Talk:Apple Lisa
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Any objection to renaming this to Apple Lisa? --Brion
- Rather than objecting, I think it's an excellent idea. -- April
- I agree. We may need "LISA" for a gravity wave observatory, if the ESA gets NASA to put up their share of the money. Vicki Rosenzweig
Done. --Brion 12:41 Aug 28, 2002 (PDT)
How many Apple Lisa were built and/or sold ? ( I want to compare that number to the 25,000 units of the Xerox Star mentioned in the Xerox PARC article ).
- According to [1] (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6757/LISA2.HTML), "It is thought that roughly 11,000 Lisa 1's and 70,000 Lisa 2's (including Macintosh XL) were produced." — David Remahl 22:28, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The Lisa OS provided non-preemptive multitasking. It is a common misconception that it had preemptive multitasking, but that was only avaiable on the Lisa if you ran one of the Unix ports, such as Unisoft. --Brouhaha 21:50, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Blakespot: How is it that you claim that it is "easily verified" that the Lisa had preemptive multitasking? The Lisa operating system documentation very definitely claims otherwise; Lisa applications have to periodically yield the CPU just as was historically the case on the Macintosh. But assuming that the application is written correctly, this is transparent to the user. This is also explicitly stated to have been a deliberate design decision in the invited paper "Architecture of the Lisa Personal Computer" by Bruce Daniels, published in Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 72 No. 3, March 1984, page 335:
The CPU is multiplexed among the runnable processes by using a priority based nonpreemptive scheduling algorithm. This nonpreemptive scheduling policy guarantees correct access to shared resources, such as the bit-mapped display, by interactive processes without the performance penalty of having to explicitly lock and unlock these resources for each access.
Since Bruce Daniels was one of the developers, I consider this to be an authoritative reference in the absence of more details on your "easily verified" claim. Are you possibly confusing "preemptive multitasking" with some other concept? I'm inclined to revert your change unless you can explain why the IEEE article and the Lisa OS documentation are wrong. --Brouhaha 02:17, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I know the truth about how the Apple Lisa got its name. One of my uncles told me (he works for Apple.) He said that it was named after Steve Jobs' daughter, so I reworded it to make it clear that somebody around here knows the truth (while still keeping to NPOV policies.) Scott Gall 10:20, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Many Apple employees (and former employees) that worked on Lisa "know the truth", yet just as many vehemently deny the story about Jobs' daughter as confirm it. It's going to take more than a single anecdotal report from one (unnamed thus unverifiable) employee to confirm it. Thus I've reverted the change unil there is something more authoritative. --Brouhaha 19:19, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Officially, the LISA was "Local Integrated Software Architecture". This has to be accepted since it is all that Apple are likely to officially admit. I'm troubled by "shrouded in mystery" as it is cliched and not really accurate. The truth is fairly simple: it had an official definition, obvious unofficial significance which possibly came first and option three is thrown in for humour. Mattisgoo 01:42, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Where are the other LISAs buried? which landfill, and have any of them been dug up? --????
Reportedly somewhere in Utah. I've always thought that the story was somewhat dubious. When Apple renamed the Lisa 2/10 to be "Macintosh XL", and supplied it with the square pixel mod preinstalled and MacWorks on the hard drive, it sold quite well. They were doing this to try to clear out the inventory, and reportedly they ran out of them. If that's true, why would they have buried any?
Secondly, they had an existing business relationship with Sun Remarketing, which purchased and resold other Apple obsolete/overstock items. Sun Remarketing continued to sell Lisas for some time after they were discontinued, so it's not clear why Apple would have buried any Lisas rather than just selling them to Sun Remarketing.
It's another one of those mysteries that will probably never have a satisfactory explanation. --Brouhaha 20:08, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)