The Apple Lisa is the first commercially available personal computer with a graphical user interface. In the early 1980s, after the market success of the Apple II computer, Apple sought new solutions to enable market expansion beyond the 8-bit computer segment. The company focused on advanced solutions for professional users. It is believed that inspiration for the Lisa, and the source of many of the solutions applied in it, was derived from the prototype series of Alto computers, produced and tested in 1973 by Xerox but never launched on the market. The Alto computer was equipped with a graphical user interface (GUI) with a desktop represented on the monitor screen. Convenient control of this interface was enabled by the use of a three-button mouse.
Concept work on the Lisa began in 1978, and the design team comprised more than 90 people managed by Wayne Rosing, Larry Tesler, Bruce Daniels, and – initially – Steve Jobs. The finished computer was launched in 1983. It was advertised in colour magazines and television commercials starring Kevin Costner, who was at the beginning of his acting career at the time. Due to a high price of almost $10,000, the computer did not achieve commercial success and production was discontinued in 1986.
In Apple’s design, running the graphical user interface required significant processing power, which is why the Lisa was equipped with a Motorola 68000 CPU and 1 MB RAM. The 8-bit computers manufactured at the time had only tens of kilobytes of RAM. The Lisa was sold in two versions. The first was equipped with 5.25-inch floppy disk drives (fondly nicknamed “Twiggy”) placed to the right of the monitor. The external hard disk drive in this set was optional. The second version went on sale a year later: it was half the price, had some components modified, and was equipped with a single 3.5-inch floppy disk drive.
Some solutions developed in the course of designing the Lisa were used for designing the much cheaper Macintosh computer, which was launched on the market in 1984.
Officially, the computer’s name was an acronym of the words “Locally Integrated Software Architecture”. However, popular belief is that the computer was named after the daughter of Steve Jobs, who was the company’s CEO at the time.

Authors: Marek Więcek, Filip Wróblewski