Even if you're not an Apple fan or if you roll your eyes anytime you see someone excited over the
next iPhone, there's no denying how influential the Mac was in shaving our modern conceptions
of what a computer is supposed to be for the average user, particularly with its user-friendly
GUI having a massive influence on layer systems. But the Mac really owes its legacy to an earlier
Apple system, the Lisa, which is named after Steve Jobs' daughter and was the very first
personal computer with a full-fledged graphical interface, complete with a mouse cursor and
pretty icons. These are things we take for granted nowadays, but believe it or not,
Jobs had to be convinced to take the Lisa in this direction. You see, although Lisa was the
first home and office PC to have a GUI, the first computer period that had one that we know of
was called the Xerox Alto, which debuted in 1973. Jobs, however, had a very low opinion of Xerox,
and it wasn't until he actually visited the company and saw the Alto for himself that he green
lit making the Lisa a GUI-based machine. The Alto cost $32,000 and was never produced in large
quantities, so Apple saw an opportunity with Lisa to produce a cheaper, more accessible machine that
still packed a punch and would be attractive to businesses. It had a 5 MHz Motorola CPU,
one megabyte of RAM, a 5 MHz hard drive, a 12-inch black and white 720 x 364 screen,
and a pair of 5 1â4 inch floppy drives to read those wacky old-school disks. They were
actually floppy. At the time, these specs weren't bad, but the real attraction was Lisa's operating
system, which actually introduced far more than just a GUI. Lisa's OS introduced multitasking to
the typical user, where you could switch between programs without closing them first.
That was massive! In addition to protected memory, which segmented off the memory space for each
program, allowing the system to be both versatile and stable. Combined that with other novel features
like a built-in screensaver, the ability to cut and paste, whatever that is, and virtual memory,
which allowed the system to use a hard disk space as additional RAM, the Lisa's OS was much more
powerful than what most users were used to. But all of these cool features put a lot of strain
on the system's hardware. Consequently, Lisa unfortunately gained a reputation for sluggish
performance due to its software being ahead of the actual components inside, which wasn't acceptable
for a computer that cost merely $10,000. Yeah, although it was a lot cheaper than the Xerox
This was obviously a massive amount of money still to charge. Apple hoped that the cost wouldn't
be much of an issue for businesses, but it turned out that not a whole lot of companies
were interested in expensive PC with underwhelming performance, especially as the included software
seemed to be more focused towards designers. Indeed, as innovative as Lisa was, it just
wasn't taken seriously enough in many quarters. There wasn't enough third-party software,
the special high-capacity floppy drives turned out to be unreliable, and many users looked at the
mouse as a gimmicky toy instead of something for serious computing, even though the Lisa also
introduced the concept of double clicking, something that Apple came up with as a way to
make their single button mouse more versatile instead of adding more buttons. Only about 10,000
Lisa's were sold after Apple sunk over $150 million into the project, but if it flopped so hard,
how did its innovative features live on? Well, it turns out that Steve Jobs was
actually kicked off the Lisa team for being an annoying micromanager, and when that happened,
he took the ideas and even some of his colleagues from the Lisa team over to the Macintosh team,
whose goal was to make a scaled-back Lisa at a far lower cost. When the Mac did launch in 1984,
it only cost one-fourth of what the Lisa did, causing the Lisa to kind of fade into computing
history by the end of 1986. But that doesn't mean it's gone for good. There's actually a
working Lisa emulator we'll link down in the description if you want to try it out for yourself.
As for the real Lisa, she went on to become a magazine writer. Oh, I doubt she ever used
her silicon counterpart to write articles. Thanks for watching guys, like, dislike,
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