Lisa is a line of desktop computers designed, produced and marketed by Apple Computer. It was the first mass-market personal computer usable through a graphical user interface (GUI). The Lisa was primarily marketed to individual businesses, small and medium-sized enterprises as an innovative alternative to much larger and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers, such as those from IBM, which required additional and costly consulting from the vendor, the hiring of specially trained 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 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, document-oriented workflow, memory protection, and a preloaded office suite.
Apple officially unveiled the Lisa on January 19, 1983, with a base price of $9,995 USD (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 faced criticism for its lack of third-party software, unreliable floppy disks ("Twiggy"), and its high workstation-level price. The Lisa's CPU and storage performance were hampered 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 under $1,000 (equivalent to $4,400 in 2025). Jobs gradually reworked the Macintosh into a graphics computer similar to the Lisa (which shared 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 having superior hardware (including hard drive support, RAM expansion slots up to 2 megabytes, 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 in turn, Macintosh software). Even with a significant price reduction, the Lisa platform failed to achieve sales volumes comparable to the much 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 reintroduced to the market as a provisional high-end Mac known as the Macintosh XL, which came supplied with a 3.5" floppy drive and MacWorks.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa ·
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