Remembering 1984 With A Macintosh & Lisa Brochure (With Pics) [Updated]

by , 11:00 AM EST, February 14th, 2001

[Update: February 15th, 2001] Larry Rosenstein wrote us with the following information:

The ProFile was the 5MB disk that in the brochure is sitting on top of the Lisa. I believe this was also used with the Apple II, but I don't recall.

The 10MB disk was code-named the "Widget" and it was an internal hard drive.

Thanks for the information Larry!

Last week, we brought you a great magazine spread about the Mac, but in 1984 there was another Apple product with a GUI. We are talking about the Lisa, the project that Steve Jobs intended as Apple's premier product line. Mr. Jobs' reportedly wanted to hamstring the Mac in order to keep it from competing with the Lisa, but ended up taking over the Mac project in the long run. Both products were marketed alongside each other for about three years. The Lisa was heavily criticized for costing more than US$10,000 when it was first introduced, and not having much software. The Lisa was eventually rechristened the Macintosh XL until it was unceremoniously dumped, literally, as Apple's remaining Lisa inventory was eventually dumped into a landfill.

Steve from Pittsburgh sent us these great scans from a brochure that featured both the Lisa 2 and the Mac.

This document shows us the different Lisa configurations and the first Mac to hit the market. The largest difference between the Lisa units was the larger screen and a hard drive option. You could have bought the Lisa without an external drive, with a 5 MB drive or a 10 MB drive. Considering that 10 MB meant a lot of storage in the mid-1980's, this was a big deal.

We have also broken this image up into two separate scans for those with smaller monitors and/or slower connections.

Thanks to Steve, from Pittsburgh for sending these great scans to us! If you have an old Apple ad for the Mac (or Mac clones), the Apple ][ (or clones), the Lisa, or any other Apple product, scan them in and send them to us, so that we can share them with other Mac fans.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Rumor has it that our own Bryan Chaffin has a functioning Lisa 2. Further rumor has it that in order to spark up this baby, you have to first turn on the Pro-File, the external 10 MB hard drive (cute name, get it?), wait for it to spin up to speed, then turn on the Lisa 2 itself.

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