Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. โค๏ธ

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

kottke.org posts about lisa

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 โ€” at least in the form we have it today โ€” 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:


An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner.

An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner. While you digest the awesomeness of that, it’s interesting to note how consistent Apple has been under Steve Jobs in their message and approach…the emphasis on non-traditional business uses of computers in the Lisa ad and the whole iLife philosophy go together quite well. (via the house next door)


Long profile of Steve Jobs on the

Long profile of Steve Jobs on the eve of his fourth act written by John Heilemann, who is one of my favorite technology/culture writers. I’m dying to find out what past Jobs-championed Apple product the iPhone will most resemble: the Lisa or the iPod?