Re: Lisa 1 on Ebay

I agree in general with Chandra's comments about the Lisa, but think that its lineage is really from the Xerox Star instead of the Xerox Alto. I didn't work for Xerox or Apple, but have read extensively about their early systems. The Alto from my readings was an excellent computer research platform for Xerox, but lacked a cohesive software architecture. The Star used many of the "lessons learned" from the Alto but the Star provided a very consistent software foundation that for its day was extremely advanced and was not surpassed until the 1990s when software technologies such as Apple's OpenDoc were developed.

For a great discussion of someone who actually worked at both Xerox and Apple see the following comments by Bruce Horn who worked on the Maintosh Finder (comments by Jef Raskin, founder Apple's Macintosh projet, are also here):

http://www.starway.org/~arnaud/Raskin

Apple's 1984 "Lisa architecture" paper by the Lisa's software manager Bruce Daniels is also a great read:

xxxx

• David Craig

On Jan 18, 2010, at 9:32 AM, chandra bajpai wrote:

> What make a Lisa-1 interesting, especially for me is the lineage.
> The Lisa is a direct discendant of the fabled Xerox Alto. Larry
> Tesler and team left Apple to build the first widely available GUI
> machine with integrated applications, multitasking, 32-bit OS etc.
> IMHO Lisa was ahead of it's time.

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