Today mark’s the 35th anniversary of the iconic Apple IIe, the first PC that can really be said to have achieved true mainstream success, but between the Apple IIe and the Mac, there was another computer: the venerable Apple Lisa, which Steve Jobs named after his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
The Lisa was a first for Apple in many ways: the first Apple computer to have a GUI, and the first Apple computer to ship with a mouse… both ideas that were borrowed by Steve Jobs from his historic visit to Xerox’s PARC labs. Unfortunately, due to both its price ($10,000 new) and the repeated delays, the Lisa never took off, and was in fact almost immediately replaced by the less expensive Lisa 2.
If you’ve got a 25K bill deep wad of Washingtons, though, you can now pick up a rare Lisa 1 computer system in original box on eBay, courtesy of the same seller who put that $100K 128K Mac prototype on sale earlier this week.
In our new Apple-inspired graphic tee, Cult Of Mac reached back into the year 1983 to breathe new life into this classic Steve Jobs creation.
The Apple Lisa computer debuted with a mere $10,000 price tag, but her epic cost left her lonely with nary a desk to sit upon. We liked her sexy style and vintage look though, so partnered with Seattle indie brand Might Tees to make her sexy-curves available again on our new In Love With Lisa graphic tee.
But here’s the best part: this new tee is finely crafted and printed right here in the beautiful USA, ships worldwide, and is available now for just $25 — only .0025% her original selling price!
Back by popular demand! Cult Of Mac has a new Apple-inspired tee for all you Apple fan boys and girls, and we think you’re really going to like this one.
The Apple Lisa computer was one of Steve Jobs’s finest creations, but her cosmic $10,000 price tag made her harder to sell than the Newton. We liked her vintage style though, so we partnered with Seattle indie brand Might Tees to make her good looks available again on our new In Love With Lisa graphic tee.
Our new tee is finely crafted and printed right here in the beautiful USA, and is available now for only $25. Get one for yourself or for your cousin in Kazahkstan — these fine garments ship worldwide!
Apple co-founder and burly all-around cuddle bear Steve Wozniak was in India last week to talk to up-and-coming entrepreneurs a thing or two about becoming a technology legend, and while he was there, he gave a great interview in which he said that competing smartphones were “failures,” just like the Apple III and the Lisa.
A few weeks ago, we posted the video above to show how Apple saw Siri and the iPad coming back in 1987. We didn’t tell the story behind the video though, which is equally fascinating.
Back in 1986, Apple CEO John Sculley had a conversation with Apple Fellow Alan Kay, the revolutionary American computer scientist who coined the phrase “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Kay pointed out to Sculley that almost all of Apple’s profits at the time came from the 512K Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe’s Postscript and Apple’s LaserWriter 2.0 printer… all inventions that were lifted from Xerox PARC.
Then Kay said something chilling. “Next time, we won’t have Xerox.” Unless Apple started incubating its own great new ideas, the company would stagnate and wouldn’t have any new products down the road.
The result of Kay’s challenge to Sculley was this 1987 conceptual video of the Knowledge Navigator.
If you love the convenience of your iPhone but miss having a large slab of bakelite on your shoulder while gabbing, your angst is over. This retro-style dock marries a polished oak and brass base, an iPhone dock, and a bluetooth-equipped handset to allow you to experience a century of telecommunications in one fell swoop.
I love this little mini-episode of How It’s Made. It takes an almost antediluvian bit of tech — rolls for automated player pianos — and then shows how two Apple computers almost as ancient help make them.
If Apple Computers had been founded over a hundred years ago, not by Steve Jobs, but by Sir Digby Chicken Caesar, iTunes might very well have looked like this: the theatrophone, an 1890s invention that allowed you to “download” music into your living room, just fifty centimes per song.
Smoking Apples has published a lovely post extolling the virtues of an ancient iBook G4, which given a little TLC and a wipe-and-install has been reborn as a perfectly functional household computer.
This is a huge hack: a plucky modder has resurrected a Macintosh SE/30 using a Seagate Dockstar, a small Linux server running a 1.2GHz ARM processor, a few USB 2.0 ports and 128MB of RAM. Not only does it work as a server, but in runs a Mac emulator, and even the floppy drive works… but it reads SD cards mounted on a floppy-shaped protoboard instead of ancient 5.25 discs! He even restored the Mac to pristine condition by bathing it in chemicals to return it to its vintage, unyellowed color. Amazing!
