The Lisa was a computer manufactured by Apple Inc. from 1983 to 1985. Much can be written about the Lisa - more than I can write here, but I will try to cover what's important. To start, it was developed in parallel with the original Macintosh computer from 1984, and is often considered to be the Mac's "older sister." It was the first Apple computer with a GUI. The high cost of the hardware (almost 10,000 USD in 1983) led Apple to target the machine for business use.

The Lisa had a highly innovative graphical user interface based on the "desktop metaphor." Users would interact with a graphical representation of an office desk. Files were represented as pieces of paper, and directories on the disk were represented as manila folders. To interact with the Lisa, the user uses a mouse - something we are all familiar with now - to move a pointer on the screen.

This desktop metaphor is the same one that has now been used for over 40 years by billions of PCs running Windows, macOS, and Linux. Most other computers in the early 80s used a "command line interface" or "CLI," which involved memorizing a set of textual commands and typing them into the computer to interact with it, which was clumsy by comparison.

The Lisa's GUI conforms more heavily to the "desktop metaphor" than macOS or Windows. The OS is "document-centric" instead of "application-centric". In most cases, the user never directly opens an application (or "tool"); they instead open documents associated with an application. To create new documents, a user "tears-off" a new file from a "stationery-pad" associated with the application they want to work with.

The screen resolution of the Lisa was 720 x 364 pixels. The Lisa's pixels are stretched vertically; In the 1980s, this was common practice on many computer systems and was done so more text characters could be displayed per line of text on the screen.

The aspect ratio suggested by certain controls and visuals in the user interface, including the grid in LisaDraw, and that used by LisaGUI and in LisaEM's scaling modes, is a width:height ratio of 2:3. However, there's a rare accessory for the Lisa used to calibrate the screen dimensions which suggests it could be closer to 3:4; this also seems to be corroborated by the page and margin/tab rulers in LisaWrite. Which one is it really? Who knows!

Aside from its GUI, the Lisa's hardware enabled some other impressive features. Unlike most machines at the time, LOS had a 32-bit operating system with preemptive multitasking, which meant it could run multiple programs at once with great efficiency. Impressively (for 1983), it supported up to 2 megabytes of RAM. The hardware is highly modular; many of the parts are user-replacable. The Lisa's front and back panels are easily removed without any tools whatsoever, exposing the disk drives and circuit boards. However, the Lisa is also notoriously over-engineered, and suffered from performance issues.

All Lisa models use a 5 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU. The original Lisa 1 used two 5.25" proprietary (and infamously unreliable) floppy disk drives known as "Twiggy" drives. The 5MB "ProFile" hard drive was sold separately and placed on top of the Lisa. In 1984, Apple released an upgraded "Lisa 2" that discarded the twiggy drives in favor of a 3.5" floppy drive, and offered a free upgrade for Lisa 1 owners (which most took, owing to the rarity of Lisa 1s today). Some Lisa 2 configurations included a 10MB "Widget" internal drive.

The Lisa is widely considered a commercial failure, and Apple would discontinue production of the machine in 1985 after a number of price reductions. At a certain point, Apple rebranded the Lisa as the "Macintosh XL" and stopped development of the Lisa Operating system in favor of the "MacWorks" environment, which allowed the Lisa to emulate an original Macintosh. Customers were eventually encouraged to upgrade to newer Macintosh machines, such as the Mac Plus and Mac II. However, it should be noted that sales had picked up considerably as the price was decreased.

Development and sales of remaining Lisa inventory was eventually handed off to Sun Remarketing, a company with previous experience in selling and supporting older Apple machines. They, as well as other third party companies, released a number of hardware and software upgrades to the Lisa, including hardware accelerators and upgrades to MacWorks.

Sadly, almost no third-party software exists for the Lisa. In part, this is because the suite of applications (the "Lisa 7/7") Apple created for the Lisa was so good there was no immediate need for them! By the time 1984 came around, most developers started focusing on Macintosh apps, and a number of apps originally in development for the Lisa were instead released on the Mac.

Both the Lisa and Macintosh build upon a lineage of work starting with Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System or "NLS" (famously utilized in his "mother of all demos" in 1968), and continuing with the work done at Xerox PARC resulting in the Xerox Alto and Star workstations, and at the Three Rivers Computer Corporation resulting in the PERQ workstation.

It should be noted the Lisa introduced significant innovations to the GUI resulting in a simpler, more intuitive system to use, such modeless computing, pull-down menus, and more. There are plenty of other resources which delve deeper into historical and technical information regarding the Lisa. Please check the links page for more information.