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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I had a Lisa on my desk in late 1983, along with an Apple II and Apple III and later a PC/XT (not sure if that appeared before they took the Lisa away). The Lisa was for evaluation, so I wrote some reports with it but didn't get to write any code. It was ridiculously expensive, but I could tell that it represented the future of personal computing. Explaining to my friends how it worked was difficult; even the concept of a mouse, much less fonts and a bit-mapped display, was foreign to them. None of my friends even owned any kind PC so they had little to compare my description to.

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It's a shame they abandoned it so quickly for the Mac, and let that project suck away all the air in the room, or allowed a competing project like that at all instead of concentrating efforts. The Mac stole from the Lisa but just aesthetic / UX aspects, and produced something that didn't grow well over the years... no memory protection, single tasking, etc. Things that impacted them very badly in the late 80s and into the 90s when customers wanted/expected these things and System 7 did not cut it.

Lisa really was the superior platform in many ways and it really would have come down to finding a way to get prices lower through economies of scale. Another couple years and the 68k and supporting chips and RAM were way cheaper and you could make a fairly beefy machine in that class for pretty cheap (as Tramiel showed with the Atari ST.)

I remember reading the accounts of the Lisa in (I think) Softtalk when I was in high school and thinking that this sounded like an absolutely amazing system. Of course, even a $666.66 Apple ][+ was not in the cards for my family¹ so a $10,000 Lisa was never going to happen, but I still dreamt of it.

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1. Until my cousin got me a Spectravideo 318 when I was a senior in high school to write some demo programs for the local dealer, I never had a computer of my own and to get computing time I had to either show up before school or stay after and use the school computer lab, assuming it was even an option.

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