I just finished watching the video to the end.
I enjoyed seeing the commentary by Ray Arachelian, creator of
LisaEM. He
passed away in early 2023 at the age of 51. I also see you have an interview with Adam Rosen, who
passed away in August 2019 at the age of 53. And perhaps one of the best interviews was with Sun Remarketing's Bob Cook, who is also no longer with us. It's nice to see your video will make the memory of these three gentlemen live on far into the future.
Another interesting part of the video were the interviews with John Woodall. It was a full wall of LISAs behind him! I also see he at some point sold a Lisa 1 with twiggy drives for $11,000 on his
VintageMicros website here, which is a steal in comparison to the crazy prices they've been selling for lately.
In the interview with Bob Cook, he didn't really know the underlying reason Apple suddenly brought in the
muscle one day to haul his inventory of LISAs away to the Logan landfill. Bob said in the interview that while some speculated it was "recouping tax credits," he felt it was Steve Jobs being instrumental in the whole thing "before he left." So I guess Bob felt the lingering influence from Steve because the landfill dump was in 1989, long after Steve had left Apple. Bob then said he had heard that Steve didn't like the sale of anything used, feeling it competed against the new.
In the interview with Sculley on Lisa disposal matter John said,, "I never had second thoughts about cancelling the LISA." Sculley also mentioned his talk with the then CFO about a tax write-off, and the CFO saying they had to be destroyed. But Sculley didn't touch on the
abruptness of grabbing them all from Sun Remarketing. I guess it was just Apple being just another huge company and not caring about the details, so long as they were destroyed to the satisfaction of the IRS so Apple could get whatever tax perks were available at the time. But it seems to indicate that Apple treated Sun pretty coldly.
Anyway, I loved the overview of John Leake's Mac collection, even more so than James' collection because John had all his setup ready to use on desks, with chairs in front of each! That's my personal philosophy about old Macs. When you have them headless on shelves, you're a hoarder (or museum), but when you have them on desks plugged and and ready to go, they are going to get used. And I think actually USING these old machines is what the hobby is all about.
Personally, I don't own a LISA. I really don't have the space for one. And I certainly do not have the money. But if I had only one model to choose from, it would be the Lisa 1 with Twiggy drives, yet not for the same reason most people want one. Today, the fabulously wealthy are snapping them up quickly, at top dollar, whenever they hit the auction block. It's all money, money, money! What's collectable, and what's not. What came first, and who cares what it did or how it works! Crazy. Personally, I think it would be good to have a Lisa 1 to relive the experience with the machine as it was originally designed, which was to run the LISA Office System on non-square pixels. Sure, it might be neat to have another LISA as well, in order to put an accelerator and other modern tech in it so it could run System 7 and you could impress your geeky friends with that fact. But the appeal of the original LISA 1 transcends upgradability. Because hey, if I want a fancy System 7 machine, I've got lots of vintage Macs to choose from! No, to me, the LISA 1 has great value, not for its monetary worth, but for the user to experience what it was designed to do.
All said, I enjoyed the video very much. Thank you for making it available for all to view,
@classiccomputing !
