Lisa is a line of desktop computers that were designed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. It was the first mass-market personal computer usable through a graphical user interface (GUI). The Lisa was primarily intended for individual users and small to medium-sized businesses as a revolutionary alternative to much larger and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers, such as those from IBM, which required additional and costly consultation from the vendor, the hiring of specifically qualified personnel, or at least a much steeper learning curve to be maintained and used.
Development of the Lisa began in 1978; Apple co-founder Steve Jobs received demonstrations of GUI technology in development at 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 introduced 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 compared to the IBM Personal Computer), the Lisa was criticized for the lack of third-party software, unreliable "Twiggy" 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 instead of a hardware memory management unit.
In 1981, after Jobs was removed from the Lisa project by Apple's board of directors, he appropriated Jef Raskin's Macintosh project, which Raskin had conceived in 1979 as a text-based appliance computer for under $1,000 (equivalent to $4,400 in 2025). Jobs gradually transformed 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 introduction and launch of the Macintosh cannibalized interest in the Lisa, despite the latter possessing superior hardware (including hard drive support, up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM expansion slots, and a larger, high-resolution display).
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 significant price reduction, the Lisa platform failed to achieve sales volumes comparable to the much less expensive Macintosh, with units estimated sold during its two years of availability ranging between 10,000 and 60,000. The final revision of the Lisa would be reintroduced to the market as a provisional high-end Mac known as the Macintosh XL, which was supplied with a 3.5" floppy drive unit and MacWorks.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa ·
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