Let’s go back in time when computing involved gazing at a blinking cursor and entering cryptic commands—praying you didn’t delete everything by accident. Personal computing was new territory before sleek icons and drag-and-drop became de rigueur.
Lisa was not another beige box. It was Apple’s bold bid to make computers accessible to everyone. On January 19, 1983, Apple introduced what would be one of the most innovative (and maligned) personal computers ever. At an astonishing $9,995, Lisa was the first to allow users to point, click, and communicate with windows and icons rather than having to memorize commands. As stated by the Computer History Museum, “Apple’s Macintosh line of computers today, infamous for popularizing mouse-controlled graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and revolutionizing how we interact with our computers, has its roots in its just prior predecessor at Apple, the Lisa.
But the seed of Lisa’s tale was planted even earlier at Xerox PARC, where the Alto and Smalltalk environments initially gave the world its glimpse of what a GUI might be. Steve Jobs witnessed this future in person when he visited PARC in 1979 and was hooked immediately. He wanted Apple to be the one to bring this revolutionary idea out of a research laboratory and into the real world.
Lisa was a combination of visionary courage and inner turmoil. Christened after Jobs’ daughter—although Apple later fabricated it as an acronym, Local Integrated Systems Architecture—Lisa was loaded with some of the most sophisticated tech on the market at the time. It boasted a Motorola 68000 processor, a hard drive, and even a multitasking operating system. Engineers such as Bill Atkinson and Larry Tesler were responsible for innovations such as QuickDraw graphics and Clascal, a new programming language that would later develop into Object Pascal.
Yet the ride was not smooth. Lisa’s software was well ahead of its time, but also more than the hardware could handle, which caused it to move slowly. The first floppy drive, dubbed “Twiggy,” was notoriously flaky. And by including all the software in the system, Apple made it difficult for third-party programmers to join the party. Most problematic of all, that lofty price made Lisa a hard sell, particularly when IBM’s PC was so much less expensive.
Times at Apple were changing as well. Jobs, always the revolutionary, was taken off the Lisa team and soon inherited the Macintosh project instead. The Mac would be pared down and cheaper, cutting out features such as multitasking and hard drives but retaining the heart of the GUI and bringing the mouse to the masses. When the Macintosh arrived in 1984—powered by that now-famous Super Bowl ad—it moved rapidly into commercial success and became an icon in the history of tech.
But Lisa’s influence went no further. It sparked a fire throughout the industry. From VisiOn and GEM to Microsoft Windows, Lisa’s innovations helped them all. Windows would not catch on until version 3.0 in 1990, but by then, the graphical interface was already well on its way to becoming the norm.
Although Lisa didn’t sell, its impact cannot be disputed. It linked the visionary research at Xerox PARC to the pioneering products that came later. It showed that computers didn’t need to be frightening—they could be intuitive and even fun to work with. Although most never used one, Lisa went about transforming the world. Every time you click on an icon or move a window, you’re living a small part of what Lisa made possible.