One of the most important figures of the Apple of the 80s sells a lot of old equipment. The teams end up in a warehouse and change hands. As usual, she decides to sell them to clean up and make some cash. They get into a container and let it be what God wants. But just before passing through China for subsequent destruction and recyclingthe last owner considers the play: “hey, this could have something of extra value”.
And so much. There are only a few hours left to close the auction for one of the teams, the jewel in the crown, a pristine and perfectly operational Apple Lisa: it has already accumulated $40,000 in bids.
Found the needle in the haystack
“Our consignor recognized that these were too valuable and historic to be destroyed, so he bought them from the junkyard.” These are statements from Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, the audit team responsible for the auction. Nothing scrap. And it is that, apparently, this set of equipment previously belonged to Delbert Yocam.
Del was one of the pioneers of the company. He worked as an executive for Apple during the 1980s and was, in fact, the person in charge who led the Apple II team. He would later become the first director of operations (COO) of the brand, focused on the Oriental and Latin American markets. In 1989, after ten years in charge, he left the company to seek his fortune in another historic company, Tektronix.
But as was the case with that original iPhone sold for $63,000, the one that keeps, finds. The saying confirms it. Among the items found there are also reportedly other pieces of equipment from the time that will be auctioned off in another lot. But unfortunately not everything could be saved. Several disk drives, monitors and keyboards have already been destroyed. Of course, nothing like this Lisa packed and like new:
Property of RR Auction
This Lisa is in excellent cosmetic condition with no notable scratches or blemishes to the case, retaining its original creamy gray color. Unlike most examples, it has not yellowed. Due to the historical nature of the computer, RR Auction has not restored it to a fully operational state; a detailed condition report written by Tim Colegrove of The BYTE Shop (Boston, MA) outlines the rudiments of maintenance required to return it to full operation. The CPU, the analog board, the CRT, the keyboard, the mouse, and a RAM board all worked properly during the tests. Any Apple Lisa 1 with its original ‘Twiggy’ drives is extremely desirable; To have such an attractive example, connected to the symbolic power in the history of Apple Computer, is something really extraordinary.
The first Apple Lisa was a commercial failure —10,000 units before its discontinuation. Too expensive, too ostentatious. But that was the germinal idea of what would come later, the PowerMac and iMacs that integrated screen, keyboard and mouse, disk drive and processing tower, within the same device. The Lisa 2, in fact, was nothing more than the first Macintosh. And the Macintosh XL, before it was called that, was called Lisa 2/10.
Lisa embodied all the ideas of the “Apple brand”: harmony in forms, functionality and operability, simplification and power. For years, Steve Jobs maintained that the Apple Lisa was the acronym “Local Integrated Systems Architecture”. Years would pass until Jobs’s official biographer, Walter Isaacson, confirmed the obvious: that historical fragment of information technology made a clear allusion to his eldest daughter, the daughter with whom he had a complicated relationship. The daughter who inspired him, with the permission of the iPhone, his greatest contribution to humanity.
Cover Image | Evan Demicoli
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