Nice! Brings back great memories of the first time I saw a Lisa. It was in a regular computer store in early 1983, shortly after the Lisa went into wide retail release. Playing with the Lisa for a few minutes was one of those powerful epiphanies that had tremendous impact on me. It happened to arrive at the perfect time in my development because I was ready to understand what it meant.
I was just around two years into owning and using my first computer which had a sub-1 Mhz, 8-bit CPU and 4K (though I'd upgraded it to 16k by this time). I'd taught myself to program in BASIC from the manuals and by modifying program listings I'd typed in from magazines. Then I taught myself assembly language and was just starting to run into the harsh limits of color, resolution and speed when I saw the Lisa.
The Lisa was not only my first experience with a WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer), it was my first awareness of the concept - and it instantly expanded my horizons of what a computer could be, unleashing a torrent of new ideas, possibilities and questions. That night I went home and started working on writing a simple windowing graphical user interface on my 8-bit computer. For several months I spent all my spare time working on it. And as my first extensive 'from scratch' assembly language program that tried to actually to do hard things (instead of just being a quick demo or code test), I learned an enormous amount - from making my own bitmap font and text renderer to optimized line drawing and synchronized screen refresh. I was determined to recreate a passable version of the 'zooming' window outline and eventually nailed it. Interestingly, the few minutes I spent with the Lisa was apparently enough to "get it" because I never went back to see it again in the following months, despite the store being quite close by.
The other thing I remember is the $8,000 price tag being essentially incomprehensible to me. It was by far the most expensive computer I'd ever even heard of, much less seen. That was as much as a fairly nice new car! The computer I had was the cheapest available at $400. Computers I wished I could get (the Atari 800 and C64) were $600-$700. The most expensive computers I was specifically aware of were $1500-$2000 (Apple II / IBM PC). $8000 was hard for my teenaged self to even process.
I was just around two years into owning and using my first computer which had a sub-1 Mhz, 8-bit CPU and 4K (though I'd upgraded it to 16k by this time). I'd taught myself to program in BASIC from the manuals and by modifying program listings I'd typed in from magazines. Then I taught myself assembly language and was just starting to run into the harsh limits of color, resolution and speed when I saw the Lisa.
The Lisa was not only my first experience with a WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer), it was my first awareness of the concept - and it instantly expanded my horizons of what a computer could be, unleashing a torrent of new ideas, possibilities and questions. That night I went home and started working on writing a simple windowing graphical user interface on my 8-bit computer. For several months I spent all my spare time working on it. And as my first extensive 'from scratch' assembly language program that tried to actually to do hard things (instead of just being a quick demo or code test), I learned an enormous amount - from making my own bitmap font and text renderer to optimized line drawing and synchronized screen refresh. I was determined to recreate a passable version of the 'zooming' window outline and eventually nailed it. Interestingly, the few minutes I spent with the Lisa was apparently enough to "get it" because I never went back to see it again in the following months, despite the store being quite close by.
The other thing I remember is the $8,000 price tag being essentially incomprehensible to me. It was by far the most expensive computer I'd ever even heard of, much less seen. That was as much as a fairly nice new car! The computer I had was the cheapest available at $400. Computers I wished I could get (the Atari 800 and C64) were $600-$700. The most expensive computers I was specifically aware of were $1500-$2000 (Apple II / IBM PC). $8000 was hard for my teenaged self to even process.