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Home
Origins
of the Floppy Drive
Woz's
Floppy Drive Miracle
Lisa,
the Apple III, and the Twiggy Fiasco
Mass
storage and the Macintosh Project
A
Floppy for Macintosh
Manual
vs. Auto Eject: The Great Floppy Debate
iMac
and the End of an Era
Sources
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Lisa, the Apple
III, and the Twiggy Fiasco
With the phenomenal success of the Apple II and the impending Apple
Computer IPO, the company faced enormous expectations for its next two
computers, the Apple III and the Lisa. Both machines were ultimately doomed
to failure.
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The
Apple III, introduced at Disneyland during the National Computer Conference
in May 1980, combined enhanced capabilities with backward compatibility
with programs designed for the II. Unfortunately, the machine, code-named
Sara, was released with the same processor as the Apple II, no clock
chip, rushed software and manuals, and major design issues resulting
in a huge failure rate. Consequently, the Apple III, even after a
relaunch in late 1981, never attained the success of its predecessor. |
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Lisa,
like Sara, was targeted at business users. Influenced by Larry Tessler's
groundbreaking work on Smalltalk for the Xerox Alto at Xerox PARC,
the Lisa team designed the machine with a mouse-driven interface and
bitmapped graphics. Despite these advances, Lisa was laden with a
gargantuan $10,000 price far beyond the financial reach of most users. |
Both the Apple III, Lisa, and Macintosh were originally slated to include
a 5.25-inch floppy drive called Twiggy. Woz's brilliant design for the
Apple II had shown that Apple could build its own drive controllers. Steve
Jobs believed that Apple could take the next step and produce its own
drives, exemplifying the company's boast that anything "Not Invented
Here" (or "NIH") wasn't worth using. (Young, p. 295)
The Twiggy group soon encountered design difficulties that precluded its
inclusion in the Apple III and led to serious problems with manufacturing
and reliability. The Apple III shipped instead with the older 143 kb Shugart-supplied
floppy drive while the Lisa originally carried two of the cursed 871 kb
Twiggy drives. Twiggy's fate was sealed when the both the Macintosh and
Lisa 2 were introduced in 1984 with a single 400k 3.5-inch floppy drive
designed by Sony.
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