May 2006 Archives

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.



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.

I am offering the old Disinfotainment server for sale. I bought this machine in 1999 but due to several exceptional features, its performance has remained competitive with modern Macs, and it has been exceptionally reliable. I don't want to sell through eBay so I am offering it for sale directly through my website.



This is a "Yosemite" Blue & White PowerMac G3/400 U2W model, an original Rev 1 model with the rare Apple-supplied Adaptec 2940 Ultra 2 Wide SCSI card, and high speed SCSI hard disk drives. SCSI drives are legendary for their high quality and long lives. These drives have been bulletproof, and still have a long life expectancy. I added an Atlas 10K 8.5Gb hard drive, it has exceptionally high performance due to the 10k RPM speed. It also includes a 9Gb Viking II drive, and an IBM 18Gb drive, for a total formatted capacity of 34Gb. The Atlas 10K drive is an ideal boot drive, giving high performance in server functions. I only have 768Mb of RAM in the machine, but that seems adequate for server use. This machine would make an ideal web server, it can easily saturate a T1 line.
One other unusual feature in this Mac is a GeeThree Stealth Serial Port. This could be useful for remote monitoring of routers. Other than that, this Mac is pretty plain, it has a standard CDROM (4x I think), no CD burner, and no Zip drive or other options.
I can deliver this machine preformatted with MacOS X 10.4, and if you like, I can preconfigure Darwin Streaming Server. Somewhere in storage I have the original keyboard (in good condition, I never used it), and even the terribly unpopular "puck" mouse. You can have the keyboard and mouse if you want, but I doubt you'd want them.
It makes me sad to see such a wonderful piece of Mac hardware go unused, so I'd like to sell it to someone who will give it a good home and put it to good use. I'm not sure what this machine is really worth, I'm sure it's not worth a lot, so I'll consider any serious offer. You can contact me via email at ceicher (at) mac.com if you'd like more information.

This website has relocated to a new address. If you read this site with an RSS or Atom-enabled reader, you may not have noticed that you were forwarded to the new site, so you should manually update the bookmark now. For your convenience, here are links to the Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds:

Disinfotainment Atom Feed
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Disinfotainment is moving to a new webhost! Things are going to get a little messy around here, while I import the site and clean up the details. Some features will be broken for a while, but everything will be put back in place as soon as possible. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.
Update May 16, 2006: I think I have all the links fixed and all videos are up and running. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can try the videos, and let me know how well they are working on the new webhost. Please leave a comment in reply to this message. Really, please please try some of the videos and let me know how well it works for you. I am working hard to upgrade the BlogTV system, to make it easier to view the videos, and to make it easier for me to prepare videos for the server. But if I get no reports on the quality of the streaming video services, I have no way to judge if the service is better or not. So leave a comment. Please.