Bench Talk

Forty-one years after its release, Apple can still be thankful for this early flop

(Source: Timothy Colegrove, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s an old cliché that our failures pave the way for our greatest successes in life. And when it comes to technology, with all the amazing strides that have been made in the past few decades, this idea couldn’t be truer. Back on January 19, 1983, Apple released what was meant to be the future of personal computers: the Lisa. In fact, the features of this technology were so revolutionary for its time that the Lisa was thought to redefine what a computer is. However, Apple learned the hard way that revolutionary tech costs money to develop—a lot of money—and comes with plenty of kinks to work out.

 But calling the Apple Lisa a flop is telling only part of the story.

Let’s start with the most obvious and notorious part: Lisa was a personal computer that cost $9,995 USD. That price is equivalent to approximately $30,000 USD today—for a personal computer. Before you allow your jaw to drop at that outrageous price tag, first consider the significant leap forward this computer took in terms of hardware and software capabilities, which included the following technical components:

Graphical User Interface

This groundbreaking feature was what set the Lisa apart. Its graphical user interface (GUI) was a departure from the predominantly text-based operating systems that served as archaic command interfaces for its contemporaries. Lisa’s GUI allowed users to interact with the computer using a mouse, icons, and windows. While the GUI was conceptually borrowed from the work of Xerox PARC and their development of the Alto, the Lisa took this innovative concept to the masses, revealed the potential of PCs, and brought us to a point of no return for what would become the foundation of modern computing interfaces.

Processor and Memory

The Lisa was powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU running at a then-impressive clock speed of 5MHz. This 32-bit processor was a considerable upgrade from the 8-bit processors prevalent at the time. In terms of memory, the Lisa featured 1MB of RAM, a substantial amount during an era when many computers were still working with kilobytes. Still, this much processing power proved to be not enough for the multitasking capabilities built into the Lisa’s operating system, and consequently, it was known to run sluggishly.

Storage

A sizable portion of the Lisa’s development costs came from the significant storage upgrade from its predecessors. The Lisa came with a 5MB "ProFile" hard drive, which was considered quite capacious at the time. This storage capacity was made possible using two 5.25-inch floppy drives, designed by Apple and affectionately known as "Twiggy." Unfortunately, Twiggy's improvements over larger floppy disks commonly used in other systems did not come without some growing pains, with reliability being an issue for Lisa users.

Display

The Lisa sported a 12-inch monochrome display with a resolution of 720×364 pixels. Although rudimentary by today's standards, this display was a leap forward in the early 1980s.

To understand the significance of the Lisa, we must consider the computing market it boldly entered. Apple was riding high on the success of the Apple II series, but the Lisa was an ambitious next step that aimed to bridge the idea of robust business computers like mainframes with the sleekness and software capabilities of personal computers. Developed at a time when personal computing was transitioning from hobbyist pursuits to mainstream adoption, the Lisa faced the tall task of mass marketing emerging computing technologies to businesses and home consumers.

While the legend of the Lisa often points to its price and the innovative technology that drove up costs, perhaps the more important part its story is that it dared to change the siloed nature of our business and personal lives. Apple’s Lisa was not just about evolving what a computer is capable of, but it set out to evolve what businesses and homes are capable of. This sentiment is no more evident than in Apple’s celebrity-endorsed advertisement for the Lisa.

Figure 1: The 1983 television advertisement for the Apple Lisa.

With the computing landscape of the early 1980s being driven forward by IBM’s entry into the PC market, the Lisa can be read as Apple’s direct response to position itself as a leader in this evolving industry; but their emphasis on advanced productivity features should be understood for its greater significance in how we think about technology. Bringing GUIs to the masses created a paradigm shift in how people interact with computers. The control this technology offered users laid the foundation for the user-friendly interfaces we take for granted today.

Eventually, the Lisa computer became the Lisa 2, a cheaper edition with much less hardware, and by 1986, the Lisa was discontinued completely, only to find its way into a Utah landfill three years later as a tax write-off. But Lisa’s legacy lived on through its concepts, technology, and ambition in subsequent Apple products. Lisa introduced advanced software features like preemptive multitasking and protected memory, setting a precedent for future operating systems; namely, Apple’s own Macintosh.

While the Lisa itself may not have achieved commercial success, its influence is palpable in the DNA of modern computing. Lisa’s ideological concepts were the seed of what the Macintosh would become. Although the Macintosh had to give up some of the functionality Lisa had, its ability to bring GUIs into an all-in-one PC and, more importantly, market it to the public with a much more reasonable price point would pave the way for the Mac series of operating systems that are so ingrained in many parts of our world now.

The Lisa computer lives on not only through Apple’s growing technology, but also through its legacy that is celebrated at the Computer History Museum, and even through an emulator project for those feeling nostalgic about the tech that was.