[chiph]

I was able to buy an Apple ][+ with my high school job at a supermarket. The Lisa was amazing (when it came out a few years later) but obviously not affordable by me. ;) Nor the Macintosh when I was on military pay a few years after that. Maybe I wasn't their target market by then. :(

But I don't think the Lisa was right for the corporate market either - since it didn't have connectivity to the firm's mainframe or midrange. On the Lisa, you had a mouse port, parallel port, and two serial ports. The serial ports could have worked, but IIRC the SNA network stack needed wasn't on the Lisa (and Apple would have been quite hostile to IBM if they'd tried to add it). So firms would have had to share data via sneakernet, and that was the same thing they'd been doing with their Apple ]['s for several years now -- so the 10x price difference wasn't worth it, even if the UI was gorgeous.

There was also the matter of the installed base of machines the company might have had. The Apple ][ used standard Shugart 5-1/4" mechanisms, but the Lisa (originally) used their new FileWare "Twiggy" drives which placed the top/bottom heads on opposite ends of the diskette. So information couldn't be shared between Lisa and Apple ][ users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_FileWare

Also - this may be my only chance to say Thank You for your work. So .. Thank you very much.