Apple's First Flops

Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."

Re:Classic tech support advise!

[Anaphiel]

I had an Amiga 500 with the 500K RAM expansion, which used to short out against the RF shielding in the case on a daily basis. "Lift up the front right corner about and inch and drop it" was the official Commodore method for dealing with it.

Re:Hot Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would he object to putting a fan in it? Did he think it'd make too much noise?

Absolutely. In this day of multi-ghz processors and video cards requiring their own cooling, people forget what it's like to have a dead silent computer. Remember back then that many/most computers didn't even have hard disks, so unless you were accessing the floppy, there was no noise at all. Notice that he made the same edict when it came to the original Mac's.

What a concept! Usually when you drop things, they break. But when you drop an Apple, well, it just works (TM).

Actually this was a common problem with all computers of that era. Wasn't uncommon at all to have chips work their way loose, esp new computers. I'd get new units and the first thing I'd do is re-seat all the socketed chips, esp the memory dips as trouble shooting your computer locking up or randomly rebooting (ahhh, some things never change do they?) because one of your 36 64k dips was loose was not fun.

Re:Hot Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would he object to putting a fan in it? Did he think it'd make too much noise?

Bingo. That's why the original Mac also lacks a fan, and I'm guessing why the original DV iMacs did away with the fan.

Larry Tesler was never CEO.

[allanc]

FTFA:
>where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)

Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.

Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...

The original killer app.

[Anonymous Coward]

but Apple never really got any sort of hold in the business market
Visicalc [bricklin.com] nearly did that. But since IBM had yet to legitimize personal computers with their "entry level systems," PCs were still looked upon by the business community as hobbyist toys.

Here's a better list of flops...

[beetle496]

Here's a nice list of real (ongoing?) flops: LEM Road Apples [lowendmac.com] They include the G4 Cube which, along with the Apple /// and Lisa, I would argue the only failure was the unrealisticly high MSRP.

Apple IIGS?

[master_p]

Wasn't that [oldcomputers.net] a flop?

Re:Hot Product

[jellomizer]

I remember my old Amstrad 8086 512k. When it wasn't accessing the drives The system was silant-minus a high pitch sound coming from the monitor, whenever it had to change what it was displaying). Modern computers with CRTs may do the same thing but with the fans I just cant tell. Even my laptop makes more noise then the Amstrad. About 5 years ago I powed back the amstrad and I was amazed how silent it was. I thought it wasn't going to boot because I wasn't hearing anything in the time it takes to power up the monitor and for it to display "Wait...."

Not too well researched, like full of errors:

[Ancient_Hacker]

Some errors in the article:

• It was the "Sophisticated" Operating System".
• The clock chip in the Apple III was unreliable, but that wasnt Apple's fault, it was an intrinsic problem with the IC.
• It's doubtful that the Apple III got hot enough to unseat the chips.
• It would be nearly impossible to add a fan to the Apple III without a major hack job on the case, power supply, and the large rear heatsink. It's not something that could be just tacked on.
• Jobs did insist the Mac would have no fan.
• Bill Atkinson did not work at PARC.

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[deaddrunk]

x86 isn't good hardware, it's cheap hardware available from a number of vendors or buildable yourself. That's a big reason for its success.

Re:Not too well researched, like full of errors:

[lseltzer]

It's not Apple's fault that they used an unreliable IC? Strange logic here.

My company (DeskTop Softare Corp, out of business now) wrote software for the III and it failed because there were a large number of 100% out of the box failures. The hardware stunk. Who can we possibly blame other than Apple?

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[TrueJim]

Apple's PCs never got a strong hold in the business market, but once upon it's most powerful machine did:

From Wikipedia: "The Apple LaserWriter was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. Combined with GUI-based programs like Adobe PageMaker on the Macintosh, it is generally considered to have sparked the Desktop publishing (DTP) revolution in the mid-1980s.

Unlike models from HP, which had been introduced a few months earlier and used their proprietary PCL printing language, the LaserWriter included the PostScript page description language which allowed for far more complex graphics, high-resolution bitmap graphics, outline fonts, and generally much better-looking output.

The use of PostScript comes at a cost. Unlike PCL and other early printer control languages, PostScript is a complete programming language and requires a complete computer to run it. In the case of the LaserWriter this was a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12MHz, making it the fastest machine in Apple's lineup, and the most expensive at $6,995 when it was introduced in late 1985."

Re:Classic tech support advise!

[putaro]

Yah, it would. Cray's of the time were running a 10ns (100 Mhz) clock. We usually assumed speed-of-electricity in copper at about 1 ft/ns. Cray's are big machines and you can get pretty close to the edge of signal propogation so lopping off a few inches of wire here and there could and does tune things. Don't forget that you need to get everything done in 10 ft of wire (minus how ever many gates it went through on the way) or your signal shows up late.

Except that you are wrong

[jscotta44]

If the X86 hardware is faster, then why doesn't it outperform the Xserve clusters using Mac OS X and standard Apple hardware? Don't mistake bad benchmarking for good data. Don't believe me, go to the Super Computer web site (http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=1 1 [top500.org]) where 5 of the top nine are PowerPC hardware. Number 7 on the list is built by using stock Xserves ordered directly from the on-line Apple Store and running Macintosh OS X. And, there are even faster Apple clusters in the wild that didn't even bother to try to compete for a ranking. These are not marketing ploys. These are very expensive machines that are optimized to go as fast as they can to get the job done. No political bias...just go fast. The only X86 cluster in the list above a ranking of 9 has nearly twice the number of processors as the Virginia Tech cluster. Maybe you should spend a little less time pounding out Visual Basic programs and do some actual research before making statements like that.

Re:Not too well researched, like full of errors:

[hawk]

>It's doubtful that the Apple III got hot enough to unseat the chips.

That would make it difficult to explain why Apple recommended lifting the machine two inches and dropping it to reseat them . . . you can argue for a different cuase, but that was Apple's explanation back then . . .

hawk

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[Spark00]

they did NOT buy "25%" of Apple. they invested $150 million. which is not anywhere CLOSE to a tenth of one per cent of the value of the company. And i doubt that anyone would sign an agreement to not compete with another company for such a paltry sum.(proof is the spat over IE & Safari - MS won't develop a new IE because they're snitty over Apple competing with them using safari.) The fact is probably as an earlier poster suggested, that Apple can control their environment with their own hardware & software together. while selling an OS and allowing any schmuck to build a system. I swear half the problems people have with PCs is that you have 89 different vendors's stuff inside and no one company will take responsibility for it. With a Mac, you may have a million vendors (my Sony HD died in my ibook) but Apple is on the hook for it. You'll never get the "it's not our equipment" excuse. It's my guess that that is the real reason Apple won't licence. because all of a sudden the vaunted "it just works, it's so elegant" feature of using the Mac OS is in danger of not being true.

What garbage...

[sillivalley]

I was working for another micro company when the Apple /// was first shown. When I saw it, and the double-shot-molded keys with word processor commands on them, I thought, "We're screwed!"

4 months later, I was working at Apple -- before the company went public. Oh, everyone already had badges. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Apple ///, good, bad, ugly. The clock problem was caused by National Semiconductor. The clock battery problem was Apple's, and was fixed in the reintroduced /// by replacing the watch batteries (mounted to the logic board, requiring disassembly to replace) with 3 AA cells under the lid. The infamous memory problem was caused by cheapskates in purchasing buying cheap connectors -- tin on tin, and tin oxide is a tenacious insulator!

Was the /// a failure? If you measured it in terms of Apple ][ sales, yes. If you measure it in terms of what it did to other companies/competitors, it was a success. And as others have mentioned, senior management felt it necessary to have the /// on the market prior to going public to show people that Apple was more than a one-trick pony.

The Apple /// also marked the first system that was actually engineered, as opposed to one that just happened. Hardware engineers, Software engineers, development plans, test plans -- a great leap forward.

And Lisa? May not have sold a lot of machines, but it was a technological milestone, introducing new ideas to the computing public. It was a stepping stone for the Macintosh -- that's where the Mac project got Bill Atkinson and the Quickdraw core.

Apple flops? They're there, but many stem from over-reaching technically -- the Twiggy disk drive for example. Many didn't have enough backing, or enough spine -- eWorld? Open Doc?

How about pushing products out the door before they're ready? Apple /// rings the bell. I also remember the morning we found out that our sugar-water selling chairman had just decided to keynote a presentation in about 6 weeks by showing the Newton -- about 6 months too early!

Many failures at Apple were products or ideas which were ahead of their time -- part of Lisa's problem. Newton fits into that category, ahead of its time and born prematurely. So does Web TV -- it didn't "fit" with the then Apple model, so Steve P and others took it outside, made it fly, eventually selling it to Gates.

Another example of Apple's "mistakes" and "failures" -- businesses other companies find very attractive.

Re:Apple is a 2.0 or 3.0 company most of the time.

[Logic Bomb]

I've now seen several comments that the Lisa led to the Macintosh. That is a mischaracterization. The two machines were being developed at the same time! Check out Revolution In The Valley by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the members of the original Mac development team. It's a fun book, but it also will show you that the Lisa and Mac teams were in fact competing with each other and hardly communicated. Steve Jobs had a great deal to do with this. It's certain that some of the same basic ideas were inspiration for both groups, but it's not like the Lisa was developed, then Apple decided to develop the Mac based on it.

Re:Sounds reasonable.

[Gleng]

If the mini's all started to exhibit failures and poor workmanship than that would harm the crossover (new mac users) market more than anything the competition could hope for.

Strangely enough, that seems to be happening [xlr8yourmac.com].

I've been drooling over screenshots/reviews of OS X for ages now (Unix? Nice interface?), and I was pretty much ready to shell out for a Mini as my first Mac until I saw that report -- and many others like them [google.co.uk].

It's a shame, but I don't really want to shell out £350+ with the risk that I won't be able to use it with my monitor. I guess I'll just keep looking for a cheap, second-hand G4 PowerMac on eBay.

Or I might just completely flip my lid and buy a new Amiga [stellardreams.co.uk]. :)