« Mac For Sale: PowerMac G3/400 U2W | Main | Burro + Beer + Camera + Me = Childhood Trauma »

Apple Lisa Sales Marketing Binder - 1983

I have painstakingly scanned the original Lisa Sales Marketing Binder that was issued to Apple dealerships in 1983, and I am releasing it for download as a 204 page 33Mb PDF file. This was the sales literature I used when I sold Lisa computers at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I've kept it in storage for decades. Now it is time for this historic document to reappear and be reappraised.
This document was obviously produced on a Lisa, some pages were printed on a daisy wheel printer, some on a dot matrix, sometimes even a mixture of the two, using scissors and glue, and if you look really close, even some white-out and pen. The information was compiled from various technical and marketing departments, and includes scans of Apple's full-color brochures for the entire Lisa hardware and software line.

LisaOverview.jpg

I thought the most interesting part of this binder was the section on the Lisa's rivals. Apple produced a competitive analysis of the Lisa vs. computer and software systems from IBM, DEC, Corvus, Fortune Systems, and Xerox. It is a snapshot of high-end office computing in 1983, just before the Macintosh was released.
Apple promised a lot more than it could deliver with the Lisa, but it created the model for all modern personal computers. Even today, the Lisa design is still the fundamental user interface used in every personal computer. A lot of computer technology has been released in the 23 years since the Lisa shipped, but in many ways, it has never been surpassed.
Update: Over the first weekend of this document's release, it was downloaded over 46,000 times! Thanks to everyone who was interested in this little slice of history, now this information will live on forever, distributed across the internet.

Comments

Thanks for sharing a slice of Apple history.

Neat . . . I have one !!! And it still works (last time I checked @ 2 yrs ago). Your PDF will be a very welcome addition . . . Thanks

Thanks indeed - any other old Apple stuff lying around with you would be welcome as well ;-)

GREAT job. Thank you very much for sharing this!

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)