Lisa is a line of desktop computers that were designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer. It was the first mass-market computer operable through a graphical user interface (GUI). The Lisa was primarily marketed to individual and small and medium-sized businesses as a groundbreaking and simpler new alternative to much bigger, more complex and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers, such as those from IBM.
Development of the Lisa began in 1978; Apple co-founder Steve Jobs received demonstrations of GUI technology being developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), some of which would inspire aspects of the computer's operating system. The Lisa was based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, and utilized an operating system with a window-and-mouse-driven interface, a document-oriented workflow, memory protection, and a pre-loaded office suite.
Apple officially unveiled the Lisa on January 19, 1983, with a base price of 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 for its lack of third-party software, unreliable FileWare ("Twiggy") floppy disks, and its high, workstation-level price. The Lisa's CPU and storage performance were hampered by cost-cutting measures and the complexity of its software, including its use of an ad hoc protected memory implementation rather than using a hardware memory management unit.
In 1981, after Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project by Apple's board of directors, he appropriated the Macintosh project from Jef Raskin, who had conceived it in 1979 as a sub- text-based appliance computer. Jobs gradually retooled the Macintosh into a graphical computer similar to the Lisa (sharing its Motorola 68K processor), but at a lower price point, and with a more intuitive user interface. The imminent unveiling and release of the Macintosh cannibalized interest in the Lisa, even though it had superior hardware (including hard disk drive support, up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM expansion slots, and a larger, higher-resolution display).
Newer Lisa models addressed the shortcomings of the original, while Apple later released MacWorks—a program that allowed the Lisa to run the Macintosh system software (and in turn, Macintosh software). Even with a major 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 ranging from 10,000 to 60,000. The final revision of the Lisa would be reissued as a stopgap high-end Mac known as the Macintosh XL, which shipped with a 3.5" floppy drive and MacWorks.
History Development Name Though the original documentation only refers to it as "The Lisa", Apple officially stated that the name was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture". Because Steve Jobs's first daughter was named Lisa (born in 1978), it was sometimes inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was a backronym contrived later to fit the name. Andy Hertzfeld said that the acronym was reverse-engineered from the name "Lisa" in late 1982 by the Apple marketing team after they had hired a marketing consultancy firm to find names to replace "Lisa" and "Macintosh" (at the time considered by Jef Raskin to be merely internal project codenames) and then rejected all of the suggestions. Privately, Hertzfeld and the other software developers used "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym", a recursive backronym, and computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit Lisa's name. Decades later, Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson: "Obviously it was named for my daughter."
Research and design The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II. A ten-person team occupied its first dedicated office at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard next to the Good Earth restaurant, and nicknamed "the Good Earth building". Initial team leader Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved into the "window-and-mouse-driven" form of its eventual release. Trip Hawkins and Jef Raskin contributed to this change in design. Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs was involved in the concept.
At Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), research had already been underway for several years to create a new humanized way to organize the computer screen, which became known as the desktop metaphor. Steve Jobs visited PARC in 1979 and was absorbed and excited by the revolutionary mouse-driven GUI of the Alto. By late 1979, Jobs successfully negotiated a sale of Apple stock to Xerox, in exchange for his Lisa team receiving two demonstrations of ongoing research projects at PARC. When the Apple team saw the demonstration of the Alto computer, they were able to see in action the basic elements of what constituted a workable GUI. The Lisa team put a great deal of work into making the graphical interface a mainstream commercial product.
The Lisa was a major project at Apple, which reportedly spent more than on its development. More than 90 people participated in the design, plus more in the sales and marketing effort, to launch the machine. BYTE magazine credited Wayne Rosing with being the most important person in the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became the technical lead for the entire Lisa project. The hardware development team was headed by Robert Paratore. The industrial design, product design, and mechanical packaging were headed by Bill Dresselhaus, the Principal Product Designer of Lisa, with his team of internal product designers and contract product designers from the firm that eventually became IDEO. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, and Larry Tesler was in charge of system software.
The user interface was designed in six months, after which the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel. During the formulation of the Lisa as a product, the applications and graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto were influential in defining the machine's capabilities. With Xerox yet to introduce its Star workstation, only the Xerox 860 featured amongst the competitors identified for the Lisa. However, the Three Rivers Computer Corporation PERQ was described as "closest to the spirit of LISA" that "in many ways exceeds it", with its price acknowledged as justifiably expensive. Nevertheless, the Xerox Star did influence the design of the Lisa's user interface, leading to the introduction to the Lisa of a "completely different" desktop manager featuring icons.
In 1980, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, and he appropriated Jef Raskin's existing Macintosh project. Raskin had conceived and led Macintosh since 1979 as a text-based appliance computer. Jobs redefined Macintosh as a cheaper and more usable form of Lisa's concepts, and led the skunkworks project with substantial motivation to compete in parallel with the Lisa team.
In September 1981, below the announcement of the IBM PC, InfoWorld reported on Lisa, "McIntosh", and another Apple computer secretly under development "to be ready for release within a year". It described Lisa as having a 68000 processor and 128KB RAM, and "designed to compete with the new Xerox Star at a considerably lower price". In May 1982, the magazine reported that "Apple's yet-to-be-announced Lisa 68000 network work station is also widely rumored to have a mouse." BYTE reported similar rumors that month.
Launch Lisa was announced on January 19, 1983. By then, the press discussed rumors of Macintosh as a much less-expensive Apple computer with similar functionality, perhaps planned for late 1983. Apple Confidential said, "Even before the Lisa began shipping in June, the press was full of intentionally-leaked rumors about a fall release of a 'baby Lisa' that would work in much the same way, only faster and cheaper. Its name: Macintosh." Lisa's low sales were quickly surpassed by the January 1984 launch of the Macintosh. Newer versions of the Lisa were introduced that addressed its faults and lowered its price considerably, but it failed to achieve sales comparable to the much less expensive Mac. The Macintosh project assimilated a lot more Lisa staff. The final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.
Discontinuation The high cost and the delays in its release date contributed to the Lisa's discontinuation although it was repackaged and sold at , as the Lisa 2. In 1986, the entire Lisa platform was discontinued.
In 1987, Sun Remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. In 1989, with the help of Sun Remarketing, Apple disposed of approximately 2,700 unsold Lisa units in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts were available until Cherokee Data (which purchased Sun Remarketing) went out of business.
Overview Hardware
The Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computer systems with a graphical user interface (GUI) to be sold commercially. It uses a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 5 MHz and has 1 MB of RAM. It can be upgraded to 2 MB and later shipped with as little as 512 kilobytes. The CPU speed and model were not changed from the release of the Lisa 1 to the repackaging of the hardware as Macintosh XL.
The real-time clock uses a 4-bit integer and the base year is defined as 1980; the software won't accept any value below 1981, so the only valid range is 1981–1995. The real-time clock depends on a NiCd pack of batteries that only lasts for a few hours when main power is not present. Prone to failure over time, the battery packs could leak corrosive alkaline electrolyte and ruin the circuit boards.
The integrated monochrome black-on-white monitor has rectangular pixels on a screen.
Lisa's printer support includes Apple's Dot Matrix, Daisy Wheel, and ImageWriter dot matrix printers, and Canon's new color inkjet technology.
The original Lisa, later called the Lisa 1, has two FileWare 5.25-inch double-sided variable-speed floppy disk drives, more commonly known by Apple's codename "Twiggy". They have what was then a very high capacity of approximately 871 kB each, but are unreliable and use proprietary diskettes. Competing systems with high diskette data storage have much larger 8" floppy disks, seen as cumbersome and old-fashioned for a consumer system.
Lisa 1's innovations include block sparing, to reserve blocks in case of bad blocks, even on floppy disks. Critical operating system information has redundant storage, for recovery in case of corruption.
Lisa (1983)
The original Lisa Computer (Lisa 1) was introduced in January 1983 and began shipping in June 1983. The machine was powered by a 5 MHz Motorola 68000 processor with an integrated monochrome black-on-white monitor having 720 × 364 rectangular pixels displayed on a 12-inch (30 cm) screen. The computer shipped with two "Twiggy" floppy disk drives along with Lisa OS and office productivity software. The interface included a detached keyboard, a "thin button" mouse, with a parallel port for Apple ProFile external hard drive(s), and three (3) expansion slots for future upgrades. The Lisa launched in January 1983 at a cost of $9,995.
Lisa 2 (1984–1985)
The second hardware revision, the Lisa 2, was released in January 1984 and was priced between and . It was much less expensive than the original model, and dropped the Twiggy floppy drives in favor of a single 400K Sony microfloppy. The Lisa 2 has as little as 512 KB of RAM.