“I remember that complaints about the small screen were rejected with the retort that the type was no smaller than the Wall Street Journal.”
The bigger problem was its 4KB of memory: that’s right, 4 KILObytes. You had to insert a floppy disk to write stuff too. We had one of these and I’m amazed what documents and spreadsheets we produced on a machine with such limitations. Compared to what came later, they were ridiculously expensive and extremely primitive. Nevertheless, they were one of the first out of the gate and for that they deserve a lot of credit.
I had one of the first Lisa Systems, forerunner of the MAC, from Apple.
It was a great machine that could do a lot of things. I think it had 4mb of memory that was later upgraded to 8mb.
It was expensive, $10,000 brand new.
My Dad had it in storage and gave it to me, I had all the orginal software and manuals. Ended up selling it on E-Bay to a collector. It still worked.
I think the BIOS was 4KB, not the main memory.
But even the Xerox NoteTaker (upon which it was based, and prototyped years earlier) had 128KB, IIRC.