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Apple Lisa

Apple Lisa, with an Apple ProFile external hard disk sitting atop it. Note the dual 5.25-inch "Twiggy" floppy drives.
Developer	Apple Computer, Inc.
Type	Personal computer
Release date	January 19, 1983
Introductory price	US$ 9,995 (1983)
Discontinued	August 1986
Operating system	Lisa OS, Xenix
CPU	Motorola 68000 @ 5 MHz

The Lisa was a personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s. It was the first personal computer to offer a graphical user interface in an inexpensive machine aimed at individual business users.

Development of the Lisa began in 1978^[1] as a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) targeted toward business customers.

In 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project,^[2] so he joined the Macintosh project instead. The Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between the systems and the final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.

The Lisa was a more advanced system than the Macintosh of that time in many respects, such as its inclusion of protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM, expansion slots, a numeric keypad, data corruption protection schemes such as block sparing, non-physical file names (with the ability to have multiple documents with the same name), and a larger higher-resolution display. It would be many years before many of those features were implemented on the Macintosh platform. Protected memory, for instance, did not arrive until the Mac OS X operating system was released in 2001. The Macintosh featured a faster 68000 processor (7.89 MHz) and sound. The complexity of the Lisa operating system and its programs taxed the 5 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor so that consumers said it felt sluggish, particularly when scrolling in documents.

Etymology[link]

While the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only ever referred to it as The Lisa, officially, Apple stated that the name was an acronym for Local Integrated System Architecture or "LISA". Since Steve Jobs' first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Nicole Brennan, it is normally inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was invented later to fit the name. Andy Hertzfeld^[3] states that the acronym was reverse engineered from the name "Lisa" in autumn 1982 by the Apple marketing team, after they had hired a marketing consultancy firm to come up with names to replace "Lisa" and "Macintosh" (at the time considered by Rod Holt, vice president of engineering^[4] 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, while computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit the Lisa's name. Decades later, Jobs would tell his biographer Walter Isaacson: "Obviously it was named for my daughter."^[5]

Development[link]

The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II. Initial team lead Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved to the 'windows & mouse-driven' form that was finally released. Trip Hawkins, who was then on the marketing team for the nascent Lisa project, and Jef Raskin contributed to the change in design.^[6]

Several years prior to this, research had been going on at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center to create a new way to organize everything on the screen, today known as the desktop. Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979. He was excited by the revolutionary mouse-driven GUI of the Xerox Alto and was keen to use these ideas back at Apple. By late 1979, Jobs successfully negotiated with Xerox for his Lisa team to receive two demonstrations of ongoing research projects at Xerox 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. A great deal of work was put into making the graphical interface into a mainstream commercial product by the Lisa team.

The Lisa was a major project at Apple, with more than 90 people participating on the design, plus more on the sales and marketing effort to launch the machine.^[7] Byte magazine credited Wayne Rosing with being the most important person on the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became technical lead for the entire Lisa project. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, and Larry Tesler was in charge of system software.^[7] After a six-month period in which the user interface was designed, the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel.

Hardware[link]

The hardware development team for the Lisa was headed by Robert Paratore. The Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983 and cost US$9,995 ($21,693.67 in 2009 dollars). It was the second personal computer system with a graphical user interface (GUI) to be sold commercially, the first being the Xerox Star. It used a Motorola 68000 CPU at a 5 MHz clock rate and had 1 MB RAM.

Drives[link]

The original Lisa had two Apple FileWare 5.25-inch double-sided floppy disk drives, more commonly known by Apple's internal code name for the drive: "Twiggy". They had a capacity of approximately 871 kB each, but required special diskettes. The Macintosh, which was originally designed to have a single Twiggy drive, was revised to use a Sony 400 kB microfloppy drive in January 1984. An optional external 5 MB or, later, a 10 MB Apple ProFile hard drive (originally designed for the Apple III) was available. With the introduction of the Lisa 2, an optional 10 MB internal proprietary hard disk manufactured by Apple, known as the "Widget" was also offered.

Lisa 2[link]

Lisa 2

The first hardware revision, the Lisa 2, released in January 1984 and was priced between $3,495 and $5,495 US.^[8] It was much less expensive than the original model and dropped the Twiggy floppy drives in favor of a single 400k Sony microfloppy. It was possible to purchase the Lisa 2 with as little as 512k RAM. An external ProFile and internal Widget drive were available as standard options in different configurations. In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple offered free upgrades to the Lisa 2 to all Lisa 1 owners, by swapping the pair of Twiggy drives for a single 3.5-inch drive, and updating the boot ROM and I/O ROM. In addition, the Lisa 2's new front faceplate was included to accommodate the reconfigured floppy disk drive. With this change, the Lisa 2 had the notable distinction of introducing the new Apple inlaid logo, as well as the first Snow White design language features.

There were relatively few third-party hardware offerings for the Lisa, as compared to the earlier Apple II.^{[citation needed]} 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 the MMU could address.

Late in the product life of the Lisa, there were third-party hard disk drives, SCSI controllers, and double-sided 3½ inch floppy-disk upgrades. Unlike the original Macintosh, the Lisa features expansion slots. Like the Apple II, it was an 'open system'. The Lisa 2 motherboard had a very basic backplane with virtually no electronic components, but plenty of edge connector sockets/slots. There were two RAM slots, one CPU slot and one I/O slot all in parallel placement to each other. At the other end, there were three 'Lisa' slots, parallel to each other. This flexibility provided the potential for a developer to create a replacement for the CPU 'card' to upgrade the Lisa to run a newer CPU, albeit with potential limitations from other parts of the system.

Macintosh XL[link]

Macintosh XL

In January 1985, following on the heels of the Macintosh, the Lisa 2/10 (with integrated 10 MB hard drive) was re-branded the Macintosh XL and with new software, positioned as Apple's high-end Macintosh. The price was lowered yet again, to $4000 and sales tripled, but (according to CEO Sculley) Apple would have lost money increasing production to meet the new demand.^[9] 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. Apple would not introduce a replacement computer with an internal hard drive or expansion slots until 1987.

Software[link]

The Lisa operating system featured cooperative (non-preemptive) multitasking^[10] and virtual memory, then extremely advanced features for a personal computer. The use of virtual memory coupled with a fairly slow disk system made the system performance seem glacial at times. Based in part on advanced elements from the failed Apple III SOS operating system released three years earlier, the Lisa also organized its files in hierarchal directories, making the use of large hard drives practical. The Macintosh would eventually adopt this disk organizational design as well for its HFS filing system. Conceptually, the Lisa resembles the Xerox Star in the sense that it was envisioned as an office computing system; consequently, 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 was a program development environment, and was almost entirely text-based, though it used a GUI text editor. The Lisa Office System was eventually renamed "7/7", in reference to the seven supplied application programs: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal.

Third-party software[link]

A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself: a separate development OS was required called Lisa Workshop. During this development process, an engineer ran the two OSes in a dual-boot config, writing and compiling code on one machine and testing it on the other. Later, the same Lisa Workshop was used to develop software for the Macintosh. After a few years, a Macintosh-native development system was developed. For most of its lifetime, the Lisa never went beyond the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to "do everything."^{[citation needed]}

MacWorks[link]

In April 1984, following the success of the Macintosh, Apple introduced MacWorks, a software emulation environment which allowed the Lisa to run Macintosh System software and applications.^[11] MacWorks helped make the Lisa more attractive to potential customers, but did not enable the Macintosh emulation to access the hard disk until September. In January 1985, re-branded MacWorks XL, it became the primary system application designed to turn the Lisa into the Macintosh XL.

Reception[link]

Apple Convention, Boston, Spring 1983. An original Apple Lisa at work.

The Apple Lisa was a commercial failure for Apple, the largest since the failure of the Apple III of 1980. The intended business customers were reluctant to purchase the machine because of its high price (nearly $10,000), making it largely unable to compete with the less expensive IBM PCs, which were already beginning to dominate business desktop computing. The largest Lisa customer was NASA, which used LisaProject for project management and was eventually faced with significant problems when the Lisa was discontinued.^{[citation needed]}

The release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which was faster and much less expensive, was the most significant factor in the Lisa's demise. Two later Lisa models were released (the Lisa 2 and its Mac ROM-enabled sibling Macintosh XL) before the Lisa line was discontinued in April 1985.^[12] In 1986, Apple offered all Lisa/XL owners the opportunity to return their computer and US$1,498.00, in return for a Macintosh Plus and Hard Disk 20^[13]

Historical importance[link]

The Apple Lisa was immediately recognized as a significant machine, with Byte for example opining it more important than the IBM PC.^[14] Further, though a limited number of Lisas were sold, the Lisa software, in combination with an Apple dot-matrix printer, could produce documents that surpassed other comparably-priced options available at the time.^{[citation needed]} This one compelling usage meant that the Lisa was introduced into a number of larger offices, and due to the price, the number of people who had used a Lisa was much larger than the number of Lisas sold.^{[citation needed]}

An often-overlooked feature the Lisa system used is its early harnessing of document-centric^{[citation needed]} computing instead of application-centric computing. On a Macintosh, Windows, or Linux system, a user typically seeks a program. In the Lisa system, users use stationery to begin using an application. Apple implemented stationery documents on System 7 in 1991 and attempted to further advance this approach on the Mac platform later with OpenDoc. Microsoft also later implemented stationery in a limited fashion via the Windows Start menu for Microsoft Office.

International significance[link]

Within a few months of the Lisa's introduction in the US, fully translated versions of the software and documentation were commercially available for British, French, German, Italian, and Spanish markets, followed by several Scandinavian versions shortly thereafter. The user interface for the OS, all seven applications, LisaGuide, and the Lisa diagnostics (in ROM) can be fully translated, without any programming required, using resource files and a translation kit. The keyboard can identify its native language layout, and the entire user experience will be in that language, including any hardware diagnostic messages.

Although several foreign-language keyboard layouts were available, the Dvorak keyboard layout was never ported to the Lisa, though such porting had been available for the Apple III, IIe, and IIc, and later for the Macintosh. Keyboard-mapping on the Lisa was complex and required building a new OS/kernel. All kernels contain images for all layouts, so due to serious memory constraints, keyboard layouts were stored as differences from a set of standard layouts, thus only a few bytes are needed to accommodate most additional layouts. A notable exception is the Dvorak layout that moves just about every key and thus requires hundreds of extra bytes of precious kernel storage regardless of whether it was needed.^{[citation needed]}

Each localized version (built on a globalized core) requires grammatical, linguistic, and cultural adaptations throughout the user interface, including formats for dates, numbers, times, currencies, sorting, even for word and phrase order in alerts and dialog boxes. A kit was provided, and the translation work was done by native-speaking Apple marketing staff in each country. This localization effort resulted in about as many Lisa unit sales outside the US as inside the US over the product's lifespan, while setting new standards for future localized software products, and for global project co-ordination.

The end of the Lisa[link]

In 1987, Sun Remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts were available until recently when Cherokee Data (who purchased Sun Remarketing) went out of business.

In 1989, Apple disposed of approximately 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory.^[15]

Like other early GUI computers, working Lisas are now fairly valuable collectors items, for which people will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The original model is the most sought after, although working ProFile and Widget hard disks, which are necessary for running the Lisa OS, are also particularly valued.

Timeline of Lisa models

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See also[link]

• Macintosh 128K
• Computer Acronyms
• People: Bill Atkinson, John Couch, Steve Jobs, Rich Page, Jef Raskin, Wayne Rosing, Brad Silverberg, Larry Tesler
• Technology: History of the graphical user interface, Cut and paste, Mouse, Mouse gesture, Xerox Star, Visi On, Apple ProFile, NeXT, QuickDraw, Pascal programming language

References[link]

External links[link]

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