rwg (02/01/83)
Just got back from a LISA demo, hope you don't mind me polluting the network; I wanted to pass along the impressions I got. - If the machine is for business use, and networking (AppleNet) will soon be available, why bundle two floppy drives into each system?? - The mouse is nice. It is mechanical, but uses a floating rubber ball whose motion is detected optically. Sounds more reliable than the Alto design. It felt better, too. - Clascal (Pascal with Simula Classes: just what the world needs -- another dialect!) -- This is a native-code compiler. The OS is written in it. (Graphics are in assembler.) - The rumors of 50 megabuck development costs were confirmed. Most of this, it seems, was for software development. It seems silly to pay for this for those of us who'd just trash it for a Un*x port anyway. - The machine is overpriced. See previous bullet. - The hard disk is the old Apple /// Profile. Horribly slow, amazing 5 MBy capacity. Totally obsolete. - Their 68000 runs at 5-point-mumble MHz. Can someone compare this to the IBM PC's 8088? Does 10% of an 11/780 sound right? - I was none-too-thrilled with the graphics. Text seemed coarse. Screen updates were reasonable (no hardware raster-op, everything is software). - Graphics run in "high-rad" mode (black text on white). Great for indoor suntans. At least it's not color. There was no noticeable flicker. - The keyboard is detachable as it should be. There is no tilt/swivel on the display, though. It's built into the base. In conclusion, it looks like a neat experiment. Perhaps, successors to LISA will be worthwhile products. For now, in a word, no. Rich (decvax!idis!mi-cec!rwg at Ucb-C70)