Lisa is a line of desktop computers designed, produced, and sold by Apple Computer. It was the first personal computer intended for the mass market that could be used through a graphical user interface (GUI). The Lisa was marketed primarily to individual users and small and medium-sized businesses as a revolutionary alternative to much larger and more expensive mainframes and minicomputers, such as those from IBM, which required additional and costly vendor consulting, the hiring of specialized personnel, or at least a significantly steeper learning curve for maintenance and use.
Development of the Lisa began in 1978; Apple co-founder Steve Jobs received demonstrations of GUI technology developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), some aspects of which inspired features of the computer's operating system. The Lisa was based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and used an operating system with a window and mouse-driven interface, a document-oriented workflow, memory protection, and a preloaded office suite.
Apple officially presented the Lisa on January 19, 1983, with a base price of $9,995 US dollars (equivalent to $32,300 in 2025) for a model equipped with a five-megabyte hard drive. While receiving critical acclaim for its technical innovations (especially in comparison to the IBM Personal Computer), the Lisa faced criticism regarding the scarcity of third-party software, unreliable "Twiggy" FileWare floppy disks, and its high workstation-level price. The Lisa's CPU and storage performance were compromised by cost-reduction measures and the complexity of its software, including the use of an ad hoc implementation of memory protection rather than a hardware memory management unit.
In 1981, after Jobs was removed from the Lisa project by Apple's board of directors, he took over Jef Raskin's Macintosh project, which Raskin had conceived in 1979 as a text-based appliance computer priced under $1,000 (equivalent to $4,400 in 2025). Jobs gradually converted the Macintosh into a graphics computer similar to the Lisa (sharing the Motorola 68K processor), but at a lower price and with a more intuitive user interface. The impending presentation and launch of the Macintosh cannibalized interest in the Lisa, despite the latter having superior hardware (including hard drive support, RAM expansion slots up to 2 megabytes, and a larger, higher-resolution screen).
Later Lisa models addressed the shortcomings of the original, while Apple subsequently released MacWorks, a program that allowed the Lisa to run Macintosh system software (and consequently, Macintosh software). Even with a substantial price reduction, the Lisa platform failed to achieve sales volumes comparable to the significantly less expensive Macintosh, with estimated units sold during its two years of availability between 10,000 and 60,000. The final revision of the Lisa would be reissued as a high-end emergency Mac known as the Macintosh XL, which shipped with a 3.5-inch floppy drive and MacWorks.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa ·
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