The two computers that made Apple

26:33Right. All you need is a few people chasing a huge payday for the entire industry to follow in that just that kind of jet stream. And it creates a very, I would say, self-perpetuating system where the whole project gets kind of instantaneously rationalized among its many actors. Yeah. What what was the guy's name who was building the education software for his middle school class? And then Tom Snyder. What a perfect example. Right. He goes from, I'm going to build this small thing for the people who need it, to I'm going to make a sort of cottage business out of this, to all of a sudden I have to be a multinational corporation or else a multinational corporation will come after me and shut down my lifestyle.

27:14Or yeah, a multinational corporation comes in and basically pays him to do work for them. And so he changes his entire approach to how software is built. He has to, in order to make his software make sense to a company that doesn't want to sell software for groups of children in a school, but wants to sell individual units of individual floppy disks to individual families, because that's a better market run. That's it's super interesting. And it does. There's so much in your book where the question of like, is this inevitable just kept coming up to me? It's like, and I think the money thing is the closest thing to inevitable of all of it that it's like, and I've just I've been covering this long enough that I'm just so trained to like, understand that as soon as venture capital appears, all the incentives change, all the business models change, and you either get big or you die.

28:01And that changes everything. And it was just interesting to watch that get traced through this entire process as well. But the other piece of software that I thought was particularly interesting was the print shop, which is, I think, fundamentally a story about like how to teach regular people how to use computers. Right. And this this point you make over and over is that at the beginning, people had to be taught not just how to use computers, but why they would give a crap about having one, which I think is it goes back to the same point of like these things were not like inevitable societal goods that we had been waiting for and emerged perfectly to solve all of our problems.

28:34they showed up and I forget you even say at one point, like most people's response to computers was basically like, okay, whatever. I'm going to go back to my life. Like, I don't care. And, and there's this big industry push to basically say, here's what you need them for, which is one side of it. But then also here's how you use it. And I think the, here's how you use it story is very much kind of, well, I guess to some extent, both of them are a print shop story. It seems like it did a better job of answering both of those questions for regular people than almost anything. So same thing. Can you just give me like sort of the, the very brief background of what the print shop was, and I guess still is.

29:07Is it still around? So there is like a weird vestigial tale of that software. It's owned by a different company. You know, the two developers kind of cast off their ownership of it many, many years ago. But I believe that you can still buy it. It's fantastic. Print shop deluxe 6.4 is still available for$49.99 on the Broderbund website. And it's like, what is Broderbund as a company today? Just like, it's like that. This is just an IP. Yeah. I think there's this mythology that in particular, the contemporary tech industries want us, need us to believe, right? Part of the fuel here is that we all have to invest in this faith of the idea that the future is inevitable.

29:52And so I think we've been fed this idea that people saw personal computers and they were like, oh yeah, got to have this, right? I need one in my home, obviously this is going to change my life. And that was just not true. None of the statistics bear that out. Computer adoption was perilously slow in actual people's homes. You could force people to use computers in schools and offices, but you could not force people to buy a computer for their house. And there was all of these ideas about, you know, part of the why there was so much software was because so many people were trying to answer the question, what do you even do with a computer?

30:31And there was all sorts of weird answers to this, right? A lot of them, to answer the question, what would you do with a computer in your home, was this idea of, well, we digitize household activities. So, oh, you have a physical address book? We're going to make software so you can have a digital address book or a digital recipe keeper or here's software that can track your gas mileage or chart your biorhythms, software that can intervene in your sex life, you know, there was this great ambivalence, right? And people really had to be taught not just how to want a computer, but I think how to desire one.

31:04There was definitely like an emotional aspect to wanting to get people to imagine how to computerize their lives. But the home software sector had really struck out. They could not really make a compelling case beyond word processing was super useful. If you had a, were in a profession or had a hobby that really required a lot of typing and then otherwise maybe you needed a spreadsheet software. So the print shop is a wonderful, almost kind of diss or punk or kind of trolls the prompt, right, is how I think of it, is that this software, which begins development, I believe, in 1982. It is co-developed by a gay couple who were in San Francisco.

31:48One of them was an employee at Broderbund at the time and had a lot of background in graphics programming, Marty Kahn and David Balsam, who were both in their kind of early, late 20s at the time. And they're in this hub of activity in San Francisco, watching everyone else get rich. And they're like, well, we've got skills. We know how to program. We've got ideas. Let's figure out what we can do. And they create, ultimately through various iterations, the print shop, which is, some people call it a proto desktop publishing software, but it was really a piece of software that allowed you to do this kind of very rudimentary printed objects.

32:30So you could create banners, you could create greeting cards, you could create letterhead and things like, you know, you could create signs. And basically it just, the whole design experience was on a rail. You chose what kind of thing you wanted to make. And then you decided, well, this is the graphic I'm going to use. This is the font. This is the border. You know, it was highly formulaic. You typed in your little message and then you sent it to print. And this blew people's minds. And they had so much fun with it. And it was a program that was really advertised on the premise that you did not even need to read the manual.

33:09That's how well designed it was. And getting people, computing was, it's hard to express how confusing computing was, right? It was just, it was terribly complicated, you know, even for people of like modest or decent technical skill. It was very frustrating. And the print shop really promised this idea of what we might call a user-friendly experience that also made you, gave you the ability to take something that you made on a computer and bring it into the world. And that was really powerful, I think, as a gesture, as creating a kind of visual culture of computing that people had never handled or experienced themselves to make material.

33:51This stuff that was trapped on a screen felt, I think, transformative. It was a real aha moment, I think, for a lot of home users. that's interesting it's it's a very funny counter to the way that things developed after that which is i think computers became so much about simplicity and consumption and like printing now is something i do like when i have concert tickets right like that's that's about that's essentially what it's for right but i think there was this idea and to some extent we're getting back to this idea of marrying technology and physicality with like ar and all that stuff but That's a whole separate thing.

34:27But I think the idea that like, this is a thing that is useful in the rest of my life and not kind of as its own thing that exists entirely inside of its screen is really interesting. And I feel like we could use more of that perspective in our world right now. Yeah, I think in a moment when computing was an extremely foreign object to so many people, there needed to be a different pitch than, well, what if you typed your papers rather than using a typewriter? Or what if your checkbook was on your computer? A lot of people's response to this was, who cares? But the print shop allowed people to do something that otherwise was really kind of impossible, that they could feel and touch and share.

35:09And it was about friendships and communities and small businesses and things like, it was about little kids making these weird computer cards for their grandma and banners for their birthdays and putting up a sign in your town that said a yard sale. And that suddenly it wasn't for like serious printing, but it allowed the computer to exceed the boundary of the screen itself in a way that was instructive. I think I want to emphasize for new users. Totally. And I think that point about it being a truly new behavior is really interesting. And I had not thought about this until just now, but that kind of unites all the software you talk about.

35:46Even VisiCalc, right, where you have all your numbers on a screen and you can update one and all the rest update. Like that is a, that is a new thing that was not possible before. And even games was like, you can do a different thing collaboratively with your schoolmates than you've ever been able to do before. And that idea of like one by one, the software developers finding, not just like take a thing that exists and do it on a computer, but, and, and, and I think a huge amount of software over the years has been take a thing that exists and do it on a computer. But it seems like the stuff that is really transformative is the stuff that is actually a net new capability that you have because you are doing this thing on a computer.

36:25Yes, activities that kind of render the power of computation in a way that is very different from what we do in a physical setting. Yeah, no, I think that's really interesting. And it makes me wonder, one of the sort of unknowable hypotheticals I kept coming back to over the course of this is like, if all of these things had just sort of stayed resolutely complex, and it's like, no, you have to learn how to speak computer language in order to use a computer. But we're going to add more and more of these cool capabilities. Like if the print shop had been just as cool as it was, and much harder to use, would everyone have eventually come around?

36:57And would there have been like two generations earlier that would have learned to code as a result? and obviously unknowable, but it's a really different future of it that like we sort of computers learn to be human much faster than we learned how to speak computer. Yeah. And I wonder what would have happened if we had gone the other way. I mean, I think that what you would need is a society that is actually interested in being structured in that way. Right. Like as a step one, what are the incentives and structures that are going to support people learning how to be highly advanced in computer use when we have problems with like literacy rates, right?

37:35For sure. And so it really becomes a question of like, where do you want, what are our social, like the, I think the social problem is the thing that's harder to imagine. Sometimes I encounter students in like a computing engineering degree or something who have this fantasy of like, if we all just learned how to program and I'm like, you mean if we lived in a fundamentally different society, right? Like this idea that somehow that is supposed to be a thing that I as a person want or will teach myself free from a society that's going to make or provide an adequate amount of scaffolding for that is a problematic fantasy and best of one that really centers the idea that we think that these technologies do things on their own, which they so resolutely do not.

38:17Yeah, no, I think that's I think that's absolutely right. Okay, one more thing. And then I'm gonna let you go here. You talk a bunch about this idea of a personal computer. And I get the sense you sort of hate the phrase personal computer, you like you spend most of the time in the book, calling it a microcomputer, which I think for a bunch of technical reasons is totally fair. But you kind of at the beginning and end reckon with like, what is a personal computer? And I think right now that question is more interesting than ever, right? We're using platforms we don't control. We have apps that can be pulled from our devices at any time.

38:43The content I stream doesn't belong to me. The content I buy often doesn't belong to me. Amazon can just pull books off my Kindle. I can't open up my computer without voiding the warranty, uh all this stuff and it feels like our devices are we still call them personal computers but they feel less personal than ever so i both wonder a if it feels that way to you and be kind of as you've spent all this time how do you define a personal computer as the have this like in the 1977 definition or even in 2023 historians always think of language as a moving target right like there's nothing that personal computer is aside from the assembly of what most people think it is at a given moment in time.

39:21And we still use, I think that the target has moved with personal computing precisely for all these reasons that you're talking about. And many of these things I kind of hedge and hint at, or sometimes very directly say in the book about the sort of long tail consequences of proprietary platforms of these mega corporations that just have basically leveraged these technical systems to own more and more and more of our creativity, of our interaction, of our communication and our collaboration with other people, right? And so the thing that is, you know, when my students, if I were to ask my students, what makes your computer personal?

40:03They would probably say that it's the interface for interacting with their lives, right? Like they would think of probably their smartphone as a personal computer. It has all their images. It has all their social networks. It has all their chat. It has all their Gmail. They watch TV on it. They play games on it. That's an extremely personal object. It contains all of their data. It is also a funnel for taking that data and sending it all over the place, right? To all sorts of places that, or basically that data, you know, in many cases may not even be on the phone at all, right? It's just a tap into a server, God knows where.

40:41And so, you know, and perhaps Apple is, you know, one of the most guilty culprits here in that they have secured this idea that what makes computing personal is the reduction of the computer itself to an assembly of like files or interactions that are about our lives, rather than about the way that we maybe relate or even understand how these objects, devices, technologies work. Would it be better if we understood it better? I mean, this goes back to the like, we should all learn how to code thing. And I think to some extent, this is like an intractable problem, right? If you want to set up your own email server in such a way that you have all of your emails on your own server, and no one else can touch them, you can, but nobody does, because it's a pain in the ass.

41:28And I can just sign up for Gmail, and it does a bunch of things that my own email server couldn't. And so part of me wonders if we've just deliberately chosen convenience and power over that kind of like personality and ownership. But part of me also thinks this next decade of technology is going to be about reckoning with that decision and whether we can pull some of it back. And I think, I don't know, I just, I saw so much of the like Steve Wozniak in the 70s ethos in the people I talked to about like the Fediverse and the open web and this idea about like, what if you had things that were yours again, that like actually truly yours.

42:03And it does, it seems like we're about to reckon with kind of that, you know, 45 year history in a big way going forward. It's gonna be fascinating. Yeah, I think the we is doing a lot of work here, right? You know, we just want to talk about like you and me or people who we are structurally disincentivized or actually structurally incapacitated from negotiating around these systems, except at great financial, personal time cost. Right. And that is to the advantage of corporations that want to make these interactions seamless, smooth, easy. I mean, the Apple II is a funny case, right? That is a computer that anyone who used it would have said that it was one of the easiest to use, right?

42:49But it gave you total access to the system itself. The sort of incremental, how do I quite want to say it, is that I really reject the proposition that this is a consumer failing or that somehow we need to vote with our dollars or something like that, right? I think that really underserves the tremendous power and authority that these corporations have, right? And the kind of levels of accountability that need to be put in place that often we don't because we're so busy thinking that the market is a transparent reflection of people's desires, right? You know, as for the history component of it, I do think in general, historical literacy is bad in this country.

43:39You know, I just started teaching a very large 240 person lecture class in my own university. It's a history of media and communication. And I dedicate about half the semester to the 20th century forward. And for most of these students, no one has ever explained to them how a computer works, what it is. you know, their technical literacy is extremely poor because there has been no concerted educational effort to try to make it accessible to them. And because the people who really control a lot of the cycles of conversation about computer history are people who either want to have a nostalgic celebration about it or are the kind of same financial actors who got us into this problem to begin with.

44:21And so if there's something my book is really trying to do, it's make this conversation relevant to people who maybe don't care about computers or don't see them as formative to their identity. And that if we could just kind of wrench open our understanding of what actually happened beyond this sort of, you know, nostalgic masturbatory festival we all seem to keep wanting to be having about the history of computing, that, you know, maybe there's a net gain there. Yeah, I love that. All right. Well, I could talk to you about this for hours, but I should let you go. This was incredibly fun. Thank you so much for doing this with me.

44:53David, this was a total pleasure. Thank you so much for this interview. All right, we need to take a break and then we're going to talk about another much less successful, but maybe just as interesting, Apple Computer. We'll be right back.

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46:31Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter or following a counterintuitive instinct or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity. And when I hear something like that, I say, of course I'm going to do it. If everybody believes it shouldn't be done or it cannot be done, then it's a good reason to do it. Or when mobile gaming giant Supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages.

47:07Many of the best things we've learned have actually come through failures. These are Crucible Moments, turning points in a company's journey that made them what they are today. Hosted by Sequoia Capitals, Rulof, Botha, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories from Zipline, Stripe, Palo Alto Networks, Supercell, and more. Subscribe to Season 3 of Crucible Moments. New episodes are out now and you can catch up on seasons one and two at cruciblemoments.com on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to Crucible Moments today.

47:48Welcome back. So 2023 is the 40th anniversary of a computer you may have heard of called the Apple Lisa. If you haven't heard of it, that's fine. In the grand legacy of Apple, it tends to be kind of overlooked, which is actually exactly why we're going to talk about it today. A few of the folks on The Verge's video team have spent the last few months working on a documentary about the Lisa. What it was, why it flopped, and why everyone remembers the Macintosh, which came out a year after the Lisa, so much more fondly. It's a weird story, and rather than spoil it for you, I just grabbed Will Poore, the Verge's lead video producer, to tell me all about it.

48:28Hi, Will. Hello. I feel like I have been hearing about this mysterious Apple story you've been working on for several decades now. Yeah, it's been a long time. What was the occasion for this? I actually don't think I know the beginning of this story. The first thing I heard was just like, oh yeah, Will's going to Utah to see a dump. I was like, all right. That's kind of the extent of it. We had gotten this tip via the Computer History Museum about the Apple Lisa's 40th anniversary was this year. And they were interested in finding fun stories around that anniversary. And someone had, I think someone there had given us a tip that there are a number of Apple Lisa computers buried somewhere in Utah.

49:09And they were like, we heard that. Go see if there's anything to that. And we poked around online and we found this one article. It's not even an actual like article hosted on a newspaper website. It was like the text of an article from 1989 that was copied and pasted onto this defunct tech blog type website. It was all very, very sketchy, but this article had the basics of this weird thing that had happened wherein in 1989, there were like 2 ,700 Lisa computers that were dumped unceremoniously in this landfill in Logan, Utah. And there was a used computer dealer who was involved. And there was this sort of strange business arrangement that he had with Apple.

49:53And there was talk of a tax write-off and the dealer was sad. This feels like the first act of like a really great true crime documentary. Yeah. I mean, that's what kind of, we were like, maybe this is exactly what that is. So we started to look into it. So what really happened that day? To get answers, we went back 40 years. Get a shovel and start digging to find the people who brought Lisa to life. Well, it was really exciting. This was the new foundation, the new frontier. To figure out why it really flopped. There definitely was an element of revenge. And to understand why Apple would bury its own past.

50:29Literally. So I want you to tell me the story, but I realized in preparing for this that I don't really know anything about the Lisa. I know it was a computer. I know it didn't really do much. I mean, it did a lot in 1983. That's fair. But it wasn't like in the history of like vaunted Apple devices. I don't feel like anybody talks about the Lisa. Like, what was this thing? Why does nobody talk about it? So I didn't. I mean, that's about as much as I knew about it myself until I started to look into it. And people still talk about it today insofar as it was this milestone thing for Apple. It came out in 1983, a year before the Macintosh comes out.

51:08Presenting Lisa, a 16-bit dual disk drive personal office system from Apple Computer, the next revolution in computing. The Apple Lisa was really the first big mass market computer to introduce all of these new ideas for personal computing to the masses. So it's the super big deal. But then a year later, the Macintosh comes out. And for a lot of reasons that we can get into, that's the one that succeeds. And the Macintosh goes on and, you know, is the Macintosh that changed everything for personal computing, whereas the Lisa just kind of went away. and then the burial is just sort of like the most extreme version of just went away uh it's sort of in keeping with this feeling that like the mac one and the lisa is just in a dump in utah so and of course as you would you in order to figure out what happened you went to a random tiny town in utah like people do to find all good stories about the history of technology well that was the whole point yeah we're like you gotta go to the dump so if we just take this road up and around when we hit that bend will be kind of right in the middle of where they were and so if we park near that bend and then just walk out and up we'll be there somewhere under 30 years of garbage so yeah but we got there and it was like a reality hit we like walked up this mountain of decades of garbage we talked to this guy that was driving a dump truck around and he's like oh yeah 1989 that's like 50 feet down.

52:41Oh, wow. And it's December. It's snowing. It's the place is completely desolate. And we're like, oh, there's no earthly clue that we're actually going to dig these things up. And we later found out after talking to a bunch of the people who were there that the folks at the landfill went out of their way to run all the computers over with the dump trucks before they buried them to like make sure they were dead. Oh, wow. Which may have been an instruction given to them by Apple, depending on that. That's like a thing that we don't know. But like those computers are dead. I have so many questions about why a company would choose to do that.

53:15But I think back up a little bit in the story, because I think in the documentary, there's this guy, Bob Cook, who becomes a sort of main character. And it seems like a lot of like a surprising amount of the story of the Lisa runs through him. Tell me about him. Yes. So he is sort of the other half of the Lisa story. There's a whole half of the Lisa story that It is well-documented, well-understood. It's about the development and the launch of this thing. Steve Jobs' role in leading the development and kind of sabotaging it and then walking away from it, all this stuff. So all of that happens.

53:46The Lisa launches anyway. It's$10 ,000. It's hardware is a little flaky. It's aimed at the business market. And Apple's not great at dealing with the business market. IBM's kind of like already got the market corner there. So Apple cans the Lisa in 1985. This story picks up because while that's all happening, there's this guy in Utah, Bob Cook. I was reading in the computer magazines and there was an advertisement that said, become an Apple dealer, fill in this form and mail it in. And I did that. He was an Apple reseller in the late 70s, early 80s. He was struggling with that, but he kind of happened onto this idea of selling older discontinued computers.

54:30And this was right around the time that there were older discontinued personal computers because personal computers were so new. But there was this Apple computer, the Apple III, that was a flop for Apple. It was supposed to be the successor to the Apple II, but it was expensive and people didn't really buy it. Yeah, another one nobody really talks about in the history of Apple. Right, exactly. And we're not going to really talk about it. But there were a bunch of leftover Apple III's at Apple HQ that this guy Bob found out about. And he kind of whined them and dined them over a period of time and eventually convinced them to just sell him all of their old Apple 3s that they didn't totally know what to do with.

55:07And so created this business for himself selling kind of outdated, failed Apple hardware. There was a lot of people that were selling brand new equipment. Computers are supposed to be leading edge. Nobody was thinking about selling the trailing edge of high technology. I kind of love that. Yeah. And that's like a thing we all think about now, now that computers are expensive and they last and we are cheap and we want to, you know, save a little bit of money. But that just wasn't a thing as much back then. So he makes this, he does this deal with the Apple three and it goes really well. And then according to him, Apple called him after this Apple three deal and said, can you just, can we just do this all again with the leases?

55:47because the Lisa had just flopped and it was the same story all over again. Apple didn't know what to do with all of its unsold leases. So they put them all in a truck and shipped them off to Utah. So that's how the story of Lisa takes this turn to northern Utah out of nowhere. So Apple has now completely moved on, but there's people in Utah who are buying and using leases. There's people all over the country who are now buying and using leases because this This guy, Bob, operated a mail order business. He had 800 phone lines and mailers that he sent out everywhere. And so, yes, the Apple computer is off selling the Apple II line and off selling Macintoshes.

56:31And out of this one kind of warehouse in northern Utah, the Lisa is like back to life. Bob is upgrading it. He's like putting new hardware into it. He modified the system software so that it would work more like a Macintosh Plus. that could actually run the latest version of macOS. So the leases actually kind of function like Macintoshes and sold them at a super steep discount. So they were competitive with the Macintoshes that Apple was offering, but they had this nice big screen like the Lisa had. It was a whole separate product line, basically. Right. Well, that's super fascinating because my initial impression from the way you described it was that he was running something like sort of a secondhand store, right?

57:13Where it's like, it's not the best thing, but it's cheaper. But what you're describing is actually like somebody sort of taking and turning Apple products and being like, actually, I can maybe do this better and more usefully than Apple is doing. Like, did this work? Like, was this was this like an like a genuinely successful business? It was for him. You know, it's compared to Apple. Obviously, no. But like he had really hit on something. He called these things the Lisa professional because he put so much time and energy into the hardware and the software. He did this whole kind of branding campaign.

57:44and moved a bunch of them. Yeah, his business grew. He was selling these computers all over the country. His customers loved him. He was helping to support the existing Lisa user base through repairs and replacement parts and things like that. And Apple notably, you know, one of the reasons he says that they really liked the deal is because they kind of washed their hands of the entire product line. They, with the Apple 3 and the Lisa both, they would just send tech support calls directly to him. Oh, wow. For either of those models. So like he sort of became this. He's like a de facto Apple executive.

58:21Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just a like, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Apple's getting rid of these computers that they are not good at selling one way or the other. And he is making them marketable and finding a market for them that Apple never did. Sun generated four million dollars last year and drew the attention of Newsweek magazine. And after the article hit the streets, sales skyrocketed. There was a lot of people that saw the Newsweek article. I mean, that was huge. This sounds like a win-win. Everybody should be happy. But at some point, this story has to go horribly wrong, right?

58:52Well, yes. At some point, all roads lead to the landfill. We know the end of this story, which is the dump. Right, right. Act three has got to be a doozy here. I mean, honestly, it's super abrupt. What happened caught Bob by surprise. He says he just got a call one day. He says that Apple loved him for what he was doing. And then one day got this call from Apple lawyers that said, hey, we're coming to get the computers. He said, we've decided that we want to exercise our clause in the contract to pick up the computers that we own. An important detail is that he had most of these on consignment.

59:27OK. There was a clause in their contract that said we can just come pick these up at some point. And so they did. there were a bunch of as he describes them very large men showed up they were ex-marines they're all six foot six you know and they're just these muscle men they started loading up trucks he thought they were headed back to cupertino but he says he got in the car and followed them and ended up at the landfill in town wait he just got in the car and he was like i'm going wherever these computers are going let's see what happens yeah this was i mean this was like he really banked his whole business on these computers.

1:00:07So when Apple threw this curveball, yeah, he says he was very, very invested in understanding what was going on. You can just picture the moment where they're driving down the street and it's like the highway is to the left and the dump is to the right. And he's like, he puts on his left signal to turn and it said the truck goes to the right. And he's like, what is happening? And this is, I mean, like with a little bit more budget, like these are the reenactments that we really needed to have done. Yeah, this is an animated series waiting to happen here, man. I'm just telling you. I know. I know.

1:00:35OK, but not only did they then take these computers to the dump for ostensibly no reason, but they like beat them to death. It sounds like they were just kind of mean about it. And this is the this is like kind of one of the central mysteries of this story, because they told the reporter who wrote this article that it was this business decision. They didn't want to be on the hook for spare parts any longer through Bob or anyone else. They could probably claim a tax write-off for the inventory that they were destroying, and they were just like, yep, that's what we're doing. But the weird thing about it is that it just all seemed sketchier than that.

1:01:11Bob and we found the reporter and the photo editor. The photo editor and Bob both described the people who showed up to take these computers to the dump. One of them called them toughies. It seemed like the mob had come to town. You know, so it was an it was a very strange day. They were very intimidating. There were big guys who were seemed like they were charged with keeping people from following the action. So this is not like Apple's accounting department coming for a tax write off. No, it is not. Yeah, it's very unclear who these people were, other than they were affiliated with Apple and they were trying reasonably hard to prevent anyone from watching what they were doing.

1:01:52So the newspaper got tipped off to this from the landfill. We probably wouldn't know anything about this except that the landfill tipped off the newspaper. Can you imagine getting that tip? Like, we're both journalists. Can you imagine getting a tip from a landfill? You got to come see what's being dumped here. I mean, I dream about that every day. That is true. There's no downside to that story. No, you just you just wait at your phone for a call like that. But yeah, so they show up and they stand their ground and they get the story. But they watch as these dump truck operators run these computers over with the dump trucks and then drop them in a hole in the ground and bury them.

1:02:29So, you know, if it was a tax thing, what's that all about? Yeah. It's all just very, very fishy feeling. Did you get any kind of information from Apple, by the way? Like, did you did you ask what they think about all this? OK. We asked very nicely and they said, quote, we are declining to participate. They just they just like gave us a wave. Fair enough. And that was that we were praying that they would give us something because after 30 plus years, it's we had enough trouble nailing down the just the particulars of what actually happened, let alone the like. But why did you really do that? And why were you so weird about it?

1:03:06Yeah. Well, that's one of the things I found myself wondering is like, is this is this like an urban legend in Logan now? Like people go to diners and everybody has a theory about what was going on because they're really at least what you describe it. there's basically like this one guy and this one primary document and kind of other than that we have essentially no information i can just imagine this being the kind of thing especially in a town like logan utah where everyone in town would have a theory about what happened here and somebody would have been like i think i saw steve jobs that day like he was there he did it himself is it kind of a myth in that story in that town now there is surprisingly little of that there and i suspect it is because it just wasn't a big deal when it happened that's fair there's that one article.

1:03:47We found a letter to the editor about a week later in the same paper complaining, like, why didn't these computers go to the schools? Like, the schools need computers. Why'd you destroy them? Like, that was sort of the extent of the response to it. And I think everyone just kind of shrugged and moved on with their lives. If I were to just wildly prognosticate based on nothing except the story that you've told me. Yes, I love it. What I would think is that this is pure vindictiveness from Steve Jobs. That not only does Steve Jobs want to kill the Lisa with the Macintosh, he wants to stamp it out of history to literally, like, I wouldn't be surprised if he was at the landfill that day, like, personally driving a stake through the heart of the Lisa as if to say, like, I won, the Macintosh won, I am Steve Jobs.

1:04:33And as far as I understand, this would not have been out of character for Steve Jobs in the 80s to go fly to Utah and do that. Not in the slightest. so do you think that sort of that corporate intrigue fueled any of this again like we don't know it's an old story but yeah i have a hard time not seeing those two things as very connected to one another well so i like that is the most natural thing in the world to think and and bob the computer reseller like that's always been at the forefront of his mind he like feels personally persecuted by steve jobs so he's like steve came for the last of these exactly the funny thing is that Steve Jobs had left the company in 1985.

1:05:10This all happened in 1989. Oh, that's right. Steve Jobs, he was running next. He had his own computer company. He was literally just like doing so he was not officially anywhere near the decision making process for any of this stuff. So there's and we found no evidence that he was pulling the strings from afar or anything like that. It's a shame. That really puts a damper on my theory. Well, here's what I can tell you is that We talked to a guy named Bruce Daniels, who was a manager on the Lisa team and was around for a lot of the rise and fall of Steve in the 80s. And one thing he told us was that Steve had so poisoned the well at Apple against the Lisa, had spent so much time bad mouthing the Lisa and preventing anyone from saying anything good about the Lisa, that he was like, that probably lasted.

1:06:02Well, certainly while Steve was there, I mean, already he was saying, you know, the Lisa was terrible and horrible and not worth it. And so it couldn't help but kind of permeate the thinking around there. I mean, if I were there, I would just for your own job security, you wouldn't say anything good about the Lisa. And you'd say good things about the Mac and the wonderful leadership the Mac group had. And also, I'm assuming like publicly this thing was something you would rather have not in existence, even made by a retailer. Like Apple in 1989, if I have my timeline right, is not doing great.

1:06:37Like the Macintosh is pretty good. It's pretty successful. But Apple is still in pretty tough straits as a company. You're absolutely right. They're selling good computers. They're selling expensive computers. And they're not selling very many of them. So they're building this reputation for themselves of being this like fancy niche computer business. And they're under a ton of pressure to release cheaper computers to compete with IBM compatibles and just like claw back some of the market share that they'd lost over the course of the 80s. And so you can see how a super expensive, business-oriented, flopped computer that just like won't go away could feel like a thing that they might want to make go away once and for all.

1:07:21You know, it's at a small scale. It's just this one reseller, but he's punching above his weight. This guy is making the rounds at Macworld Expos. He's he got written up in Newsweek. He was sort of the face of the this like trailing edge business. Oh, man. See, that actually makes a lot of sense, because I can absolutely see if I'm, you know, John Scully, the CEO of Apple, and I'm looking at this and it's saying Apple couldn't make the Lisa any good. But this dude in Utah can. But this guy did. Yeah, absolutely. And there's just article after article in in magazines, these trade publications, just like the the lisa's second shot the lisa rides again there's just all of this like lisa's back everybody which i can't imagine is is useful at apple yeah uh so again like 100 speculation apple was not super forthcoming we had a really hard time finding anyone who was at apple at that time and was in any of the rooms where this kind of thing was discussed but it all kind of lines up in that way yeah that makes a lot of sense okay so you didn't find the how how many thousands of lisas was it again about 2700 of them okay so you didn't find the 2700 how close do you think you got like you stood in the landfill could you feel the vibes of the 2700 lisas like did they call to you i mean there there were ghosts there were also it was like cold and windy and it just like stinky it had a vibe about a place so we we were ready to go i don't know if that was the like anguished cries of the leases driving us away but it was not a super pleasant environment all the slow processors saying get out of here but it did feel like we at least proved out the basics of the story which does have this sort of like tech urban legend kind of feel to it we we went to the utah state archives and like found the actual microfilm print of the article to prove that it like was actually an article and not this like you know pile of text on this blog and they actually had scans of of all the photos that the photographer took that day so we got to just like click through photo after photo of just like dumpster bulldozer and there's like this one photo of a just a bulldozer and a keyboard just like a sad keyboard in the garbage with a like bulldozer coming up over it it feels like an album cover for like a really sad piano right yeah that's like a ben Folds 5 album, just that.

1:09:42Ballad of the Lisa, yeah. I love that. So what do you take away about this as like a story about Apple? Because it's a really interesting time because Apple is obviously this like untouchably ascendant company right now. But it's also a really funny moment because everybody thinks they're about to launch a headset that is also potentially we're back in this kind of like thing before the thing moment where it's like, is this going to be when Apple like reinvents the future? Or is this going to be the dumb, disastrous, too expensive thing before somebody actually figures this out? So to some extent, history is repeating itself a bit, but also Apple is this untouchably gigantic company that feels dominant in a way that it wasn't obviously in the 80s.

1:10:21And the whole idea of Apple working with an outside dude to make their computers better is so hilariously impossible at this point. But what do you take away as a person who thinks about Apple as a company now? What did you learn? i've been thinking about the you know the pending release of this headset too not least of which because i just realized that the this documentary is about the lisa is going to come out and then like a week later it's going to be completely buried by the news of whatever apple releases and like that's so perfect for this story about the lisa that it's going to have this like very brief window of play and then it's just going to be buried under this avalanche of apple news and then 30 years later somebody will find it and they'll be like gosh remember in 2023 And then the whole cycle will start anew and someone will come find me and I'll be like, I was there.

1:11:11But yeah, I think you kind of hit it because I also have this feeling about Apple that they are completely unstoppable, untouchable. And I feel just like a plaything of Apple's as as their customer. And this story was really interesting to dig into because because it wasn't always like that. It's just like this completely different portrait of this company that does not have its shit figured out, that is willing to work with whoever comes calling with an interesting idea that can make these colossal mistakes and just try something else. It just sort of brings them down to earth a little bit. And I think that's valuable.

1:11:53And it's especially valuable as they and whoever knows else is going to take this next leap to try to like figure out what comes next after the smartphone. And like the story beats of this story, which just feel quaint and from a very different time could be super relevant again. And it could be, you know, history could absolutely repeat itself. And so I think in this era of huge, infallible tech companies, that's always a good reminder because nothing lasts. It kind of makes me think about the like the vanishing thinness of the line between getting it right and not getting it right. And it's like the alternate history where the Lisa was the one that worked and like the computer in front of me is a Lisa book error instead of a MacBook error is like not crazy.

1:12:40And there's a handful of what seems like relatively minor and often not product related things that made one work and not the other. Absolutely. And it's seeing the two of them side by side really drives that home. People really like honestly, seriously talk about one of the reasons the Macintosh was more successful than the Lisa was that it's just cuter. like people actually say that you know like designers of these computers say that they're like well the mac was just kind of cuter and people kind of went oh mac and like that's kind of all you have to go off of when you're looking at the two computers side by side is the lisa was like a little bit bigger and bulkier and like looked like it belonged in an office to do important office things and the mac is like jazz and it's like that's really stupid that they're so similar, but there is something to it somehow.

1:13:30Totally. Yeah. The line between changing the world and being in a dump is always smaller than you think. How's that for a life lesson right now? Because just everyone remember that. Just carry that one around with you. All right. Well, the doc is awesome. Everybody should go watch it. We'll link it in the show notes. It's on theverse.com. Congrats on being done with this. The story is super fun. I'm really glad you got to go to a dump in Utah and figure it all out. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for chatting about it. We'll be right back. Thank you.

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1:16:29All right, before we go, we have a question from the Vergecast hotline. We're going to start answering one of these every week because we just get too many fun ones to save them all up and do an episode every once in a while. Sometimes I'll have an answer. Sometimes I'll grab someone else who knows better. Let's just hear the first one and we'll find out. Hey, Verge, this is Josh from Texas. I have a question about music streaming services and why is there not an easier way to switch to other streaming services? It kind of seems like We're in a world where companies are providing tools to help you switch your phone or your desktop operating systems, or even trying to make things work together, kind of like what's happening with Matter.

1:17:08But it seems like on the music streaming services side, it's like none of the providers are interested in solving this problem, and we're just kind of stuck with third-party services. So my questions are, are any of these third-party services good to switch? And also, why are these companies not giving us the tools to help us get to their platform? Y 'all are the best. I love the show. Thanks.

1:17:59that switching is too easy for all of these companies. If they made it easy to switch, the price would go down. Everybody would have to build new features because it's all just a music library. None of these companies want to make it easy for you to switch because they don't really have any moats otherwise. That said, there are some tools that make it easier. I used one recently called SoundEase, S-O-U-N-D-I-I-Z, and it worked surprisingly well. I ended up paying five bucks for a month of pro, but then I basically was able to just check next to all of my Spotify playlists and kind of all at once create identical playlists on YouTube music.

1:18:34That's all it moved. It can't really grab every other part of what's going on inside of my Spotify, but at least I had all of my playlists. That was pretty good. There are also tools like Free Your Music, Song Shift, and Tune My Music that have their own spin on kind of that same idea. We actually have a good how-to story that I will link in the show notes on how to switch between a bunch of different music services. None of them are perfect, but you can do pretty well. The downside is you can't really teach a new system to know you like the old one does. You can't transfer your listening history.

1:19:06The algorithms don't transfer. So I now have, I don't know, more than a decade of Spotify listening, and the service just knows me really well. And you are going to have a very real cold start problem, no matter what you do with a new service. It would be great if it was better and you could just move between the music services as you want to, but I wouldn't hold your breath. all right that's it for the verge cast today thanks to everyone who came on the show and thank you so much for listening there's a whole lot more from this conversation at the verge.com we'll put some links in the show notes to lane's book and to the doc but just go to the verge.com it's a cool website and like i said we are going to have an awful lot of apple coverage through wwdc and all of next week if you have thoughts questions feelings predictions for wwdc or anything else on your mind you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11.

1:19:55Like I said, we're going to answer a question on this show every week, and we're probably going to do a hotline episode pretty soon. So keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about, well, probably WWDC, plus all of the other tech news going on this week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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