FILK: Heart of the Apple Lisa

        I kept forgetting to send this to the filk list (forgive me, it's been a hectic month). Here you are, enjoy, all that rot, etc.

Heart of the Apple Lisa
lyrics by Jordan Kare
(Orig. "Heart of the Appaloosa" by Fred Small)

In the land of high tech ventures, by the waters of Frisco Bay, Hewlett Packard up by Stanford, IBM in San Jose The Hackers of the Apple wrote their code and schemed their schemes In the Valley known as Silicon, where fortunes grow from dreams. Still smarting from the Apple III, the Edsel of its day They vowed to build a new machine to win them praise and pay. They would ease the user's burden; the command line they'd replace With the magic known as GUI, Graphics User Interface

CHORUS:         Windows Scrolling in the Valley
                Lead the Hackers off on a GUI tide
                There's blood on the chips down at HP, DEC, and MIPS
                But the heart of the Apple Lisa never died!

Then from Xerox came the Alto, never marketed nor sold Bringing mice and multitasking, and windows that unfold. Desktops sprouted metal rodents; bitmaps glowed upon the screen, And printers put on whizzy wigs to print just what was seen.

Nearly lost in Big Blue's shadow, incompatible with DOS, The Lisa, slow and costly, seemed sure to be a loss, But then came Macs and Fat Macs, LaserWriters, II's, and more And word would come from Microsoft: "You realize, this means War!"

CHORUS The Chief spoke to the Hackers, in his anger and his pain, "I am no more John Sculley; Scrolling Windows is my name! They condemn us to niche markets, call our products vaporware. We will sue them if we must, but we'll retain our market share!"

They climbed on board that scuzzy bus, and with Postscript in their hearts They won in desktop publishing, they won in Graphic Arts, 'Til Bill Gates, he saw his strategy, and sent the e-mail down, To copy those GUI features, wherever they be found.

CHORUS Three Windows versions later, past the Pentium divide, The strangest of bedfellows, IBM now on their side, Three thousand applications on the Power PC run, But the buyers and the users still are leaving one by one...

Windows Scrolling in the Valley said, "My heart is sick and sad. The future now is RISCy, the old chips are dead. The lawyers take our spirit... But I've stock options galore.
>From where Scott McNealy stands, I will fight no more!"

CHORUS They were moved to Intel platforms. Michaelangelo ran rife But more hackers quit from boredom, and went off to get a life. And the man once known as Scully,

        with great glee is heard to state, "They'll get Windows '95 debugged... in 1998!"

But sometimes, without warning, in a dull commercial app, A hack of wondrous cleverness emerges from the crap! A metaphor that's graceful; a shortcut that's a thrill. Double click upon that icon -- the Apple Lisa's living still!

CHORUS
CHORUS santa@serv.net : http://www.serv.net/~santa Received on 04/30/96