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Comment by twoWhlsGud

5 days ago

I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.

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twoWhlsGud

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cmrdporcupine  5 days ago

Yes this is exactly my point. The Mac was a semi-expedient branching point in an effort to get an idea to market, but that's not really the sum of it. Choices were clearly made for personal and political reasons, and it cost Apple 10 years later when it had no answer for Windows NT or Unix.

And I don't think it was about "worse is better" -- they shipped the org chart, really, forked a new team under Jobs to make a "like Lisa but cheap" but it wasn't just "but cheap", it was 100% incompatible, and sacrificed on basic engineering fundamentals.

It also makes no sense to me. The Lisa hardware was expensive, but I think LisaOS could have been made to run on less expensive hardware by jettisoning features, and then picked up again later. Instead because of personalities and org chart they went and made a completely incompatible other-thing that looked like LisaOS without being it, duplicating effort and creating internal ill will, and short circuiting potential futures.

Anyways, Jobs profited it off it twice. Ego satisfaction with shipping the Mac, and killing off the Lisa -- his grudge/nemesis. And then again when Apple was forced to come to him 10 years later and buy NeXTstep because of what Jobs had done in 84.

Larry Tesler is spinning in his grave somewhere.