Apple Lisa

The famous Apple Lisa was the precursor to the Macintosh. It was the machine for which Apple reduced the somewhat inchoate graphical user interface ideas which it had gotten from Xerox PARC to their final polished form ('WIMP' - windows, icons, menus, and pointer), as later used on the Macintosh, and copied by Microsoft in Windows.

The Lisa was trying for the 3M's of the time... 1 million bytes of RAM (1MB), 1MB of storage, and a 1000x1000 display... While falling short in the display area the Lisa came close. Originally planned to have a custom microprocessor, once the Motorola MC68000 was announced, the decision was fairly quickly made to switch to that. The first generation Lisa's were also noted for having a 'twiggy' drive, a modified 5 1/4" drive. Lisa's also had a 5MB profile hard disk.

Not surprisingly, the Lisa had a BIG price tag, I remember it being $10,000 USD. It's not surprising to say it was not a commercial success. Once it became clear the Lisa was not going to make it, they were rebranded as Macintosh XL's.

Operating Systems

While the Lisa's shipped with "Lisa Office System", they did have a few different OS's.

• Lisa Office System
• Xenix
• Uniplus

Emulators

There are a few good Lisa emulators...

• LisaEM
• Idle

External Links

• The Lisa Was Apple’s Best Failure - excellent overview from the IEEE
• The Lisa: Apple's Most Influential Failure - another version, from the CHM
• The Art of Code: Apple Lisa
  • Apple Lisa: Still More to Uncover - how the Lisa code was saved and made available
• lisa - copious documentation on BitSavers
  • Inventing the Lisa User Interface
• Lisa - software and firmware images
• Square Dots - the Lisa had a different screen resolution than the Macintosh