Chris%USC-ECLB%sri-nic@sri-unix.UUCP (01/26/84)
From: Christopher Ho <Chris%USC-ECLB@sri-nic> I haven't had a chance to see Apple's Mac yet, but I have seen the advertisements...But tell me, does anyone know anything about the Lisa 2, Lisa 2/5 and Lisa 2/10? I saw these mentioned in an article in today's Wall Street Journal. Prices are ~$3500, ~$4500 and ~$5500. Do these incorporate anything revolutionary (faster processor maybe?) or are they just repackaged for the lower price? Chris Ho -------
andrew@orca.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) (02/01/84)
"I haven't had a chance to see Apple's Mac yet, but I have seen
the advertisements...But tell me, does anyone know anything
about the Lisa 2, Lisa 2/5 and Lisa 2/10? I saw these
mentioned in an article in today's Wall Street Journal. Prices
are ~$3500, ~$4500 and ~$5500. Do these incorporate anything
revolutionary (faster processor maybe?) or are they just
repackaged for the lower price?"
All new Lisas uses 3.5" floppy disk drives instead of the old 5.25".
Lisa owners can return their systems for free upgrade, which consists
of replacement disk drives, a new front panel, and modified software.
And a good thing, too; nobody followed Apple into the CLV (constant
linear velocity) minifloppy fray, reliability was poor and equipment
and media quite expensive.
The Lisa 2/5 and Lisa 2/10 have built-in hard disks of 5 and 10 Mbytes,
respectively. The big win here is that the interface is DMA, which
provides a big throughput improvement over the ProFile parallel
interface, which requires the CPU to touch each byte.
The operating system in the Mac does *not* support parallel processing!
However, since many software vendors are jumping on its bandwagon,
Apple is porting Mac's OS to the Lisa. It is rumored that the original
Lisa OS, "desktop", may be phased out, and that fifteen people from the
Lisa team have quit or been transferred. The rumor goes on to say that
Mac's OS will be upgraded to parallelism. One problem here is that Mac
has no memory management hardware ...
-- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!orca!andrew) [UUCP]
(orca!andrew.tektronix@rand-relay) [ARPA]