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Apple Lisa

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For the MOS 6502 assembler for Apple II computers, see Lisa assembler.

The Apple Lisa was a personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s.

Apple Lisa
Apple Lisa, with an Apple Profile external hard disk sitting atop it. Note the dual 5.25-inch "Twiggy" floppy drives.
DeveloperApple Computer
TypePersonal computer
Release dateJanuary 19, 1983
Introductory priceUSD$9,995 (1983)
DiscontinuedAugust 1986
CPU5 MHz Motorola 68000

The Lisa project was started at Apple in 1978 and evolved into a project to design a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that would be targeted toward business customers.

Around 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, so he joined the Macintosh project instead. Contrary to popular belief, the Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between the systems and a later version was sold as the Macintosh XL.

Etymology

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 Software Architecture. Since Steve Jobs' first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Jobs, it is normally inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was invented later to fit the name. Hertzfeld[1] 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 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 acronym.

Hardware

The Lisa was first introduced in January 1983 (announced on January 19) at a cost of $9,995 US ($20,893 in 2007 dollars). It was one of the first commercial personal computers to have a GUI and a mouse. It used a Motorola 68000 CPU at a 5 MHz clock rate and had 512 KiB or 1 MiB RAM.

The original Lisa had two Apple FileWare 5¼ 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 kilobytes each, but required special diskettes.

An optional external 5 MB or 10 MB Apple ProFile hard drive (originally designed for the Apple III) was also offered. The later Lisa 2 models used a single 3½ inch floppy-disk drive and an optional 10 MB internal hard disk. In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple announced that it was providing free upgrades to the Lisa 2 to all Lisa 1 owners, by swapping the pair of Twiggy drives for a single 3½ inch drive, and updating the boot ROM and I/O ROM.

There were relatively few third-party hardware offerings for the Lisa, as compared to the earlier Apple II. AST offered a 1.5 MiB memory board, which when combined with the standard Apple 512 KiB memory board, expanded the Lisa to a total of 2 MiB 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.

Software

File:Apple Lisa Office System 1.0.png
A reproduced screen shot of the Lisa Office System 1.0.

The Lisa operating system featured cooperative (non-preemptive) multitasking[2] 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 sluggish at times. Conceptually, the Lisa resembled the Xerox Star in the sense that it was envisioned as an office computing system; consequently, Lisa had two main user modes: the Lisa Office System and the Workshop. The Lisa Office System was 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.

A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa could not be used to write programs for the Lisa: a separate development system was required, which was based on the same hardware but ran a version of the UNIX operating system. An engineer would run the two machines side by side, writing and compiling code on one machine and testing it on the other. Later, the same development system was used to develop software for the Macintosh. After a few years, Macintosh-native development system was developed. Judging from the "program development environment" reference in the previous paragraph, this deficiency was later remedied; but many software houses had by then already dismissed the Lisa as a target platform and did not reconsider it. For most of its lifetime, the Lisa never went beyond the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to do "everything."

Business blunder

 
The Lisa 2 / Macintosh XL

The Apple Lisa turned out to be a commercial failure for Apple, the largest since the Apple III disaster of 1980. The intended business computing customers balked at Lisa's high price and largely opted to run 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 which was faced with significant problems when the Lisa was discontinued.

The Lisa was also seen as being a bit slow in spite of its innovative interface. The nail in the coffin for Lisa was the release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which helped discredit the Lisa since the Macintosh also had a GUI and mouse but was far less expensive. Two later Lisa models were released (the Lisa 2 and its Mac ROM-enabled sibling Macintosh XL) before the Lisa line was discontinued in August 1986.

At a time when 96 kB of RAM was considered an extravagance, much of the Lisa's high price tag—and therefore its commercial failure—can be attributed to the large amount of RAM the system came with for its time [citation needed].

Historical importance

Though generally considered a commercial failure, the Lisa was a marked success in one respect. Though too expensive and limited for individual desktops, there was a period of time when it seemed that nearly every moderate-sized organization had one or two (shared) Lisas in each major office. Though the performance of the Lisa was somewhat slow and the software rather limited, what the Lisa could do, it did well. Using the Lisa software and an Apple dot-matrix printer, one could produce some very nice documents (compared to other options available at the time). This one compelling usage drove the Lisa 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. This meant that when the lower-priced Macintosh came along, there was a notable pool of people pre-sold on the benefits of a GUI-based personal computer and the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointer) with its point-and-click, cut-copy-paste and drag-and-drop capabilities between different applications and windows. These people quickly bought the cheaper Macintosh and continued to buy new upgrades that gradually approached the Lisa's capabilities—and have now greatly excceded them.[original research?]

International significance

Within a few months of the Lisa 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) could be fully translated, without any programming required, using resource files and a translation kit. The keyboard would identify its native language layout, and the entire user experience would be in that language, including any hardware diagnostic messages.

Curiously, although several foreign-language keyboard layouts were available, the Dvorak keyboard layout was never ported to the Lisa, even by Dvorak users inside Apple, as had already happened on the Apple III, IIe, and IIc, and as later happened on the Macintosh. Keyboard-mapping on the Lisa was a black art, known to only a few of the Lisa engineers; and changing or adding layouts required building a new OS/kernel. All kernels contained 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 were needed to accommodate most additional layouts. A notable exception would have been the Dvorak layout that moves just about every key and thus required hundreds of extra bytes of precious kernel storage regardless of if it was ever used or not.

Each localized version (built on a globalized core) required 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. 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 coordination.

The end of the Lisa

In 1987, Sun Remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts are still available today.

In 1989, Apple buried about 2,700 unsold Lisas at a landfill in Logan, Utah and received a tax write-off on the unsold inventory.[3]

Like other early GUI computers, working Lisas are now fairly valuable collectors items, for which people will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Notes

  1. ^ Andy Hertzfeld (2005). "Bicycle". Revolution in the Valley. O'Reilly. p. 36. ISBN 0596007191.
  2. ^ Evolution of Memory Management in Mac OS
  3. ^ American Heritage magazine article on the Apple Lisa

See also

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