While Steve Jobs told the press, at the Apple II Forever event, that the Macintosh had reached 50,000 unit sales in 100 days, there were growing doubts about how many people wanted a computer with a black-and-white screen. When interviewed by David Sheff for Playboy magazine, Jobs' reply on the lack of color was:
“Someday, we may be able to build a color screen for a reasonable price.”
Toby Farrand recalls:
Interestingly, at that time, when people thought of business computers, they thought of monochrome displays. Color was not common. This bias was so strong that Jobs was quoted somewhere as saying, “Color has no place on the Macintosh.” Of course, Steve did not believe that, but he was in a desperate battle to get I.T. people to take Apple seriously, and there were a lot of not-very-smart I.T. people in the world who somehow felt that color was not good for business. The business focus and Steve’s statement created the perfect opening for Wayne (Rosing).
Rosing was asked what would happen to the Lisa team post-launch:
“The more creative ones are getting loose now. They're going to do some wild thinking. We'll create an atmosphere, try not to interfere, not expect anything from them, and if we manage it right, something neat's going to happen - we just don't know what.”
Journalist Denise Caruso detailed further changes at Apple:
“Wayne Rosing, who headed the Lisa division, is now VP of advanced development, a strategic technical position for developing future technology”.
Larry Tesler recalled Rosing's plans post-Lisa.
“He said, 'I'm interested in education. I’m interested in research. I’ll start an Education Research Group (ERG). That’s a very important market for Apple. And I can do not just K-12 but university-level computing.' He started this pretty cool research group, people from Lisa, people from outside Apple”.
Toby Farrand recalls:
He (Rosing) gathered up a dozen or so engineers, called it the Education Research Group (ERG), and declared internally that our mission was to build a color Macintosh for the education market. It was a brilliant move.
Around this time, senior programmer Mark Cutter reached an impasse. His MacDraw vector graphics drawing application had moved Apple away from pixel-oriented programs with fixed resolutions, but he was unsure of what came next.
I had spent four years on those apps, and once the Mac shipped, there was some discussion about whether Apple wanted to be in the app business. There were third-party products that had come out and did similar things. Apple's product and marketing folks didn't know whether Apple should compete with developers. At the same time, there was a bit of organizational turmoil going on with the Lisa team and the Mac team and Steve Jobs - and everything. So when Wayne Rosing and a lot of the Lisa team formed ERG, I went with them.
ERG also caught the eye of original Lisa programmer Rod Perkins:
I heard that Wayne Rosing was starting some kind of research group.
Meanwhile, David Fung had gone from Apple intern to employee:
I could play around with Mac development early with a Lisa that we had in our department, and then I joined Rosing's ERG team.
The Education Research Group was soon a mixture of ex-Lisa, ex-HP, and ex-DEC engineers. Wayne Rosing told Noospheric years later:
“[My job] was to create an environment where inventors could flourish. The second was understanding broad technology trends, where the big technological discontinuities are, and how you can apply technology to create breakthrough products. So you take that understanding, and then you find people who you place bets on. And I don't mind running multiple bets, but I just don't like people competing with each other. You don't play one against the other.”
Toby Farrand looks back:
Reporting to Sculley, he (Rosing) was untouchable, and since Jobs had taken great pains to distance the Macintosh from the education market and exclude color, Wayne’s group had a wide-open field to explore those areas without interference.
While many staff members from Lisa went to ERG, Ron Johnston, and the team that built its operating system, did not.
Steve Jobs was in charge, and he had no use for Lisa or us. Jobs was resentful that he hadn't been allowed to run the Lisa project solo and that it had then been taken off him in '81 and given to John Couch to run instead. So, as soon as he could, he killed Lisa, and there was a big layoff. I survived, luckily, and moved to the Macintosh division under Bud Colligan. And we were looking at this computer and thinking, 'This Mac is a toy, it can't even support its development.' Several of us agreed on what needed to happen.'We've got to have a real operating system.' And so I started investigating Unix. Secretly.
Without telling anyone, especially Steve Jobs.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
