Amaya Toman In late July 1979, engineers at Apple began work on a new Apple computer called the Lisa. It was supposed to be the first ever computer produced by Apple, which will have a graphical user interface and can be controlled with a mouse. The whole thing sounded like an absolutely brilliant, revolutionary project that simply has no chance of going wrong.
Steve Jobs drew inspiration for Lisa especially during a visit to the Xerox PARC company, and at that time you would be hard-pressed to find someone at Apple who did not consider her a 100% hit. But things ended up moving a little differently than Jobs and his team originally expected. The roots of the whole project go a little deeper than Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC in the late 1970s. Apple originally planned to develop a computer focused on business, i.e. as a kind of more serious alternative to the Apple II model.
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In 1979, a decision was finally made and Ken Rothmuller was appointed project manager for the Lisa. The original plan was for the new model to be completed in March 1981. The vision that Apple management had for the Lisa was a computer with a then-traditional user interface. But that took over when Steve Jobs had the opportunity to see their graphical interface in Xerox's research laboratories. He was really excited about it and decided that the Lisa would be the first mainstream commercial computer in the world to feature a GUI and a mouse.
What seemed at first glance like a brilliant innovation, but ultimately failed. Ken Rothmuller argued that the innovations that Jobs proposed for the Lisa would drive the price of the computer much higher than the two thousand dollars originally intended. Apple responded to Rothmuller's objections by removing him from the head of the project. But he wasn't the only one who had to leave. In September 1980, the "Lisa team" even said goodbye to Steve Jobs - allegedly because he was very difficult to work with. Jobs moved on to another project that eventually produced the first Macintosh.
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The Apple Lisa finally saw the light of day in January 1983. Apple set its price at $9995. Unfortunately, Lisa didn't find her way to customers - and she didn't help her either advertising, which starred Kevin Costner as the happy new owner of a revolutionary computer. Apple finally said goodbye to the Lisa for good in 1986. As of 2018, there are an estimated 30 to 100 original Lisa computers in the world.
But in addition to the story of its failure, there is also a story related to its name associated with the Lisa computer. Steve Jobs named the computer after his daughter Lisa, whose paternity he originally disputed. When the computer went on sale, Jobs was just going through a trial. Therefore, he stated that the name Lisa means "Local Integrated System Architecture". Some insiders at Apple have joked that Lisa is actually short for "Let's Invent Some Acronym." But Jobs himself finally admitted that the computer was really named after his first-born child, and confirmed it in his biography, which was written by Walter Isaacson.
