When I visited the Museum of Printing a month ago, I saw an Apple Lisa that, unfortunately, is no longer working. Here’s one that is.
Lisa was famously inspired by Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, where he saw a demonstration of the revolutionary Alto office system. The Alto project was headed by Bob Taylor, after he got the pre-Internet Arpanet going, and before he went to DEC to create the pre-Google search engine, Alta Vista.
In early 1983, I was flying around to install operating systems on minicomputers for medical laboratory systems at hospitals. In addition to my hi-fi magazine habit, I was reading computer magazines. One of the best was Byte. The February issue that year featured the introduction of Apple’s Lisa.
As seen by enlarging the page at right below, PARC’s influence was acknowledged.
But it wasn’t Lisa that caught my fancy in that particular issue of Byte. It was that little word “STANDARDS” in the bottom right corner of the cover.
I read that article over and over. A year later, The RS-232 Solution, by Joe Campbell was published.
https://archive.org/details/The_RS-232_Solution_by_Joe_Campbell
What I learned from studying that book became second nature to me. The next step was buying a portable RS-232 breakout box.
I took that thing with me everywhere on my business travels, for whenever I needed to figure out the interface pin-outs for a particular device. I’d draw the wiring diagram and add it to my collection.
Eventually, I wrote a RS-232 Wiring Guide that was distributed to all customers. It was one of those things that nobody told me to do, but it needed doing, so I did it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_modem
My interest in data communications, later superseded by computer networking, served me very well all the way through to retirement. Everything I’ve written here about keeping my music network running is just another expression of scratching that itch.