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Even if you're not an Apple fan or if you roll your eyes anytime you see someone excited over the

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next iPhone, there's no denying how influential the Mac was in shaving our modern conceptions

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of what a computer is supposed to be for the average user, particularly with its user-friendly

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GUI having a massive influence on layer systems. But the Mac really owes its legacy to an earlier

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Apple system, the Lisa, which is named after Steve Jobs' daughter and was the very first

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personal computer with a full-fledged graphical interface, complete with a mouse cursor and

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pretty icons. These are things we take for granted nowadays, but believe it or not,

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Jobs had to be convinced to take the Lisa in this direction. You see, although Lisa was the

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first home and office PC to have a GUI, the first computer period that had one that we know of

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was called the Xerox Alto, which debuted in 1973. Jobs, however, had a very low opinion of Xerox,

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and it wasn't until he actually visited the company and saw the Alto for himself that he green

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lit making the Lisa a GUI-based machine. The Alto cost $32,000 and was never produced in large

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quantities, so Apple saw an opportunity with Lisa to produce a cheaper, more accessible machine that

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still packed a punch and would be attractive to businesses. It had a 5 MHz Motorola CPU,

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one megabyte of RAM, a 5 MHz hard drive, a 12-inch black and white 720 x 364 screen,

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and a pair of 5 1⁄4 inch floppy drives to read those wacky old-school disks. They were

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actually floppy. At the time, these specs weren't bad, but the real attraction was Lisa's operating

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system, which actually introduced far more than just a GUI. Lisa's OS introduced multitasking to

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the typical user, where you could switch between programs without closing them first.

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That was massive! In addition to protected memory, which segmented off the memory space for each

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program, allowing the system to be both versatile and stable. Combined that with other novel features

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like a built-in screensaver, the ability to cut and paste, whatever that is, and virtual memory,

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which allowed the system to use a hard disk space as additional RAM, the Lisa's OS was much more

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powerful than what most users were used to. But all of these cool features put a lot of strain

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on the system's hardware. Consequently, Lisa unfortunately gained a reputation for sluggish

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performance due to its software being ahead of the actual components inside, which wasn't acceptable

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for a computer that cost merely $10,000. Yeah, although it was a lot cheaper than the Xerox

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This was obviously a massive amount of money still to charge. Apple hoped that the cost wouldn't

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be much of an issue for businesses, but it turned out that not a whole lot of companies

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were interested in expensive PC with underwhelming performance, especially as the included software

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seemed to be more focused towards designers. Indeed, as innovative as Lisa was, it just

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wasn't taken seriously enough in many quarters. There wasn't enough third-party software,

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the special high-capacity floppy drives turned out to be unreliable, and many users looked at the

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mouse as a gimmicky toy instead of something for serious computing, even though the Lisa also

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introduced the concept of double clicking, something that Apple came up with as a way to

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make their single button mouse more versatile instead of adding more buttons. Only about 10,000

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Lisa's were sold after Apple sunk over $150 million into the project, but if it flopped so hard,

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how did its innovative features live on? Well, it turns out that Steve Jobs was

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actually kicked off the Lisa team for being an annoying micromanager, and when that happened,

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he took the ideas and even some of his colleagues from the Lisa team over to the Macintosh team,

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whose goal was to make a scaled-back Lisa at a far lower cost. When the Mac did launch in 1984,

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it only cost one-fourth of what the Lisa did, causing the Lisa to kind of fade into computing

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history by the end of 1986. But that doesn't mean it's gone for good. There's actually a

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working Lisa emulator we'll link down in the description if you want to try it out for yourself.

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As for the real Lisa, she went on to become a magazine writer. Oh, I doubt she ever used

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her silicon counterpart to write articles. Thanks for watching guys, like, dislike,

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check out some of her other videos, comment with video suggestions, and don't forget to subscribe

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and follow.