I owned a Lisa when I was in high school (my first "business" was buying, repairing, and selling computers, and I found it at a garage sale).
It was pretty neat, but I already had an Amiga by then (then being 1989 or so), so wasn't particularly impressed. What did amaze me, however, was the price of the thing. The fellow I bought it from had all the receipts for everything: $10k for the Lisa, $7.5k for a 10GB hard disk, $5k for a 5GB hard disk, and about $5k worth of software and ancillary stuff, if I recall correctly. This sum seemed unbelievably large to me back then...and it was more than the purchase price of both of my parents cars combined.
The external hard disks were absolutely massive, and had huge cables. The other thing I remember is how godawful slow the thing was. It took forever to boot, and starting applications took forever. Since it didn't multi-task (which I had already become addicted to using my Amiga), switching between applications was an exercise in frustration. And, of course, since the Lisa existed for a very short time before the first Mac arrived, it wasn't really a machine one could get software for anymore. The screen was kinda tiny, too.
When we went to the Computer History Museum my girlfriend got a chuckle out of my excitement in the "PC" corner of the museum...I kept exclaiming, "ooh, I had one of those!"
It was pretty neat, but I already had an Amiga by then (then being 1989 or so), so wasn't particularly impressed. What did amaze me, however, was the price of the thing. The fellow I bought it from had all the receipts for everything: $10k for the Lisa, $7.5k for a 10GB hard disk, $5k for a 5GB hard disk, and about $5k worth of software and ancillary stuff, if I recall correctly. This sum seemed unbelievably large to me back then...and it was more than the purchase price of both of my parents cars combined.
The external hard disks were absolutely massive, and had huge cables. The other thing I remember is how godawful slow the thing was. It took forever to boot, and starting applications took forever. Since it didn't multi-task (which I had already become addicted to using my Amiga), switching between applications was an exercise in frustration. And, of course, since the Lisa existed for a very short time before the first Mac arrived, it wasn't really a machine one could get software for anymore. The screen was kinda tiny, too.
When we went to the Computer History Museum my girlfriend got a chuckle out of my excitement in the "PC" corner of the museum...I kept exclaiming, "ooh, I had one of those!"