Apple Lisa is future-proof

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vintage_hot_mess@reddit

Bombed badly after the success of the Apple II and III. Paved the way for the emergence of the IBM PC.

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oboshoe@reddit

I was in high school and a computer enthusiast when the Apple Lisa was released. It was truly amazing. But priced at $9,995 in 1983 it was about as accessible as quantum computing is today.

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>But priced at $9,995 in 1983 it was about as accessible as quantum computing is today. *Apple Lisa* - $9,995 ($32,307.43 in 2025 inflation) *SpinQ Gemini Mini* ^‡ - $8000 to $9000 ^‡ ^Room ^temperature, ^2-qubit ^quantum ^computer

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SocialJusticeAndroid@reddit

There are personal quantum computers?

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rabindranatagor@reddit

They are available for consumers too, but you can't just walk into a Micro-Center, and buy it, yet. They are mostly bought by professional institutions (e.g.: Universities, educators, labs, elite schools, etc).

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SocialJusticeAndroid@reddit

It would be cool if we had a new “home computer” era with home quantum computers.

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TheThiefMaster@reddit

A 2 qubit system is hilariously useless when you can simulate an order of magnitude more with a conventional computer you already have using tools like e.g. https://quantumai.google/qsim

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rabindranatagor@reddit

It's already impressive that SpinQ has successfully made a quantum computer, that can run at room temperature, without having to keep the tech at near zero Kelvin, though. >A 2 qubit system is hilariously useless when you can simulate an order of magnitude more with a conventional computer you already have using tools like e.g. https://quantumai.google/qsim For now. It's just a matter of time, before they successfully upscale this to millions of qubits, in a compact form factor. I can't wait to see where this goes. :D >2 qubit system Also, this is their low end quantum computer. They have higher end ones, although those ones aren't compact, and don't run at room temperature. But we'll get there. We always do.

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revdon@reddit

A: I have a Qubit smartphone! Q: Can it play Crysis?

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Velocityg4@reddit

So, can I cluster them for a 2,000 cubit quantum computer which stomps supercomputers?

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Accurate-Minimum-465@reddit

not furlong

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Sudden-Variation-809@reddit

finally, an affordable computer that both can and can't run doom

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Viharabiliben@reddit

It was partially targeted to software developers. A software business would buy a few of these to develop software for the upcoming Mac which was released a year later. For a software development company this was an (expensive) but necessary business expense if they wanted to start creating software for the new Mac platform.

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Seacarius@reddit

Well, that Lisa would cost you $33,117.79 in Dec. 2025 dollars.

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wiggum55555@reddit

Same price as a specced up Mac Studio today, about +$30K. No idea if the Lisa was comparable in power against it's peers of the day. I was using C64 and BBC Micro back then. *Wild to think a $100 Pi5 of today is about 40,000 times faster and 8,000 times more RAM than the Apple Lisa.*

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OptionRecent@reddit

Still out of my price range.

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dlogan3344@reddit

There's a reason the cheapest powerhouses did so well

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artinnj@reddit

Wasn’t it out of date by 1984 when Apple started converting them into Macintosh XLs?

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carpathiaman@reddit

It’s weird, I had an Apple //e in 1983 and had little to no clue that things like the Lisa or Max existed. I didn’t even start using a GUI full time until I had a 486 with Windows 3 years later.

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bebizzy@reddit

Probably some Linux distros that would run on it.

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hegedusa@reddit

I remember “Your Computer” magazine. It wasn’t exactly highly respected. It ended up concentrating more on games as I recall. It was often technically inaccurate. I am also struggling to work out who decided that beige is a good colour for computer cases. This particular Lisa looks pre-aged, left out in the sun too long!

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Schrockwell@reddit

One MILLION bytes?!

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Mortomes@reddit

Mega cool

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TheseMenArePawns@reddit

I see what you did there 😉

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Empty-Ad-5360@reddit

Was pretty cool—my dad wrote a microprocessor book and was in good with Motorola…had a Lisa in our basement for a few weeks when it first came out. Was quite a step up from the PET and Apple II! Good memories (pun intended!)

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DiskaCoyote@reddit

Whoa that’s so neat! He let you try it?

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SnooCheesecakes399@reddit

I do love my Lisa, great little computer.

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rectalhorror@reddit

There's a website that lets you run LisaOS within a browser. [https://lisagui.com/](https://lisagui.com/)

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NoMaskNoVaxReOpen@reddit

neat. i dont do apple but, neat

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curlypaul924@reddit

How does it differ from the original Macintosh System Software?

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F54280@reddit

Multitasking. Different concept of documents. Slower. Non-square pixels.

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the123king-reddit@reddit

I like my MS2000 more, and it was half the retail price of a Lisa

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OptionRecent@reddit

I have the boot disks now all I need is the hardware.

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Yeegis@reddit

“Future-proof” The internal clock doesn’t even fully count the 1990s. It stops at 1995.

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Rude-Associate2283@reddit

A computer system is only as viable as the software available to run it and the company behind it providing updates and improvements. Apple did neither. They let it die and then dumped them all into a landfill. Shameful.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

That's not what I'd read! What about the Mac XL?

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Rude-Associate2283@reddit

XL? Not marketed properly. Everything got thrown into the Mac 128k and Mac 512k (Fat Mac) marketing.

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uberRegenbogen@reddit

Because it had no future. 😕

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RealOzSultan@reddit

I remember when those things went on sale they were still $7000

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sharpied79@reddit

Amiga enters the chat.... 😉

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sputwiler@reddit

- looks at price Now I understand why my dad had an Atari ST instead. The "Jackintosh" as it was known.

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Great-Elevator3808@reddit

Yup, I was an ST Fan in the late 80's/early 90s. One of my close friends was an Apple Mac fan who insisted his Mac Classic was a better machine. He was absolutely livid to find out that my ST with Spectre GCR ran Timeworks at least twice as fast as his Mac Classic did - and with a bigger screen (still monochrome though). He also couldn't get his head around the fact that the I/O on every other 68k based machine was based on IRQ rather than the Macs software polling.

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dendawg@reddit

…and promptly heads to Europe.

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Timbit42@reddit

Smart people.

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Linux4ever_Leo@reddit

Too bad it was released with the very high price of $9,995 (about $30,000 in today's money), making it a commercial flop despite pioneering features like a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse.

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Servile-PastaLover@reddit

The first generation Macintosh released a year later. lmao only 128k ram iirc but at a tiny fraction of the Lisa's price.

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Practical-Hand203@reddit

The first generation Macintosh really wasn't very useful either, as 128K really wasn't enough a lot of vendors targeted the 512K when it released less than 8 months later, which makes the $7,600 in today's money very expensive. You needed to dole out another $2,900 if you wanted to upgrade the motherboard to the 512K model. Apple did the early adopters pretty dirty, although they seemingly simply didn't anticipate how quickly more complex software was written that required 512K.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

Appreciate the explanation! I remember a game on a floppy subtitled "for the one megabyte Macintosh" Makes me wonder when it came out.

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Practical-Hand203@reddit

That's the [Mac Plus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Plus) from 1986, which saw over ten years of OS support (up until 7.5.5 in 1996). In a way, the first modern Mac.

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TMWNN@reddit

>In a way, the first modern Mac. Indeed. Your describing the 128K as "wasn't very useful" is too kind. Even the 512K in practice requires far too many disk swaps to do anything; one only shudders at how horrible the 128K is in this regard. /u/TrannosaurusRegina , I would describe the Mac Plus with its 1MB memory as basically the equivalent of the 640K PC with two floppy drives c. 1985: A baseline with which you can do useful work, and against which much software was designed for. In addition to the aforementioned 10 years of OS support, Apple recycled the Mac Plus hardware as the SE (1987) and Classic (1990); not until the Classic II (1991) did Apple move away from the 68000 CPU and 1MB of RAM as its lowest-end hardware configuration.

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F54280@reddit

> Even the 512K in practice requires far too many disk swaps to do anything I would disagree. You could do quite a lot with it in 1985, and adding a external floppy or an HD20 made it really usable. Of course, the plus was a huge step up, in particular with 4Mb…

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TMWNN@reddit

I was thinking of the stock Fat Mac. I agree that having dual drives made it basically usable for many use cases.

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grizzlor_@reddit

Now I'm curious why the Mac Plus supports 7.5.5 but not 7.5.2. Kind of amazing that classic Mac OS ran on hardware that old in 1996. It's like Windows 95 running on a 286.

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gihutgishuiruv@reddit

I don’t think 7.5.2 ever had a 68k release. It was only for the early PCI Power Macs

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NaoPb@reddit

This reminds me of the early Intel Mac Minis that had the underperforming Core Solo processors. The price was low, but you'd wish you paid more for the upgraded model.

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TMWNN@reddit

Apple should have waited six more months to launch its Intel Macs with Core Duo. Those six months cost it and developers an untold amount of grief over the next 15 years having to deal with 32-bit x86 support.

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sputwiler@reddit

To be pedantic. Core 2. Core Solo and Core Duo were still 32-bit. Core 2 (the x64 line) came in Core 2 Solo and Core 2 Duo variants. I eventually had a Core 2 Quad destkop that I ran Mac OS X on.

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TMWNN@reddit

Thank you for the correction.

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eldofever58@reddit

IIRC, Apple also wanted the first version to ship with 512K but internal edicts and a surge in RAM pricing altered that plan. I've got a 128K, and can confirm, it's just barely usable.

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rklug1521@reddit

>surge in RAM pricing How history repeats itself

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Syzygy2323@reddit

$2400 isn’t a tiny fraction of $10k.

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ErikTheRed2000@reddit

And if you waited another year for the Mac plus then you’d get 1 megabyte

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curlypaul924@reddit

Wow, is that outpacing Moore's Law by a factor of 2?

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CVGPi@reddit

Also, later when Lisa flopped they flashed a bunch of Lisa's with Mac software as Macintosh XL. Steve Jobs (who got kicked out of the Lisa project and joined the Mac project) was real mad.

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fuzzybad@reddit

This ad belongs in r/agedlikemilk

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mallardtheduck@reddit

In fairness, the Lisa hardware was "supported" by Apple until the late 1980s with their "MacWorks" product that allowed it to run the Macintosh OS and software up to System 5.0. Apple even sold/licensed MacWorks to third-parties who added support for Systems 6 & 7, making the Lisa "usable" well into the 90s (although you'd also need a third-party RAM upgrade). Not too bad for a 1983 machine...

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adamchevy@reddit

I prefer a 5170 AT. But I have always wanted to own a Lisa. I remember when they were around $2000 for a couple years. I should have picked one up.

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curlypaul924@reddit

I have to agree -- the PC/AT had color, a faster CPU, a bigger HD, and more RAM. But in 1983 you'd be buying an XT, not an AT. For a computer available in 1983, I have always wanted to play with a Xerox Star (or even an Alto). There is something mysterious about those early GUIs. The "luggable" Kaypro 10 is a better looking machine than any of them. The "beige era" was a weird time in computer case design.

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TooManyBulborbs@reddit

"Lisa is Future-Proof" yeah right, the Lisa calendar uses a 4-bit counter, it's not Y2K compliant and can't even reach 1999 or "2000" (Y2K problem was rolling over to 1900), the Lisa calendar can only handle years 1980 to 1995. https://lisafaq.sunder.net/lisafaq-hw-io-cop421_clock.html

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SpezLuvsNazis@reddit

“ Lisa calendar can only handle years 1980 to 1995.” Same as me.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

Wow that is bad!! I didn't know that!

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hdufort@reddit

It led to the Mac. It was an early iteration.

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mikaey00@reddit

According to Adrian’s Digital Basement, there were two completely separate teams working on the Mac and the Lisa. I don’t think the Mac was intended to be the successor to the Lisa — in fact, it competed with the Mac. I think the Mac simply came later and was more successful.

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curlypaul924@reddit

Similarly, Windows 2000 was the eventual successor to Windows 95, despite it originally having been developed by a different team (Dave Cutler being in charge of the NT line and Brad Silverberg leading the development of Chicago/Windows 95).

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teknosophy_com@reddit

The irony is killing me. That beautiful machine will long outlive the "designed to be obsolete in a year" current Apples.

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curlypaul924@reddit

Makes me glad they named their visual theme Liquid Glass instead of Liquid Metal.

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ScudsCorp@reddit

Marketing!

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Jasoco@reddit

It’s funny Apple tried to revolutionize personal computing in 1983, failed miserably, and came back and succeeded a year later with a product very similar but distinct. Poor Lisa.

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curlypaul924@reddit

I wonder if there is a connection to the Video Game Crash of 1983.

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Blah-Blah-Blah-2023@reddit

Similar pattern slighly earlier with the failure of the Apple /// and the repackaging of a lot of the ideas into the //e.

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Royal_Stay_6502@reddit

I would buy a conputer for the masses and not for the classes. But that might just be me.

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Ornery-Practice9772@reddit

Unlike today where apple can overprice their products & still make bank- The $10k price tag didnt fly in 1984🤷‍♀️

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ABeardHelps@reddit

Well, it was future proof in that they were able to turn it into the Macintosh XL and keep it on the market for a few more months.

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johnklos@reddit

To be fair, it could be updated to run Mac software, so the Lisa could've been useful for several more years after that.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

True!

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Roachpile@reddit

Was it that color when it was new

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

Yes! Nice to have a reference for those who think everything was always bright white for some reason!

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mikegalos@reddit

By far a better computer than its successor. Apple would be a much different and better company had Lisa been evolved but (despite the Jobs-pushed Twiggy drives) it wasnt a Jobs program so he used his remaining influence to kill it in favor of the much worse Macintosh.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

Likewise with the Apple II (eventually)

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Bushgooher@reddit

Yes it will be. Every computer is out of date next year.

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TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

Except for eMachines of course! 😄😋

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No-Advertising-9568@reddit

Actually saw a Lisa in a junk shop, sometime in the early Nineties I think it was. They wanted about $2k, which was a fabulous lot of cash for a retired soldier.

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the123king-reddit@reddit

r/agedlikemilk

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keonyn@reddit

Heh, that certainly didn't age well. Of course, neither did the Lisa's. After watching Adrian taking his apart and repairing it over many episodes it was pretty plain just how many design flaws that computer had.

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Corrosive23@reddit

Adrian Black just did a multi part series about trying to restore one. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4tFqFVNf5LQ-OE8JGNMJQoVOmgkyTorC&si=-xoF8uMDaKEGn-k1

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710dabner@reddit

Hey, the 5mb hard drive was immense, I mean it took up the whole top of the computer.

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TravelerMSY@reddit

Fair enough. The future in computing is only about a one year.

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micjosisa@reddit

"One million bytes of internal memory". I'm sold! To think that I have been tossing around measly numbers like 16 and 32 for memory increments nowadays.

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mikegalos@reddit

As an FYI, that ad claims to be for the 1983 Lisa but is showing a Lisa 2 or Macintosh XL variant since it has the Sony 3 1/2" floppy drive rather than the original Lisa's odd 5 1/4" Twiggy drive.

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herseyhawkins33@reddit

The verge did a fascinating documentary on Lisa units being repurposed after the commerical failure for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://youtu.be/rZjbNWgsDt8?si=_kwehh1JeOWg2Tka

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compu85@reddit

I got to help slightly with that documentary. They did a fantastic job.

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ChocolateSpecific263@reddit

it was not future proof, they just didnt made money with cpu extensions and due this you could atleast use youre machine until it was too slow

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HernBurford@reddit

I love the marketing move that proved the computer is FUTURE-PROOF with a tear-off paper desk calendar.

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