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The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. The Lisa project was started at Apple in 1978 and slowly evolved into a project to design a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that would be targeted toward 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 the systems. Download high resolution version (640x710, 84 KB)Apple Lisa with a ProFile hard drive stacked on top of it. ...
Apple Inc. ...
January 19 is the 19th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...
1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
CPU redirects here. ...
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the SI unit of frequency. ...
The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor from Motorola. ...
ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 3. ...
Apple Inc. ...
A graphical user interface (or GUI, often pronounced gooey), is a particular case of user interface for interacting with a computer which employs graphical images and widgets in addition to text to represent the information and actions available to the user. ...
Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney. ...
The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...
Etymology While the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only ever referred to it as The Lisa, officially, Apple stated that the name was an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture. Since Steve Jobs' first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Jobs, it is normally inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was invented later to fit the name. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Backronym and Apronym (Discuss) Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and ABC, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced on the basis of this abbreviated written form. ...
It is proposed that this article be deleted, because of the following concern: Does not satisfy WP:BIO If you can address this concern by improving, copyediting, sourcing, renaming or merging the page, please edit this page and do so. ...
A backronym or bacronym is a type of acronym that begins as an ordinary word, and is later interpreted as an acronym. ...
Hardware The Lisa was first introduced in January 1983 (announced on January 19) at a cost of $9,995 US ($20,600 in Nov. 2006 dollars). It was one of the first commercial personal computers to have a GUI and a mouse. It used a Motorola 68000 CPU at a 5 MHz clock rate and had 1 MB RAM. The first Lisa had two custom 5¼ inch floppy disk drives designed with two head assemblies, one per side, which could seek independently. These drives required custom media with two head openings. They were nicknamed "Twiggy" drives. An optional external 5 MB Apple ProFile hard drive (originally designed for the Apple III) was also offered. The later Lisa 2 models used a single 3½ inch floppy disk drive and optional 5 or 10 MB internal hard disks. In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple announced that it was providing free 5 MB hard drive upgrades to all Lisa 1 owners. 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
January 19 is the 19th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...
ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 3. ...
Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ...
The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor from Motorola. ...
CPU redirects here. ...
MegaHertz (MHz) is the name given to one million (106) Hertz, a measure of frequency. ...
A megabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to approximately one million bytes. ...
Random access memory (usually known by its acronym, RAM) is a type of data store used in computers that allows the stored data to be accessed in any order — that is, at random, not just in sequence. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. ...
Apple Lisa with a ProFile hard drive. ...
Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
Apple III The Apple III, or Apple /// as it was sometimes styled, was the first completely new computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. ...
1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Software The Lisa operating system featured cooperative (non-preemptive) multitasking[1] and virtual memory, then extremely advanced features for a personal computer. The use of virtual memory coupled with a fairly slow disk system made the system performance seem sluggish at times. 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 Lisa Office System was the GUI environment for end users. The Workshop was a program development environment, and was almost entirely text-based, though it used a GUI text editor. The Lisa Office System was eventually renamed "7/7", in reference to the seven supplied application programs: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal. An operating system (OS) is a computer program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ...
In computing, multitasking is a method by which multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is...
It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles. ...
The Star workstation, officially known as the 8010 Star Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. ...
Business blunder
 The Lisa 2 / Macintosh XL 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 less expensive IBM PCs, which were already beginning to dominate business desktop computing. The largest Lisa customer was NASA which used LisaProject for project management and which was faced with significant problems when the Lisa was discontinued. 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 Apple Macintosh in 1984, which helped discredit the Lisa since the Macintosh also had a GUI and mouse but was far less expensive. Two later Lisa models were released (the Lisa 2 and its Mac ROM-enabled sibling Macintosh XL) before the Lisa line was discontinued in August 1986. Image File history File linksMetadata Macintosh_XL.jpg‎ A Lisa 2/10 (looks identical to the Macintosh XL) with an external ProFile hard drive. ...
Image File history File linksMetadata Macintosh_XL.jpg‎ A Lisa 2/10 (looks identical to the Macintosh XL) with an external ProFile hard drive. ...
Apple III The Apple III, or Apple /// as it was sometimes styled, was the first completely new computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. ...
IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ...
The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...
Old World ROM Macintosh computers are the Macintosh models that use a Macintosh Toolbox ROM chip, usually in a socket (but soldered to the motherboard in some models). ...
Macintosh XL The Macintosh XL was a modified version of the Apple Lisa personal computer made by Apple Computer. ...
At a time when 96 kilobytes of RAM was considered an extravagance, much of the Lisa's high price tag—and therefore its commercial failure—can be attributed to the large amount of RAM the system came with. Most personal computers didn't begin shipping with megabyte-sized RAM until the mid-to-late 1980s.
Historical importance Though generally considered a commercial failure, the Lisa was in one respect a marked success. Though too expensive and limited for individual desktops, there was a period of time when it seemed that nearly every moderate-sized organization had one or two (shared) Lisas in each major office. Though the performance of the Lisa was somewhat slow and the software rather limited, what the Lisa could do, it did well. Using the Lisa software and an Apple dot-matrix printer, one could produce some very nice documents (compared to other options available at the time). This one compelling usage drove the Lisa into a lot of larger offices, and due to the price, the number of people who had used a Lisa was much larger than the number of Lisas sold. This meant that when the lower-priced Macintosh came along, there was a notable pool of people pre-sold on the benefits of a GUI-based personal computer and the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointer) with its point-click-copy-paste and drag-and-drop capabilities between different applications and windows. In human-computer interaction, WIMP stands for window, icon, menu, pointing device, denoting a style of interaction using these elements. ...
In computing, cut and paste is a user-interface paradigm for a means of moving text (typically plain text) or other data from a source to a destination. ...
A spiral mouse gesture in the computer game Black and White. ...
International significance Within a few months of the Lisa introduction in the US, fully translated versions of the software and documentation were commercially available for British, French, German, Italian, and Spanish markets, followed by several Scandinavian versions shortly thereafter. The user interface for the OS, all seven applications, LisaGuide, and the Lisa diagnostics (in ROM) could be fully translated, without any programming required, using resource files and a translation kit. The keyboard would identify its native language layout, and the entire user experience would be in that language, including any hardware diagnostic messages.
Each localized version (built on a globalized core) required grammatical, linguistic, and cultural adaptations throughout the user interface, including formats for dates, numbers, times, currencies, sorting, even for word and phrase order in alerts and dialog boxes. Translation work was done by native-speaking Apple marketing staff in each country. This localization effort resulted in about as many Lisa unit sales outside the US as inside the US over the product's lifespan, while setting new standards for future localized software products, and for global project coordination.
The end of Lisa In 1987, Sun Remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts are still available today. Sun Remarketing is a retail company, located in Logan, Utah, that specializes in reselling old Apple Computer software and hardware, including Apple II and Apple Macintosh parts such as motherboards and peripherals. ...
Macintosh XL The Macintosh XL was a modified version of the Apple Lisa personal computer made by Apple Computer. ...
In 1989, Apple buried about 2,700 unsold Lisas at a landfill in Logan, Utah and got a tax write-off on the land they rented for it.[2] This article does not cite its references or sources. ...
Like other early GUI computers, working Lisas are now fairly valuable collectors items, for which people will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The hobby of collecting consists of acquiring specific items based on a particular interest of the collector. ...
Notes - ^ It is a common misconception that the Lisa OS used preemptive multitasking.
- ^ The GUIdebook Gallery history of the Apple Lisa
Trivia In the movie Weird Science, the lead female character was named after the Apple Lisa. Weird Science (1985) is a popular 1980s teen film written and directed by John Hughes. ...
See also - People: Bill Atkinson, John Couch, Steve Jobs, Rich Page, Jef Raskin, Wayne Rosing, Brad Silverberg, Larry Tesler
- Technology: History of the graphical user interface, Cut and paste, Mouse, Mouse gesture, Xerox Star, Visi On, Apple ProFile, NeXT, QuickDraw, Pascal programming language
Bill Atkinson worked at Apple Computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ...
John Couch can refer to: Captain John H. Couch, an early settler in the Oregon Territory and resident of Portland, Oregon John Couch, scientist from North Carolina This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple and was the CEO of Pixar until its acquisition by Disney. ...
Rich Page was the manager of the Lisa group at Apple Computer in the 1980s, and he later joined Steve Jobs at NeXT. External links Folklore. ...
Jef Raskin outdoors, photographed by his son Aza Raskin. ...
Wayne Rosing is a super genius who helped develop the Apple Lisa, the forerunner to the Macintosh. ...
Brad Silverberg and Bill Gates giving presentation for the Windows 95 launch Brad Silverberg is an entrepreneur, most noted for his work at Microsoft in 1990–1999 as Senior VP and product manager for MS-DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office. ...
Lawrence G. (Larry) Tesler (born April 24, 1945) is a computer scientist working in the field of human-computer interaction. ...
The graphical user interface, or GUI (IPA: ), is a computer interface that uses graphic icons and controls in addition to text. ...
In computing, cut and paste is a user-interface paradigm for a means of moving text (typically plain text) or other data from a source to a destination. ...
Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ...
A spiral mouse gesture in the computer game Black and White. ...
The Star workstation, officially known as the 8010 Star Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. ...
VisiCorp Visi On was a short-lived but influential graphical user interface-based operating environment program for IBM PC compatible personal computers running early versions of MS-DOS. Although Visi On was never popular (as it had steep minimum system requirements for its day), it was a notable influence on...
Apple Lisa with a ProFile hard drive. ...
NeXT Software, Inc. ...
Two quickdraws. ...
Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ...
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