Newsweek, in an article from 1983:
Like a magician readying his best trick, Steve Jobs waited for the houselights to dim and the crowd to quiet down. A spotlight focused on a table where a bulky shape lay hidden beneath a buff-colored cloth. “The personal computer was created by a hardware revolution of the 1970s,” Jobs, the 27-year-old multimillionaire chairman and cofounder of Apple Computer, told 1,200 Apple stockholders gathered last week in Cupertino, Calif. “The next dramatic change will come from a software revolution . . . which Apple is introducing here today.” On cue, the cloth was lifted — revealing Lisa, a new $10,000 computer and a $50 million gamble for Apple.
Great read. Another inflection point for Apple, on the road to Macintosh.
The Lisa’s physical profile reminds me of two other computers that became important in my life. The first was the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III, on which I did my first remote work for college via a Hayes Smartmodem. The second was a Mergenthaler Linotype CRTronic typesetting machine at a subsequent day job, which got put out of business by the rise of Macs in publishing.
In my high school days I got to work on real, hot lead Linotype machines, given to our school’s print shop classroom by our local newspaper plant when IT went to electronic typesetters. How time flies when you’re getting old 🙂
I missed out on hot type. But I do remember a school tour of the New York Times composing room, where we were all handed a line of cast type of the name of the paper. Wish I hadn’t lost that.