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Computer Faire, as Apple had done four years earlier.
    The Osborne 1 was on display at their crowded booth near the center of Brooks Hall. It looked a lot like an oversized lunch box, with a keyboard on the back of the lid, crammed full with two floppy drives and a tiny, 5 inch monitor in its center. We were a little surprised, because it looked uncannily like some of Jef Raskin's early sketches for the Macintosh, which Steve had recently abandoned for a vertically oriented design. Portable was sort of a euphemism as the thing weighed around 25 pounds, but at least it fit under an airline seat, barely. As Macintosh elitists, we were suitably grossed out by the character-based CP/M applications, of course, which seemed especially clumsy on the tiny, scrolling screen.
    We worked our way up to the front of the crowd to get a good look at the units that were on display. We started to ask one of the presenters a technical question, when we were suprised to see Adam Osborne himself standing a few feet from us, looking at our show badges, preempting the response.
    "Oh, some Apple folks", he addressed us in a condescending tone, "What do you think? The Osborne 1 is going to outsell the Apple II by a factor of 10, don't you think so? What part of Apple do you work in?"
    When we told him that we were on the Mac team, he started to chuckle. "The Macintosh, I heard about that. When are we going to get to see it? Well, go back and tell Steve Jobs that the Osborne 1 is going to outsell the Apple II and the Macintosh combined!"
    So, after returning to Cupertino later that afternoon, we told Steve about our encounter with Adam Osborne. He smiled, with a sort of mock anger, and immediately grabbed the telephone on the spare desk in Bud's office, and called information for the number of the Osborne Computer Corporation. He dialed the number, but it was answered by a secretary.
    "Hi, this is Steve Jobs. I'd like to speak with Adam Osborne."
    The secretary informed Steve that Mr. Osborne was not available, and would not be back in the office until tomorrow morning. She asked Steve if he would like to leave a message.
    "Yes", Steve replied. He paused for a second. "Here's my message. Tell Adam he's an asshole."
    There was a long delay, as the secretary tried to figure out how to respond. Steve continued, "One more thing. I hear that Adam's curious about the Macintosh. Tell him that the Macintosh is so good that he's probably going to buy a few for his children even though it put his company out of business!"

Square Dots
by Andy Hertzfeld in April 1981

    The Apple Lisa
    From the very beginning, even before it had a mouse, the Lisa was designed to be an office machine, and word processing was considered to be its most important application. In the late seventies, the acid test for an office computer (as compared with a hobby computer) was the ability to display 80 columns of text.
    The Lisa team decided to optimize their display for horizontal resolution, in order to be able to display 80 columns of text in an attractive font. The vertical resolution wasn't as important, because vertical scrolling works much better for text than horizontal scrolling. The designers decided to endow Lisa with twice as much horizontal resolution as vertical, using a 720 by 360 pixel display, with pixels that were twice as high as they were wide. This was great for text oriented applications like the word processor, but it made things somewhat awkward for the more graphical applications.
    When Burrell redesigned the Macintosh in December 1980 to use the same microprocessor as Lisa, the Motorola 68000, it set off shock waves within Apple. Not only was Burrell's new design much simpler than Lisa, with less than half the chip count, but it also ran almost twice as fast, using an 8 megahertz clock instead of a 5 megahertz clock. Among other advantages was the fact that the Mac's 384 by 256 pixel display had the identical horizontal and vertical resolution, a feature that