Apple Lisa

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 US$9,995 (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 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-$1,000 (equivalent to $4,400 in 2025) 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....