[Macworld]

Post your comments for The little-known Apple Lisa: Five quirks and oddities here

[stimarco]

The "DRM" thing is not quite as onerous as it seems: the application would have only been available on a disk, and that disk would allow you to install the application on *any* Lisa. It's only the copies of that disk that would be tied to the specific machine.

This fits the best practices of the day: you buy an application, copy the disk, then use the copy as your 'master' disk – the original disk is kept in its box and retained as an archive.

As long as that original disk is kept, you'd have no difficulty installing the application on another Lisa.

[user88331]

I miss the days when OS research was alive and kicking. I love my Mac but I agree with Rob Pike that Unix is old, and tired, and we need a new paradigm. It's neat reading this article and remembering the excitement of brand new ideas.

[Kentbob]

I remember MS Works had a similar copy prevention. Once you used the original floppy, you could know longer copy it.

The work-around was to switch on the record safety tab on the floppy, then make a copy of it, then use that copy to install from.

[writerbenj]

[lrosenstein0]

Benj is correct. (I worked at Apple on the Lisa software as my first job out of school.)

As I recall, the system would not let you run an application from the master floppy, nor would it let you copy the application unless the original floppy was writeable, so it could be serialized. Apple didn't provide a way to make a bit-for-bit copy of the master disks, and since the original hardware used the proprietary "Twiggy" drives it wasn't possible to make a copy on some other machine. I once visited a customer who has multiple Lisas, and they had to keep track of which floppies went with which machines.

[Norton]

Respect.

[webwielder]

The ugliness of these screenshots shows how important it was that Steve Jobs hired a trained artist (Susan Kare) to work on the Mac UI. It resulted in a considerably friendlier and more pleasant experience. Very few people in the tech industry considered aesthetics to be of importance (or even realized they were a factor).

[philomath777]

What was impressive at the time was the multitasking. I remember driving 2 printers at the same time, which the subsequent Mac could not do.

[ChrstB]

I am more interested in my apple2E proDOSE guarantee of support by apple because I didn't make it at the U of Michigan Music where It was displayed at the library. My OhioScientific Challenger has always been a superior design with its 48 pin backplane.
concerning Amiga and multi-tasking................... the 16bit motorola is multi-tasked: gary dices and slices blitters and heap stack pointers directing denice paula agnus.....................it is not about concurrent software applications

[ZPedro]

I have never known the Lisa, but I remember reading that the serialization thing was a whole pain when it came to support: if a Lisa had to be serviced it was not possible to exchange or even loan another one while the problem was being fixed, since the software would only run on that one Lisa, so one had to wait for the repair to be done.

Worse, if the problem was with the board or the particular chip that housed the serial number (was it a PAL on the video hardware? I'm not sure about the details) then the Lisa had to be factory serviced so that the faulty part would be replaced with one that had the same serial number (instead of the local dealer putting in a spare part, which would have had a different serial number, in turn preventing the software from working and preventing even the possibility to reinstall it).

Modern DRM may be restrictive, but at least it is a little bit more flexible than that.

[Helgi]

Xerox Star could handle files with the same name, and even files without a name, AFAIR. See