Amaya Toman In today's historical review of products from Apple's workshop, we will focus on the Apple Lisa computer, which was introduced in early 1983. At the time of its release, the Lisa had to face competition in the form of computers from IBM, among other things, which ultimately made it, despite certain indisputable qualities, one from the few business failures of the Cupertino company.
It could be interest you
On January 19, 1983, Apple introduced its new personal computer named Lisa. According to Apple, it was supposed to be an abbreviation for "Locally Integrated Software Architecture", but there were also theories that the name of the computer referred to the name of Steve Jobs' daughter, which Jobs himself eventually confirmed to the writer Walter Isaacson in an interview for his own biography. The beginnings of the Lisa project date back to 1978, when Apple tried to develop a more advanced and modern version of the Apple II computer. A team of ten people then occupied their first office on Stevens Creek Boulevard. The team was originally led by Ken Rothmuller, but later he was replaced by John Couch, under whose leadership the idea for a computer with a graphical user interface, controlled by a mouse, which was certainly not usual at the time, gradually arose.
Over time, Lisa became a major project at Apple, and the company reportedly invested a staggering $50 million in its development. More than 90 people participated in its design, other teams took care of sales, marketing, and issues related to its release. Robert Paratore led the hardware development team, Bill Dresselhaus oversaw industrial and product design, and Larry Tesler oversaw system software development. The design of Lisa's user interface took the responsible team half a year.
Gallery
The Lisa computer was equipped with a 5 MHz Motorola 68000 processor, had 128 KB of RAM, and despite Apple's efforts to maintain maximum secrecy, there was even talk before its official presentation that it would be controlled by a mouse. Objectively, the Lisa was not a bad machine at all, on the contrary, it brought a number of groundbreaking innovations, but it was significantly harmed by its excessively high price, due to which the computer sold really poorly - especially compared to the first Macintosh, which was introduced in 1984. It did not achieve too much success even later introduced the Lisa II, and Apple finally decided in 1986 to put the relevant product line on hold for good.
