We all know the story of the first computers that Steve Jobs powered by Apple, the Lisa and the Macintosh. But little is known about the details of this transition from one type of computer to another, and a new documentary from the team at The Verge sheds some light.
Actually there are many Apple Lisa units buried in a landfill for years. And this fact is not the product of a idea of being of Steve Jobs: there is no longer any involvement in what was an attempt to resuscitate this computer once it was disowned by the co-founder of Apple.
“One man’s trash can be another man’s treasure”
The half-hour documentary, which you can watch for free on YouTube, shows how Jobs abruptly parked his Lisa while tempting the market with something that would be even better: the Macintosh. And he was so excited that he wanted to “bury” the Lisa in favor of the computer, traces of which can still be found in current models. Interestingly, he literally ended up buried.
It was all because of Bob, an Apple salesman who was looking for business in the Lisa seeing that things weren’t going so well for him. It started buy all the Apple IIIs that Apple had left in its stores after the company stopped selling them. Bob sold them for a good price because they were older models, and Apple let him pay for them month by month. There were about 3,500 computers, no less.
Bob has become Apple’s favorite “recycler”
The strategy worked out well, so Apple contacted Bob again to help him “get rid of” the 7,000 Lisa units that had been gathering dust in its warehouses after Steve Jobs stopped promoting them. Here there were already more problems: several units were missing components and there were failures in others, so the sales strategy had to be refined much more than with the Apple III.
Bob installed an alternative operating system that emulated that of the Macintosh, and provided the Lisa with more expansion options to gain some market appeal at the time. He spent over $200,000 on the initiative, but again the move paid off. For its part, Apple was happy that Lisa users continued to receive support, even if it was not official.
“Lisa’s Second Death”
But that all changed in 1989. Suddenly Apple wanted Bob to return all the Lisas. Nobody could resist the powerful legal team of Cupertino, so soon a truck arrived that began to take all the units of these Lisa. To where? At the Logan City dump where they were buried.
The dump operators were so shocked that they were “destroying thousands of computers” that they even called the press. Bob and his partners went to the dump to see what was going on, and they saw all the computers thrown into a hole. There were even agents hired by Apple to make sure everything wasn’t as low-key as possible. For Bob, it was the day of Lisa’s second death.
Apple declined to let Verge comment on the matter, but the press at the time reported statements in which the company said it was simply “better on an enterprise level.” For Bob, Apple just wanted to get rid of a computer that he ended up considering a flop, or there were just nice tax deductions if he got rid of the computers.
I don’t think we know more about it, but it’s still interesting: someone trusted Lisa more than Steve Jobs himself, and thanks to that they had a second life. In short, before Apple decides to get rid of everything at all costs.
In Applesphere | ‘Too valuable to destroy’: They find it in a junkyard in China, test it and discover Steve Jobs’ favorite apple intact
