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My dad and I found one at a garage sale when I was a kid. I bought, repaired, and resold mostly 8 bit machines, but found a big bunch of Apple Lisa stuff for no
by SwellJoe 7y ago
My dad and I found one at a garage sale when I was a kid. I bought, repaired, and resold mostly 8 bit machines, but found a big bunch of Apple Lisa stuff for not a lot of money, maybe $150. I didn't really know much about it, but it was interesting and I figured I could get my money back out of it. It had the computer, three external hard disks (2x5MB and 1x10MB), and some software and other accessories.
This would have been around 1988-1989, and the Mac had been out for a while; this seemed like a quaint old computer at the time. Since the Lisa wasn't quite Mac compatible, there wasn't really anything you could do with it...the software it had (early variants of stuff like Mac Write and Paint and such, called, I think Lisa Write, etc.) was what you got.
When I unboxed everything I found the receipts from when the original owner bought it all new. He'd spent something like $20,000+ on the whole setup. Computer was $10k, and each of the hard disks was several thousand dollars.
I sold the whole setup for about twice what I paid for it (I seem to recall about $300, but it's been a long time, and it wasn't super memorable...I bought and sold a lot of weird old computers back then), after cleaning it up and testing everything and tinkering with it until I was bored (I was a Commodore kid with a C128D and saving up for my first Amiga...Apple stuff was just a curiosity, not anything I wanted for myself).
Though I wasn't super into it at the time, it's one of the few things I kinda wish I still had all these years later. It has real historical significance that I didn't really appreciate at the time.