mr. toothpaste may be doing a bit here and i don't wish to make it less fun if so, but what i think is the funniest thing about the lisa is that they suck really bad. if you see one in person you go "oh my god this is so much bigger than i thought, this is comically large" and then a moment later you go "oh my god this plastic looks so trashy" and then a moment later you go "oh my god there's almost no industrial design here, it's just a big rectangle with huge gaps between the panels" and then if you're very unlucky, someone turns it on and you see the OS
the lisa is what you get when it's the 1980s and you ask Apple to build a new computer (can't be an Apple II!) with function over form.
if i remember right, the whole thing was basically specified, designed, and built by like... ex-minicomputer Business Computing(TM) types of folks, which makes it kind of interesting if you do get to see one next to a Mac.
the lisa is significantly more capable than the mac but it's my understanding that the trade-off is that it's also significantly slower. i saw one in action once and uh...
they're not actually all that fast, in the "things happen on the screen quickly" sense.
secondarily to all that, they can run alternative OSes, they were recommended purchases in some academic departments because they're like, a UNIX for them.
i don't know if i'd go as far as to say unusable, but if it's 1984 and you can choose between an Apple IIe, a Mac, and a Lisa, each of these things has fairly different priorities as a platform.
i think it would have been interesting to see where the lisa platform could hypothetically have gone with some newer CPUs and some other more modern accoutrements, networking, etc etc, but alas it was not to be!
