14 DAY TRIAL // A person claiming to be the brother of an Apple staffer who had worked on the Lisa 1 development team has cashed in on his late sibling’s original Lisa 1 computer, nabbing himself some $15,000 on eBay.
The seller described the machine as an early production model that still worked.
He claims to be the younger brother of a former Apple staffer working on the original Lisa 1 project.
After his brother’s death in 1988, the seller took his Lisa 1 computer into care, storing it safely in a closet.
"I had an older brother that started working for Apple in 1980.
He was part of the product development team that worked on the Lisa 1.
In 1988 my brother passed away. He was still working for Apple at the time.
I’ve had this computer safely stored in my closet ever since. Being such a big part of Apple’s history, it really should be taken care of and displayed, not stuck in the closet for another 30 years."
For one reason or another, he recently decided to sell it on eBay, where he cashed in on US $15,000 on December 21st.
The final shipping package, won by the bigger spender of eleven bidders, included:
- the authentic Lisa 1 and Twiggy ROMS - the Keyboard - the original TWIGGY Floppy Disk Drives - anti-glare silk screen for the CRT (no holes or tears)
According to the seller, the plastic has yellowed in time, but there are no chips, cracks, or dents anywhere on the case.
"The CRT is bright and sharp with no burn in," the seller said, and there are no problems with the power supply.
The bundle did not include a mouse, nor the Lisa system software.
It also has some very minor corrosion from the battery, the seller said. As such, he removed the batteries.
As reported by Softpedia in a "Did You Know" piece, the Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa (contrary to popular belief), although the similarities between the two systems were striking at the time they were available on the market.
The main thing that differentiated Lisa from the Macintosh was that Lisa could run multiple applications at the same time, an ability known as “multitasking,” while the Mac would only be able to fire up one program application at a time.
The Lisa boasted a real Graphical User Interface (GUI), with icons for everything a person would keep stored on their hard drive, something that other OSes didn't.
The Lisa was a more advanced (and far more expensive) system than the Macintosh was, thanks to its built-in protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, 2 megabytes of RAM, expansion slots, a larger higher resolution display and many other impressive abilities.