14 DAY TRIAL // If you think that today is just another ordinary day that ends the week and you hardly wait the weekend to arrive, then you'd better think again! Today, we should have a party going on, because Lisa is now 24 years old! You don't know the Lisa I am talking about here? Well, if that's true, I am sure we can fix this problem...
During the early 1980s, when I was just starting to walk and spell "da-da", Apple Computer was working on a revolutionary personal computer design, called simply Lisa. Started in 1978, the Lisa project slowly turned into an effort to design a powerful computer able to use a graphical user interface and targeting the business market. Although the Lisa and the later Macintosh have some obvious similarities, the later is not a direct descendent of our celebrated computer.
Despite the fact that Apple stated that this computer's name is an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, you don't have to spend more than a few seconds to make the link between Lisa Jobs, Steve's first daughter, born in 1978, and this computer. Are you ready for some numbers now?
Announced on the 19th of January 1983, the Lisa was introduced the same month, at a price of 9,995$, which is 20,600$ in November 2006, being one of the first commercial PCs to use a graphical user interface and a mouse to interact with its users. The CPU used was a Motorola 68000 running at 5MHz and had the gigantic quantity, for that time, of 1MB of memory. The floppy drives used were of 5.25 inch designed with two head assemblies, one for each side, later followed by a single 3.5 inch floppy drive and optional 5 or 10MB hard disks, for the Lisa 2 models.
Lisa's operating system had extremely advanced features for those days, including cooperative multitasking and virtual memory, although the virtual memory used with the slow disk system available at that time made the computer seem sluggish from time to time.
The main user modes were the Lisa Office Sustem, an environment for end users that included Write, Calc, Draw, Graph, Project, List and Terminal, later renamed "7/7", and the Workshop, a program development environment that was almost entirely text-based, despite the fact that it used a graphic user interface.
Apple Lisa was a commercial failure for Apple, the largest since the Apple III back in 1980, although the largest Lisa customer was NASA, which used it for project management. Despite this fact, it is generally believed that Lisa helped Apple move on and also made a big step forward into bringing the graphical user interface to the masses.
A real pity, in 1989, Apple buried about 2,700 unsold Lisas at a landfill in Logan, Utah, getting a tax write-off on the land they rented for it, and today the working Lisas are valuable collector items, valued at hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
No matter how many working Lisas still have a 5MHz heart beating at this time and no matter how outdated they may seem today for most of us, all I can say is "Happy birthday, dear Lisa!"...