It was sixteen twenty-three years ago that Lisa was birthed. She was stunning. The first ever computer with a GUI (or graphical user interface for the older generation,) and two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives with one huge external 5 Meg hard drive. Humming with 1 MB of RAM and the Motorola 68000, blazing at 5 MHz, Lisa was a bargain at $10,000. Or was it?

Lisa set up the stage for Macintosh and even though it is Apple’s most well known bomb, in reality it was an incredible machine. It’s easy to work on motherboard (just slid right out from the back) and ingenious use of the mouse was nothing like that in computing history. Sure, 10k was a lot of money, but it was positioned toward the business community and was never meant to be a home computer. That was the idea of the Macintosh.

I never saw a Lisa in RL, but everything I’ve read about them make me wish I had. It was truly a mark and testimony of how brilliant Apple engineers where. Remember, it was 1983 when it was released and had been in development since 1978! While most call it a failure, I don’t think it was. Even though the Mac and Lisa were developed separately, Lisa knowledge did bleed into the Mac group (some engineers even went to the Mac team.) Yea, Apple ended up burying all the unsold Lisas in a mass grave of landfill (what would that mound be worth now?!) but did it hurt Apple like what happen to Osborne? No. Apple’s doing just fine, thank you, and I will always remember the Lisa for what it was. A truly great computer.

Correction: Whoops, not sixteen years ago, but twenty-three years ago on that release. Silly me, I figured the first number on a Windows Calculator. Thanks RB for enlightening me of my error.

2 Responses to “Remembering Lisa”

1. David Herren Says:
   January 25th, 2006 at 15:45

   I worked on a few Lisas shortly after they were released. Then, in 1984 when I bought a Mac and started hitting a few BBSs (remember those?) at a screaming fast 1200 bps, the best BBS I found and which I frequented regularly was called the “JackMacAttack” in Nashville. JackMacAttack was hosted on a Lisa. Over the years the owner/operator of the BBS upgraded the Lisa to include a twiggy drive (one of the first small 3.5 inch floppies that spun the disc at a variable rate to increase the amount of data it would hold), installed a larger hard drive, and upgraded the OS and machine to what became known as the Mac XL.

2. stefan oetter Says:
   January 25th, 2006 at 21:20

   I remember working for an Apple dealership in 1985 and Apple had a promotion whereby you would get $1000 off the price of a “fat” Mac with the trade-in of a Lisa…
   Apple didn’t want the Lisa back and I recall tossing many of them into the dumpster out back…boy were they heavy!