Apple Lisa 1

From: Teo Zenios <teoz_at_neo.rr.com>
Date: Tue Nov 11 13:10:26 2003

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf_at_siconic.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 1:57 PM
Subject: RE: Apple Lisa 1


> On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Hans Franke wrote:
>
> > > Also, out of the 70,000 or so Lisa 1s that were sold most of them
would've
> > > been upgraded to a Lisa 2 during Apple's free upgrade period, and
%deity%
> > > knows how many were tossed over time.
> >
> > Now we got a number. I'd go for 5% as a bet, that makes some 3.5K (or
> > still 1.4 K if we just use Sallams 2%) ... now ther must be 99% of them
> > beeing trashed to come to Sallams 30 Units. I can't belive that.
>
> I question the 70,000 figure. I highly doubt Apple sold that many Lisa
> 1's.
>
> >
> > > I'm one of the million nutters who wants one and has done since
> > > 1983.....it's my ultimate machine, though truth be told I'd probably
be even
> > > more scared to turn it on than I am my Lisa 2 :)
> >
> > Now that I can't agree on. What's a machine that you don't turn on?
> >
> > A pice of junk metal!
> >
> > Ok, given that I don't have the time to play with all of my machines
> > on a regulary base,but if I take one out, it will get powered up.
> > No mater if it's just a C64, an MZ80, or my KIM#1. It's one of the
> > reasons why I collect, I want to play around with all of the nice
> > toys I ever wanted to have.
> >
> > Gruss
> > H.
> > --
> > VCF Europa 5.0 am 01./02. Mai 2004 in Muenchen
> > http://www.vcfe.org/
> >
>
> --
>
> Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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>
This site mentions 10,000 for the twiggy, and  80,000 units sold for the
Lisa 2 series:
http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apple/lisa2.php
Twiggy!
Unfortunately for Apple, Lisa had an achilles heel. Or two. Yes she was
groundbreaking, but bugger me did she cost - $9999 - although when you add
up the individual cost of the components and technology it wasn't THAT bad.
After all, how much did 1mb of RAM cost in those days? The 2nd and 3rd
problems were to be her downfall. She used proprietary 880K double sided 5
1/4 inch floppy drives called 'Twiggy' because they were so thin (named
after the 60's model of the same name). While they were an excellent design
in themselves they were prone to repeated failure apparently because of the
unique way they read data from the floppy. An extra read/write hole was
created opposite the 'normal' one; rather than have a read/write head on
either side of the disk surface at the front like the DEC RX50 the Twiggy
had one side reading from the front and the other side reading from the
back!
3rd and final problem was that there was little software available other
than Lisa Office System 7/7 which contained the aforementioned applications.
She also took ages to boot. Things were helped with the ProFile external
hard drive from the Apple 3, which could store a whopping 5 MEGABYTES of
data....hell of a lot in those days....but not by much. Only 10,000 were
sold.
Apple's answer was a free upgrade to the Lisa 2, which lost half the memory
and the Jobs-designed Twiggy drives (Apple never made another floppy drive
themselves) replacing them with a single Sony 3 1/2 inch 400K floppy that
still talked to the Twiggy routines by virtue of an interface card called
the 'Lisa Lite'. Also there were now 3 models of Lisa - the bog-standard 2,
the 2/5 (with the Profile) and the 2/10 which had the original megabyte of
RAM and an internal 10mb hard drive called the Widget. They also slashed the
cost to $3495 according to the bumf I've got here, or $4495 if you wanted
the 2/5. It must've worked because Apple sold upwards of 80,000 machines. I
also wish the people I bought mine from had forked out the extra grand for
the 2/5 *g*. Lisa 2 could only run MacWorks since LisaOS needs more
available at any one time that a 400K floppy could provide, Lisa 2/5
couldn't run all of the OS owing to not having the full complement of
memory, Lisa 2/10 could do it all but still cost over 5 and a half grand.
TZ

Received on Tue Nov 11 2003 - 13:10:26 GMT