Forty years ago, a ground-breaking personal computer named the Lisa, named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, was announced. This computer would revolutionize the world of personal computing, only to be overshadowed and almost completely forgotten two years later.
The Lisa project started in 1978 under Steve Wozniak’s helm. The objective was to create an advanced computer utilizing a bit-slice processor, a primitive attempt at scalable computing. However, the project didn’t start in full swing until 1979 when Apple’s management team initiated a project leader and started hiring a team.
The Lisa computer was the first of its kind to feature a graphical user interface (GUI), a concept borrowed from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The introduction of GUI to the Lisa project happened through Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who had visited PARC and strongly believed in the future of GUIs. Despite initial resistance from Jobs, Raskin managed to get graphics programmer Bill Atkinson to propose an official tour of PARC in November 1979, leading to the acceptance and incorporation of GUI in Lisa.
The Lisa’s hardware was also revamped. The team moved away from the bit-slice processor and adopted Motorola’s new 68000 CPU, a 16/32-bit chip that used a 24-bit address bus, giving it a maximum of 16 megabytes of memory【7†source】. By early 1982, the Lisa hardware was mostly finalized, but the software was still in flux. A team of designers, including Larry Tesler who had left PARC to join Apple, had been busy doing extensive research, prototyping, and testing.
The Lisa was an all-in-one computer with a 12-inch monochrome screen at a resolution of 720×365 pixels. It came with 1MB of RAM, two Apple-designed “Twiggy” 5.25-inch floppy drives, and three expansion slots. It also introduced the concept of “double-clicking” through its one-button mouse, a decision made after extensive user testing.
However, the revolutionary hardware and software came at a steep cost. The Lisa was priced at $9,995, which would equate to nearly $30,000 today. This price point made it inaccessible to home users and even business owners, who were the target market for the Lisa, were reluctant to invest in it due to its inability to support multiple users and run basic accounting software.
Sales of the Lisa were disappointing, with only a few thousand units sold in the first year. This lackluster performance was further exacerbated by Jobs who was already touting the upcoming release of another revolutionary computer from Apple, the Macintosh.
The Lisa project, despite its ambitious vision and groundbreaking innovations, ultimately fell short of its expectations. But it played a crucial role in the history of personal computing, pioneering features that would later become industry standards. Its fall from grace serves as a stark reminder that being revolutionary isn’t always synonymous with commercial success.