Apple Lisa
(w/ external hard drive)

After college I wound up at a miserable job working for a small company that leased copy and fax equipment. They would also lease computer equipment from time to time, and whenever something got reposessed they always told me to check it out and tell them what it was worth. They assumed that since I was a computer programmer that I must also be a computer appraiser too. I always told them that I had no such training, and it was not in my job description anyway. But they kept right on asking me.

Then one day an Apple Lisa showed up in the office. Once again they told me to check it out and tell them what it was worth. I decided to take it home. If anyone ever asked about it I would bring it back home again. If no one did, then it was mine. Well guess what. I still have it.

Unfortunately it was never in usable condition. It had an external hard drive, but no cable to connect it, and no diskettes to boot from. And when the monitor came on there was a scary squeeky noise, like leaking eletromagnetic radiation. So it was only ever just shelf candy for me.

The Apple Lisa never played an important role in my computer geek history, but as time went on I developed an appreciation for the role it played in the history of desktop computing. Although the Macintosh was the first point-and-click computer I'd ever seen, it was the Lisa that broke the ice.

Actually Xerox deserves the real credit. Back when computers were starting to come into their own, the "paper free" office was the vision of the future. Xerox, who had built its empire on paper, decided they should get into the electronic document processing game. To their immesurable credit, they actually did a little research into the issue of human/computer interaction. Inspired by the demonstrations of Alan Kay and his Learning Research Group in the early 1970's, and built upon earlier creative work by Doug Englebart at Stanford Research Institute and Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah in the 1960's, Xerox set up their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In addition to engineers, they employed cognitive psychologists and graphics desingers. It was the first really big leap in how computers were used.

The result was the Xerox Star Workstation. It was the first computer with a mouse and point-and-click interface. Unfortunately it was also big and expensive, and it didn't sell. And by that time, Xerox was learning that computers meant more paper, not less, and they bagged the whole project.

The real beneficiaries were Steve Jobbs and Steve Wozniac at Apple. Xerox just handed all their research over to them. The result was the Apple Lisa. But like the Xerox Star, the Lisa was too big and too expensive, and it didn't sell. Fortunately, Jobbs and Wozniac recognized the error, and they set out to create the Macintosh, which was small and inexpensive. The rest is history.

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