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Also known as | Local Integrated Software Architecture |
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Developer | Apple Computer |
Manufacturer | Apple Computer |
Type | Personal computer |
Release date | January 19, 1983 |
Introductory price | US$9,995(equivalent to $30,600 in 2023) |
Discontinued | August 1, 1986 |
Units sold | 10,000 [1] |
Operating system | Lisa OS, Xenix [2] |
CPU | Motorola 68000 @ 5 MHz |
Memory | 1 MB RAM, 16 KB Boot ROM |
Display | 12 in (30 cm) monochrome 720×364 |
Input | Keyboard and mouse |
Mass | 48 lb (22 kg) |
Predecessor | Apple II Plus Apple III |
Successor | Macintosh XL Macintosh |
Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, produced from January 19, 1983 to August 1, 1986, and succeeded by Macintosh. It is generally considered the first mass-market personal computer operable through a graphical user interface (GUI). In 1983, a machine like the Lisa was still so expensive that it was primarily marketed to individual and small and medium-sized businesses as a groundbreaking new alternative to much bigger and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers such as from IBM, that either require additional, expensive consultancy from the supplier, hiring specially trained personnel, or at least, a much steeper learning curve to maintain and operate. Earlier GUI-controlled personal computers were not mass-marketed; for example, Xerox PARC manufactured its Alto workstation only for Xerox and select partners from the early to mid-1970s.
Development of project "LISA" began in 1978. [3] It underwent many changes and shipped at US$9,995(equivalent to $30,600 in 2023) with a five-megabyte hard drive. It was affected by its high price, insufficient software, unreliable FileWare (codename Twiggy) floppy disks, and the imminent release of the cheaper and faster Macintosh. [4] : 79 Only 60,000 Lisa units were sold in two years. [4] : 77
Lisa was considered a commercial failure but with technical acclaim, introducing several advanced features that reappeared on the Macintosh and eventually IBM PC compatibles. These include an operating system with memory protection [5] and a document-oriented workflow. The hardware is more advanced overall than the following Macintosh, including hard disk drive support, up to 2 megabytes (MB) of random-access memory (RAM), expansion slots, and a larger, higher-resolution display.
Lisa's CPU and the storage system were strained by the complexity of the operating system and applications, especially its office suite, and by the ad hoc protected memory implementation, due to the lack of a Motorola memory management unit. Cost-cutting measures that target the consumer market, and the delayed availability of the 68000 processor and its impact on the design process, made the user experience sluggish. The workstation-tier high price and lack of a technical software application library made it a difficult sale for all markets. The IBM PC's popularity and Apple's decision to compete with itself through the lower-priced Macintosh also hindered Lisa's acceptance.
In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project by Apple's board of directors, [6] he appropriated the Macintosh project from Jef Raskin, who had conceived it as a sub-$1,000(equivalent to $4,200 in 2023) text-based appliance computer in 1979. Jobs immediately redefined Macintosh to be graphical, but as a less expensive and more focused alternative to Lisa.
Macintosh's launch in January 1984 quickly surpassed Lisa's underwhelming sales. Jobs began assimilating increasing numbers of Lisa staff, as he had done with the Apple II division upon taking Raskin's project. Newer Lisa models addressed its shortcomings but, even with a major price reduction, the platform failed to achieve sales volumes comparable to the much less expensive Mac. The Lisa 2/10 is the final model, then rebranded as the high-end Macintosh XL. [4] : 79
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". [7] [8] 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 [9] 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." [10]
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". [11] 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. [12] 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 $50 million on its development. [13] 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. [14] 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. [15] The user interface was designed in six months, after which the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel.
In 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, [16] 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". [17] 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." [18] Apple Confidential said, "Finally, and perhaps most damaging, 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." [4] : 79
Lisa was launched on January 19, 1983. [19] Its 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. [4] : 79
The high cost and the delays in its release date contributed to the Lisa's discontinuation although it was repackaged and sold at $4,995, 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. [20] Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts were available until Cherokee Data (which purchased Sun Remarketing) went out of business.[ when? ]
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. [21] The real-time clock depends on a 4 × AA-cell 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. [21]
The integrated monochrome black-on-white monitor has 720 × 364 rectangular pixels on a 12-inch (30 cm) 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". [4] : 77–78 They have what was then a very high capacity of approximately 871 kB each, but are unreliable [4] : 78 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. [22] Critical operating system information has redundant storage, for recovery in case of corruption.
The first hardware revision, the Lisa 2, was released in January 1984 and was priced between $3,495 and $5,495. [4] : 79 [23] It was much less expensive than the original model, and dropped the Twiggy floppy drives in favor of a single 400K Sony microfloppy. [24] The Lisa 2 has as little as 512 KB of RAM. The Lisa 2/5 consists of a Lisa 2 bundled with an external 5- or 10-megabyte hard drive. [25] In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple offered free upgrades to the Lisa 2/5 to all Lisa 1 owners, by replacing the pair of Twiggy drives with a single 3.5-inch drive, [24] and updating the boot ROM and I/O ROM. In addition, the Lisa 2's new front faceplate accommodates the reconfigured floppy disk drive, and it includes the new inlaid Apple logo and the first Snow White design language elements. The Lisa 2/10 has a 10 MB internal hard drive, no parallel port, and a standard configuration of 1 MB of RAM. [25]
Developing early Macintosh software required a Lisa 2. [26] There were relatively few third-party hardware offerings for the Lisa, as compared to the earlier Apple II — AST offered a 1.5 MB memory board which, when combined with the standard Apple 512 KB memory board, expanded the Lisa to a total of 2 MB of memory, the maximum amount that the MMU can address.
Late in the product life of the Lisa, there were third-party hard disk drives, SCSI controllers, and double-sided 3.5-inch floppy-disk upgrades. Unlike the original Macintosh, the Lisa has expansion slots. The Lisa 2 motherboard has a very basic backplane with virtually no electronic components, but plenty of edge connector sockets and slots. There are two RAM slots, one CPU upgrade slot, and one I/O slot, all in parallel. At the other end are three Lisa slots in parallel.
In January 1985, following the Macintosh, the Lisa 2/10 (with integrated 10 MB hard drive) was rebranded as Macintosh XL. It was given a hardware and software kit, enabling it to reboot into Macintosh mode and positioning it as the high-end Macintosh. The price was lowered yet again, to $4,000, and sales tripled, but CEO John Sculley said that Apple would have lost money increasing production to meet the new demand. [27] Apple discontinued the Macintosh XL, leaving an eight-month void in Apple's high-end product line until the Macintosh Plus was introduced in 1986.
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The Lisa operating system features protected memory, [28] enabled by a crude hardware circuit compared to the Sun-1 workstation (c. 1982), which features a full memory management unit. Motorola did not have an MMU (memory-management unit) for the 68000 ready in time, so third parties developed their own. Apple's is also the result of a cost-cutting compromise, with sluggish performance. Based, in part, on elements from the Apple III SOS operating system released three years earlier, Lisa's disk operating system also organizes its files in hierarchical directories. File system directories correspond to GUI folders, as with previous Xerox PARC computers from which Lisa borrowed heavily. Lisa was designed around a hard drive, unlike the first Macintosh.
Lisa has two main user modes: the Lisa Office System and the Workshop. The Lisa Office System is the GUI environment for end users. The Workshop is a program development environment and is almost entirely text-based, though it uses a GUI text editor. The Lisa Office System was eventually renamed 7/7 which refers to the seven supplied application programs: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal.
Apple's warranty said that this software works precisely as stated, and Apple refunded an unspecified number of users, in full, for their systems. These operating system frailties, and costly recalls, combined with the very high price point, led to the failure of the Lisa in the marketplace. NASA purchased Lisa machines, mainly to use the LisaProject program.
In 2018, the Computer History Museum announced it would be releasing the source code for Lisa OS, following a check by Apple to ensure this would not impact other intellectual property. For copyright reasons, this release does not include the American Heritage dictionary. [29] For its 40th anniversary on January 19, 2023, Lisa OS Software version 3.1's source code is available under an Apple Academic License Agreement. [30] [31]
In April 1984, following the Macintosh launch, Apple introduced MacWorks, a software emulation environment enabling Lisa to run Macintosh System software and applications. [32] MacWorks improved Lisa's market appeal. After the early Macintosh operating system first gained hard disk support, MacWorks also gained access to Lisa's hard disk in September. In January 1985, MacWorks was re-branded MacWorks XL as the primary system application, to convert the Lisa into the Macintosh XL.
The launch version of Lisa Office System can not be used for programming, requiring the separate development OS called Lisa Workshop to be toggled and booted. Lisa Workshop was also used to develop Macintosh software for its first few years, until a Macintosh-native development system was released.[ when? ] For most of its lifetime, the Lisa only had the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to "do everything".[ citation needed ] UniPress Software released UNIX System III for $495(equivalent to $1,500 in 2023). [33]
Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) published Microsoft Xenix (version 3), a Unix-like command-line operating system for the Lisa 2, and Microsoft's Multiplan 2.1 spreadsheet for Xenix. [34] Other Lisa Xenix apps include Quadratron's Q-Office suite. [35]
BYTE previewed the Lisa and wrote in February 1983 that it was "the most important development in computers in the last five years, easily outpacing [the IBM PC]". It acknowledged that the $9,995 price was high, and concluded "Apple ... is not unaware that most people would be incredibly interested in a similar but less expensive machine. We'll see what happens". [13]
The Lisa was a commercial failure, the company's largest since the Apple III of 1980. Apple sold a total of approximately 10,000 [1] Lisa machines at US$9,995(equivalent to about $30,600 in 2023) each, [36] generating total sales of $100 million against a development cost of more than $150 million. [1] The largest Lisa customer was NASA, which used LisaProject for project management. [37]
The Lisa 2 and its Mac ROM-enabled Macintosh XL version are the final two releases in the Lisa line, which was discontinued in April 1985. [38] The Macintosh XL is a hardware and software conversion kit to effectively reboot Lisa into Macintosh mode. In 1986, Apple offered all Lisa and XL owners the opportunity to return their computer and pay $1,498, in exchange for a Macintosh Plus and Hard Disk 20. [39] Reportedly, 2,700 working but unsold Lisa computers were buried in a landfill. [40]
The Macintosh project, led by Steve Jobs, borrowed heavily from Lisa's GUI paradigm and directly took many of its staff, to create Apple's flagship platform of the next several decades. The column-based interface, for instance, utilized by Mac OS X, had originally been developed for Lisa.[ citation needed ] It had been discarded in favor of the icon view.
Apple's culture of object-oriented programming on Lisa contributed to the 1988 conception of Pink, the first attempt to re-architect the operating system of Macintosh.
In 1989, after Wayne Rosing had moved to Sun Microsystems, he reflected on his time at Apple, recalling that building the Lisa had been hard work. He said the system's hard disk and RAM was a requirement and not a luxury, but that the system remains slow. He noted that, by 1989, Lisa's level of integration between applications had not yet been repeated by Apple. [41]
Original "Twiggy" based Lisa 1 systems command high prices at auction due to the scarcity of surviving examples. The auction record for a Lisa 1 was set on September 10, 2024, when a Lisa from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was sold for $882,000. [42]
The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.
The Macintosh Plus computer is the third model in the Macintosh line, introduced on January 16, 1986, two years after the original Macintosh and a little more than a year after the Macintosh 512K, with a price tag of US$2,599. As an evolutionary improvement over the 512K, it shipped with 1 MB of RAM standard, expandable to 4 MB, and an external SCSI peripheral bus, among smaller improvements. Originally, the computer's case was the same beige color as the original Macintosh, Pantone 453; however, in 1987, the case color was changed to the long-lived, warm gray "Platinum" color. It is the earliest Macintosh model able to run System Software 5, System 6, and System 7, up to System 7.5.5, but not System 7.5.2.
The Macintosh Classic is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1990 to September 1992. It was the first Macintosh to sell for less than US$1,000.
The Macintosh SE is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, from March 1987 to October 1990. It marked a significant improvement on the Macintosh Plus design and was introduced by Apple at the same time as the Macintosh II.
The Macintosh, later rebranded as the Macintosh 128K, is the original Macintosh personal computer from Apple. It is the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse. It was pivotal in establishing desktop publishing as a general office function. The motherboard, a 9 in (23 cm) CRT monochrome monitor, and a floppy drive are in a beige case with integrated carrying handle; it has a keyboard and single-button mouse.
The Macintosh 512K is a personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from September 1984 to April 1986. It is the first update to the original Macintosh 128K. It was virtually identical to the previous Macintosh, differing primarily in the amount of built-in random-access memory. The increased memory turned the Macintosh into a more business-capable computer and gained the ability to run more software. It is the earliest Macintosh model that can be used as an AppleShare server and, with a bridge Mac, communicate with modern devices.
Macintosh XL is a modified version of the Apple Lisa personal computer made by Apple Computer. In the Macintosh XL configuration, the computer shipped with MacWorks XL, a Lisa program that allowed 64 K Macintosh ROM emulation. An identical machine was previously sold as Lisa 2/10 with the Lisa OS only.
The Macintosh Classic II is a personal computer designed and manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from October 1991 to September 1993. The system has a compact, appliance design with an integrated 9" monitor, typical of the earliest of the Macintosh range. A carrying handle moulded into the case added a degree of portability at a time when laptops were still relatively uncommon.
The ProFile is the first hard disk drive produced by Apple Computer, initially for use with the Apple III. The original model had a formatted capacity of 5 MB and connected to a special interface card that plugged into an Apple III slot. In 1983, Apple offered a ProFile interface card for the Apple II, with software support for Apple ProDOS and Apple Pascal.
Steve Capps is a pioneering American computer programmer and software engineer, who was one of the original designers of the Apple Macintosh computer and co-designers of the Finder in the 1980s. He also led development of the Apple Newton PDA and designed music software such as SoundEdit, before developing user interface (UI) designs for Microsoft's Internet Explorer and online/mobile payment systems.
MacWorks XL is an Apple Lisa computer program which shipped with the Macintosh XL. It allows 64K Apple Macintosh ROM emulation so the Macintosh XL can run classic Mac OS programs.
The original Macintosh was a relatively simple machine, now of interest for its simplicity and for the fact that it was the first computer produced by Apple under the name Macintosh. The Macintosh used standard off-the-shelf components to the greatest extent possible, achieving a moderate price point by mixing complex LSI chips, readily customizable programmable array logic, and off-the-shelf components.
The Amiga computer can be used to emulate several other computer platforms, including legacy platforms such as the Commodore 64, and its contemporary rivals such as the IBM PC and the Macintosh.
The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a 5 +1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak at the recommendation of Mike Markkula, and manufactured by Apple Computer It went on sale in June 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 including the controller card and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the 1977 Apple II personal computer to replace the slower cassette tape storage.
FileWare floppy disk drives and diskettes were designed by Apple Computer as a higher-performance alternative to the Disk II and Disk III floppy systems used on the Apple II and Apple III personal computers. The drive is named Apple 871 in service documentation, based on its approximate formatted storage capacity in kilobytes, but is most commonly known by their codename Twiggy, after the famously thin 1960s fashion model named Twiggy.
MacWorks Plus was a complete implementation (port) of the Macintosh Plus 128K ROM on the Apple Lisa and Macintosh XL computer systems, and introduced in August 1988. It was developed for Sun Remarketing of Cache Valley, Utah, under license from Apple Inc., by a contract developer named Chuck Lukaszewski, who was responsible for versions up through 1.1(h), which supported up to Macintosh System 6.0.3. Dafax Processing Corp. with the assistance of Query Engineering, Inc. then further developed the environment to MacWorks Plus II, which continued Macintosh system support up to System 6.0.8 with the Basic version, and introduced a Pro version to extend support to the maximum possible for any 68000 processor: System 7.5.5. Prior to MacWorks Plus, the maximum system supported by its predecessor MacWorks XL was System 3.2.
The Macintosh Hard Disk 20 is the first hard drive developed by Apple Computer specifically for use with the Macintosh 512K. Introduced on September 17, 1985, it was part of Apple's solution toward completing the Macintosh Office announced in January 1985. It would be over a year more before Apple would release the file server software AppleShare that would link all of the hardware together. By that time the SCSI interface introduced on the Macintosh Plus in January 1986, would accommodate far faster and more efficient hard drives, rendering the Hard Disk 20 virtually obsolete.
The Macintosh Office was an effort by Apple Computer to design an office-wide computing environment consisting of Macintosh computers, a local area networking system, a file server, and a networked laser printer. Apple announced Macintosh Office in January 1985 with a poorly received sixty-second Super Bowl commercial dubbed Lemmings. In the end, the file server would never ship and the Office project would be cancelled. However, the AppleTalk networking system and LaserWriter printer would be hugely successful in launching the desktop publishing revolution.
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original model in a series of external 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple unified their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name "Macintosh" from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard 5+1⁄4-inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new 3+1⁄2-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external 3+1⁄2-inch drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the Apple UniDisk 3.5.
Mac OS is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept. It was included with every Macintosh that was sold during the era in which it was developed, and many updates to the system software were done in conjunction with the introduction of new Macintosh systems.
By most accounts, Lisa was a failure, selling only 10,000 units. It reportedly cost Apple more than $150 million to develop Lisa ($100 million in software, $50 million in hardware), and it only brought in $100 million in sales for a net $50-million loss.
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