The Lisa: Apple's Most Influential Failure (2023)

I used one casually at "Systime", a UK DEC OEM. The research department where I had a desk was run by John Bondi, the son of Herman Bondi, a genius Astrophyicist who backed the wrong horse in "steady state" universe theory. Systime R&D got their hands on one, and made it available for people to play on. I didn't code on it but I had fun in the paint program.

There was a bootstrap dependency on the UCSD-p system which ran on Apple hw and meant a compiler existed which could be tooled to write Lisa code in Pascal. Compared to UCSD-p Lisa was chalk-and-cheese. Tool you make things with not the same as tool they become.

I have to say, alongside the Vax 11/780 we were coding network stacks on, the lisa was just amazing. It was completely intuitive, although I did watch and follow the on-lisa video presentation on how to use it.

I have no idea where they got it from because the Lisa was not easy to buy in the UK. I never saw another one after that. I used an ICL (three rivers) Perq for a while, and I think Lisa was riffing on ideas expressed in that machine and in the symbolics LISP machine and the XEROX Parc work. The future exploded into workstations shortly after. Whitechapel and others.

Systime had other cool things, like metal stripe guided 4 wheel robotic shuttles to carry the production process between stages. I mean now that would be an autonomous AI system with vision but at the time it was really simple to just lay down some metal tape on the floor and give them guidance on how to deal with low bandwidth radar "you are in my path" signals.

Systime went under, they were involved in a scam breaching the ITAR regulations selling DEC compatible stuff to the USSR, and in copying DEC IPR in hardware beyond the licence agreement. The headquarters was an iconic 1980s Leeds building and features in the 1985 TV series dystopian nuclear thriller "edge of darkness".

The Lisa 2 series with the Sony 3.5" floppy drives was able to run Macintosh software via an emulator.