Apple Lisa





The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple
Computer during the early 1980s. Much of the design of the Lisa, which was
supposedly named after the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, was
inspired by the graphical user interface of the Xerox Star (8010)
workstation. The Lisa project was started at Apple in 1978 and slowly
evolved into a project to design a powerful personal computer with a GUI
that would be targeted towards business customers. Around 1982, Steve Jobs
was forced out of the Lisa project, so he joined the Macintosh project
instead. Contrary to popular belief, the Macintosh is not a direct
descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between both
systems.

The origin of the name Lisa is shrouded in mystery. Some say it is an
acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, others that it was named
after Steve Jobs' daughter, and that the acronym was invented later to fit
the name.

The Lisa was first introduced in January 1983 (announced on January 19) at a
cost of $9,995 US. It was the first personal computer to have a GUI and a
mouse. The first Lisa had two 5.25 inch disk drives (nicknamed the "Twiggy"
drive) and ran the Lisa OS as its operating system. It ran on a Motorola
68000 CPU and had 512K RAM. It also featured preemptive multitasking, then
an extremely advanced feature for a system at this level, but one that was
partially responsible for the overall slowness of the system. (The Macintosh
did not receive this feature until Mac OS X). The Apple ProFile external
hard drive, which was originally designed for the Apple III, could be used
with the Lisa. Conceptually, the Lisa resembled the Xerox Star in the sense
that it was envisioned as an office computing system; consequently, Lisa had
two main user modes: the Lisa Office System and the Workshop.

The Apple Lisa turned out to be a commercial failure for Apple, the largest
since the Apple III disaster of 1980. The intended business computing
customers balked at Lisa's high price and largely opted to run more
inexpensive IBM PCs, which were already beginning to dominate business
desktop computing. The Lisa was also seen as being a bit slow in spite of
its innovative interface. The nail in the coffin for Lisa was the release of
the Macintosh in 1984, which helped discredit the Lisa since the Macintosh
also had a GUI and mouse but was far less expensive. The Lisa, like many
products, was a victim of being too far ahead of its time. Two later Lisa
models were released (the Lisa 2 and the so-called Macintosh XL) before the
Lisa line was discontinued in August 1986.

At a time when 96kilobytes of RAM was considered an extravagancy, much of
the Lisa's high pricetag, and therefore its commercial failure, can be
attributed to the large amount of ram the system came with. Computers were
still being sold into the 1990s with smaller amounts of ram onboard than the
Lisa had.

Computing folklore has it that Apple had a significant number of their
unsold Lisas buried at a landfill.

Like other early GUI computers, working Lisas are today fairly valuable
collector-items, which people will pay thousands of dollars for.