to be easy for the casual user to upgrade by adding new hardware - the back panel had a microswitch on it such that if you removed the panel while the computer was running, it would automatically shut itself down.   We didn't know that and after we'd pulled the back off to add memory or something, we tried to check the machine was working OK before we put the panel back on again.  The computer wouldn't run and we couldn't understand why.  Thinking we'd broken it, we shipped it off to be repaired - since we'd packed it all up with the back panel re-installed, when the Apple service department got it, it booted right up and ran first time.   This actually happened twice before we realised what was happening!
Ours was used in an office environment - running UNIX and with four users logged in over serial ports. SteveBaker 03:33, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Odd memories of the Lisa 

message: Deleted the last sentence from the section about NASA's use of Lisa, which implied that Lisa's discontinuation was somehow responsible for the shuttle disasters. Thirdgen 06:18, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: lol FCHistoricalAccount (talk) 12:03, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Implied Link to the shuttle disasters 

message: The article mentions:
:At a time when 96 kibibytes of RAM was considered an extravagance, much of the Lisa's high price tag—and therefore its commercial failure—can be attributed to the large amount of RAM the system came with. Most personal computers didn't begin shipping with mebibyte-sized RAM until the mid-to-late 1980s.
However, I can't find any reference to how much internal memory the system actually contained. This paragraph makes little sense without this information. Could someone who knows this please add it to the "Hardware" section? 130.89.167.52 12:32, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Internal memory? 

message: I remember providing ISV support for Apple Lisas running SCO XENIX. We had one or two clients successfully using them to run Open Systems Accounting Software under Thoroughbred Business BASIC. On top of the multiple virtual terminals that XENIX provided, Lisa had one (or two?) built-in serial ports (but more could be added using an expansion slot), so dumb terminals were sometimes added to make a small timeshared multiuser system. Despite the 5 Mhz CPU, XENIX being all character based made it feel snappy enough even when timeshared.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.68.70.186 (talk) 07:13, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah - I worked with the personal computer research team at Philips Research.  We bought a Lisa (I suspect it was a Lisa II) in order to investigate the GUI system.  Once we'd finished evaluating it, the machine was turned into a UNIX box.  It's possible we were running Xenix also.  We had (typically) four users logged in through the serial ports using either dumb terminals or CP/M machines using terminal emulator software that I wrote for the purpose.  I think there should be some mention of the SCO Xenix port for the Lisa in the article. SteveBaker (talk) 15:36, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternative Operating Systems for Lisa 

message: Just noticed the notice at the top. !@#$ Maiq the liar (talk) 23:41, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ignore this... 

message: In the Macintosh XL article, I noticed the following:
: Because of its roots as a Lisa—and unlike all other Macintosh computers—the Macintosh XL did not use square pixels.
Did the Lisa really have non-square pixels? How non-square were they, and was this common at the time? Is it worth a mention in the Hardware section? - IMSoP (talk) 15:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-square pixels 

message: The 3 Rivers PERQ GUI computer first sold in August 1980....see the info at...http://toastytech.com/guis/perq.html  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.110.206.127 (talk) 16:55, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That is super-cool. Too bad movies like Pirates of Silicon Valley were so poorly made that they completely ignored this machine. Better resolution than Lisa and accelerated graphics? Bigger hard disk than Lisa? In August of 1980? Nice. Lisa was more advanced in some ways, like its multitasking, more robust desktop simulation, and nearly universal clipboard, but this PERQ is very cool.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.233.137.31 (talk) 00:42, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: The Xerox Star was not the first commercial GUI computer

message: The entire etymology section of this article appears to have been copied nearly-verbatim from the first source reference at mac-history.net Charles Kozierok (talk) 16:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It appears that mac-history.net copied this text from the Wikipedia article, not the other way around. The mac-history.net article was published 12 October 2007. The first time a version of this text appeared in this Wikipedia article was on 18 January 2005 . If we look at the version of this article immediately preceding mac-history.net's publication , we can see that mac-history.net copied several sentences from this article: (duplication detector report: .) The author cites Wikipedia at the end of the second page. We should consider replacing mac-history.net as a source. GabrielF (talk) 04:13, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Indeed that is a violation of WP:CIRCULAR that still persists in article. Someone not using his real name (talk) 10:28, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plagiarism? (No, but circular referencing) 

message: Simple question - how does an operating system running on a CPU without an MMU or segmented memory ( such as the Motorola 68000 ) provide 'protected memory'? If there is no supporting evidence can it be removed please? Djm63y2k (talk) 17:53, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Protected Memory? 

message: I've edited the article to claim preemptive multitasking, but upon reading further into the vintage documentation I see that this isn't exactly the case. Processes were not automatically preempted by a hardware timer but all system calls (or a jump to non-resident code) had the effect of yielding the CPU. This requires less "cooperation" than other systems such as the later Mac OS, which typically have one call for yielding and allow a process to remain in control whilst it accesses OS services.
I don't think either buzzword really fits. The article should probably give a bit of detail about this, as it's a very contentious point. Potatoswatter (talk) 08:20, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cooperative multitasking 

message: concerning the recent tag added to the article.  Scans of the manual that came with the computer, are on the website in question.  I believe this qualifies as fair usage.  The manual is not being printed anymore, since the computer isn't being made, no money is being made from this at all, and its there for educational purposes.  Is the copyright owner likely to complain about something like this?  Dream Focus 10:44, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Who knows if they qualify as fair use or not? There hasn't been a substantive court case for stuff like this. In practice, the vast majority of computer companies don't make money from selling manuals, let alone old manuals. For example, we have lots of links to ancient Intel manuals that aren't on Intel's site. Intel does have all new manuals for free on their site, but it would cost them pretty money (just in the scanning cost, never mind bandwidth) to put all their stuff from the 80's there, and it's extremely likely that wouldn't generate any new sales for them. So they have little incentive to do archival like that. As long as such old manuals are hosted on a fairly reputable source (e.g. bitsavers, at the University of Stuttgart ), which we can assume would remove them if they received DMCA notices, then I think it's fine to link to them. It's really not that different from linking to archive.org, probably the greatest WP:LINKVIO machine, but tolerated in practice (in no small part because they comply with DMCA request). Someone not using his real name (talk) 09:59, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

text: By the way, the linkvio tags were added by User:Elegie, who hasn't commented here yet. Someone not using his real name (talk) 10:19, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

text: Although the manuals may be out of print, it is not at all clear that linking to complete copies even for the purpose of reference is a fair use. Under the WP:LINKVIO policy, it appears that archives that "host unmodified archived copies of webpages taken at various points in time" are something of a special case (it is noted that the copyright status of such archives in the US is unclear) in that it is permissible to link to them, at least currently; the Wayback Machine at archive.org falls in this category although it is not the case that all the other materials at archive.org are in the same category. From what one can tell, if a page has content that is known to be infringing, then linking to an archived copy of the page via the Wayback Machine might be problematic whereas linking to an archived copy of a page that is not known to contain infringing content would be OK under the current policy. Also, from what one understands, the Wayback Machine may sometimes acquire content to archive in an automated fashion which could make it easier for Archive.org to claim that the archived content is of third-party origin and thus within the DMCA safe harbor. It is not clear that uploading copyrighted content (such as a printed manual) in its entirety to a Web page is comparable to archiving publicly accessible Web pages along with providing a means to go from one version to another (which is sort of what the Wayback Machine does.) --Elegie (talk) 06:51, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Do you have a source for your claim that full-scale (not google snippet) copying of web pages has unclear copyright status in the US, as opposed to scanned material? Someone not using his real name (talk) 17:19, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  copyright violation? 

message: In the intro section it says, "Contrary to common belief, it was not the first personal computer to offer a graphical user interface in a machine aimed at individual business users."
Further down the article states, "It was the very first personal computer system with a graphical user interface (GUI) to be sold commercially."
Which is it?
2601:643:8101:6A37:60AC:5CFC:8867:1970 (talk) 08:49, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  First GUI or not? 

message: "In the Lisa system, users use stationery to begin using an application"
It's not mentioned what stationery is, in this context. Mazz0 (talk) 09:28, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I answered this by adding a section about it. It's surprising that it was missing since the document-oriented paradigm of Lisa is a dramatic difference from the later, and arguably regressive, Mac and Windows program-centric models.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.77.193.137 (talk) 10:20, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The section is called Task-oriented workflow and it's the polar opposite of today's common anti-productivity practice of pairing obscure names with corporation names (e.g. Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox). For Lisa, the task (productivity) is king — not who made the, often bizarrely-named, software. It's a quaint old notion. The world is apparently more interested in emotion.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.77.193.137 (talk) 10:31, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stationery? 

message: Quoting:
"The legacy of the Lisa is that of a large failure spawning generations of success elsewhere. Why Apple missed the mark so thoroughly twice in a row is a question that may never be adequately answered. Once can be chalked up to bad luck, but twice means that there's a problem. Lisa's most enduring legacy has little to do with computers, and everything to do with corporate governance."
That sounds like an editorial to me and doesn't really fit an encyclopedic tone. I didn't remove it but honestly it could do without that passage in an already questionable (in my opinion) section of the article. 47.196.67.235 (talk) 02:33, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Legacy section 

message: Lisa is described as a "commercial failure for Apple". However it's also said that there were "total sales of almost $1 billion against a development cost of $50 million" - this doesn't sound like a commercial failure to me. Zin92 (talk) 08:13, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commercial failure 

message: Was it Canon? I read about which one it was and can't remember.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.77.193.137 (talk) 08:38, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Third party responsible for the ProFile 

message: The article currently says (bolded for ease of seeing the quote) The Apple Lisa was a commercial failure for Apple, the largest since the failure of the Apple III of 1980. Apple sold approximately 10,000 Lisa machines at a price of US$9,995 (equivalent to about $25,100 in 2018), generating total sales of $100 million against a development cost of more than $150 million. What I don't understand is how the $9,995 sales are presented here as the totality of Lisa sales, since Apple cut the price heavily for Lisa 2 and there were a variety of price points. For example, Lisa 2 could be purchased with 512K of RAM and no hard disk. Lisa 2/10 was 1 MB of RAM and a 10 MB hard disk. Then, there was Macintosh XL, which is Lisa with a different name, the changed ROM, and the square pixel mod — very small differences. So, can anyone clarify what the article is claiming? How many Lisa systems Apple sold at the debut price point is one figure but hardly the totality of Lisa sales. Was the totality of Lisa system sales, at all price points and incarnations, below the investment costs? How much money did Apple actually make from the initial price point sales (Lisa 1)? How much was that in comparison with the sales after Lisa 1? How much did Apple lose with the free upgrades to Lisa 2?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.77.193.137 (talk) 09:15, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: In fact, when the Lisa 2 debuted, I believe Apple offered three or four configurations: Lisa 2 with 512K RAM and no hard disk (aka Lisa 2), Lisa 2 with 512K RAM and 5 MB hard disk, Lisa 2 with 1 MB of RAM and 5 MB hard disk (aka Lisa 2/5), and Lisa 2 with 1 MB RAM and 10 MB ProFile (aka Lisa 2/10). This was prior to the sale of Widget-containing 2/10 models. I think when Widget hit then the 2/10 ProFile model was dropped. This is all vague recollection. However, obviously all of those sales have little to do with the original price point of Lisa 1. And, then we have Mac XL as well.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.77.193.137 (talk) 09:23, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing claim about commercial failure, please clarify 

message: Any additional sources for estimated sales data? Citation one states 10,000 units. Citation three states 60,000 units. The article has discrepancy on units sold. ShadyCrack (talk) 02:13, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unit sales data 

message: Info Box states 10k units sold, while the article states 60k… I’m confused Gumby-andrit (talk) 02:36, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: As per , the citations themselves appear to disagree on this. Guy Harris (talk) 19:51, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  How many units sold?