Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on

Forty years ago today, a new breed of personal computer was introduced that would change the world forever. Two years later it was almost completely forgotten.

Apple Lisa started in 1978 as a new project by Steve Wozniak. The idea was to create advanced computers using bit-slice processors, an early attempt at scalable computing. Woz was preoccupied with other things and the project didn’t really start until his early 1979. At that time, Apple management brought in his leader for the project and began hiring people to work on it.

Lisa was named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, although Jobs denied the connection and his parentage. But what’s even more interesting about the Lisa computer is how it evolved into something unique That’s what it means. It was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).

vision takes shape

The GUI was invented at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s. The Alto workstation, which was never sold to the general public, had a bitmap screen that mimicked the size and orientation of a sheet of paper. PARC researchers created software that displayed windows and icons, and used a mouse to move the pointer on the screen.

Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote Apple manuals][, had visited PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine. However, he couldn’t convince Jobs, who thought Raskin and Xerox were incompetent.

Raskin altered his approach and got graphics programmer Bill Atkinson to propose an official tour of PARC in November 1979. Because Jobs thought Atkinson was great, he agreed to come along. Jobs’ visit to PARC became the stuff of legend, a tale of a brilliant visionary seeing the future of computing for the first time. But in reality, Atkinson was already working on LisaGraf—the low-level code that would power the Lisa’s GUI—months before Jobs saw the PARC demo.

The Lisa’s hardware changed as well. The team abandoned the bit-slice processor and adopted Motorola’s new 68000 CPU. The 68000 was a 16/32-bit chip and used a 24-bit address bus, giving it a maximum of 16 megabytes of memory. This was fine, as memory prices were still sky-high in 1980, and most computers of the day had a maximum of 64 kilobytes of RAM.

In January 1981, senior leadership at Apple got tired of Jobs’ constant interference and micromanagement of the Lisa project and officially removed him from the team. Jobs seethed, then took over a smaller skunkworks project being run by Raskin. This would become important later.

By early 1982, the Lisa hardware was mostly finalized. However, the software was still in flux. A team of designers—including Larry Tesler, who had left PARC to join Apple—had been busy doing tons of research, prototyping, and testing. The main question they had was: How should the Lisa’s GUI actually work?

In an article for Interactions magazine, designers Roderick Perkins, Dan Smith, and Frank Ludolph describe how Lisa’s interface transitioned from early prototypes to a familiar desktop with icons, then departed from that model and eventually icon-based. I returned to the docs and explained how. central approach. The goal was to make Lisa powerful and fun to use.

Finally, you’re ready to publish Lisa. On January 19, 1983, Apple announced a computer that it described as precisely “revolutionary.”