Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Brings Back Useful Features from Apple’s 1983 Lisa

Low End Mac’s Dan Knight says that during the WWDC keynote, the thought kept coming to his mind that Lisa lives!

Lisa was Apple’s first computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), debuting a year before the Mac. With a $10,000 price, it didn’t sell briskly, but did pave the way for Macintosh and had some innovative features that were left behind when the Mac, with far less RAM, no hard drive, and just one built-in floppy drive, displaced it.

Other Lisa coolness: as you worked, the coputer took care of saving, and when you quit a file, quit an app, or turned off the computer, it marked your place, so the next time you launched that document, there you were functionality that’s returned with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in a feature called Resume, but only with apps designed to take advantage of Lion.

The Lion Auto Save feature not only saves your documents as you work, but allows you to revert to a previous version or open an earlier version, copy text or data, and paste it into the current version. You don’t have to remember to save when you quit an app. However, as with Resume, apps will have to be updated to take advantage of it.

The third element this is Versions, which is like Time Machine for your document, making it easy to navigate however many saved versions Auto Save has archived. That, says Dan, goes way beyond anything Lisa had, and that’s just three of 250 new features coming with Lion for the amazing price of $29.95, as opposed to the historically customary $129 price of Mac OS X upgrades, and $199 for a five-user family pack for those with two or more Macs. Apple lowered the price of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to $29 (or $49 for the five-user family pack), but Lion lowers the ante again with the $29.95 Mac App Store price covering up to 10 Macs registered with the same Apple User ID.

For Dan Knight’s full report, see:
http://lowendmac.com/musings/11mm/lion-ios5-icloud.html