Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The clear forerunner of the Macintosh was Apple's Lisa - one of the very first GUI-
based machines - for which Apple launched development in 1978. According to official
Apple history, this name was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture,"
though folklore says the machine was named for Steve Jobs' daughter, Lisa, born that
year. But per Apple programmer Andy Hertzfeld, the acronym was actually reverse en-
gineered from the name "Lisa" in autumn 1982 by the Apple marketing team. Privately,
Hertzfeld and the other developers used "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym," which they
called a "recursive backronym." Meanwhile, industry pundits went with: "Let's Invent
Some Acronym."
When the Lisa issued in 1983 it was pricey at around $10,000 (nevertheless signific-
antly cheaper than its closest competitor, the Xerox Star, released in 1981 with a price of
approximately $17,000). Neither machine proved successful. The Lisa sold only an anemic
100,000 units in the course of two years. In addition to its high price as compared to the
IBM PC and Apple II, the machine was slow running - this due to an overly large and com-
plex operating system which proved a burden on the 5MHz CPU. Per Ceruzzi: "Raskin's
Macintosh would preserve the Lisa's best features but sell at a price that Apple II customers
could afford."
Apple introduced the Mac with a still much talked about television commercial directed
by Ridley Scott. This aired in January of 1984 during the Super Bowl. As CNET's Caroline
Murphy recalls: "[The commercial] began, in a clear nod to George Orwell's novel [ 1984 ],
with tense strains of music, the image of figures marching through a tube across a dank
industrial complex, and the start of a bizarre monologue: 'Today we celebrate the first glori-
ous anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.' ... Scores of blank-faced people
are fixated on a broadcast of a Big Brother figure on a giant television screen, until a wo-
man in bright athletic apparel sprints down a center aisle, wielding a hammer. She hurls
it at the screen, which explodes into a bright white light. The expressions on the faces in
the crowd morph into fascination." Interestingly, the ad made absolutely no mention of the
Mac, and never showed either the machine or its revolutionary interface.
Priced at $2,495, the first Mac was significantly more expensive than the IBM PC, but
was also obviously a premium product far above and beyond the PC. As Ceruzzi writes:
"The Mac's elegant system software was its greatest accomplishment. It displayed a com-
bination of aesthetic beauty and practical engineering that is extremely rare." Most im-
portantly, at a time when computers in general were completely new to most users, the
Macintosh offered an easy, intuitive, non-threatening interface for deploying and maximiz-
ing powerful business applications.
Although the hardware was expensive as compared to the PC, employers could count
on considerably fewer man-hours being spent by novice "virgin" users getting up to speed
on the desktop. It is important to remember that this was a time well before the advent
of Microsoft Windows, when much of the power a PC offered was delivered via an ar-
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