Jan 19, 1983 — Apple Lisa Release
January 19, 1983
Apple Lisa is probably the most expensive “failed” project of Steve Jobs, and at the same time the one that completely changed how we interact with computers. It was named after Jobs’s daughter (although Apple tried for a long time to hide this fact, inventing awkward backronyms like Local Integrated Software Architecture).
Why does this matter? Before Lisa, computers were mostly black screens filled with white lines of code. Lisa became the first mass-produced machine with the interface we are used to today: a mouse, icons, windows, and a trash bin. Essentially, almost everything you see on your screen right now first appeared for a wide audience there.
Technically, it was a breakthrough: a full 1 megabyte of RAM (which was mind-blowing in 1983) and a Motorola 68000 processor. It also came with a bundled software suite called Lisa Office, which included spreadsheets, text editors, and even tools for creating charts.
But there was one huge problem — the price. At $9,995, it would be close to $30,000 in today’s money. For an average person, that was simply unaffordable, so Apple sold only about 100,000 units. Eventually, the project was shut down in favor of the more affordable Macintosh, and thousands of unsold Lisas were literally buried in a landfill in Utah so the company could write them off for tax purposes.
A sad fate — but without this machine, modern Windows and macOS might have appeared much later, or looked very different.
The importance of Apple Lisa in the history of computing is underscored by the fact that in every major feature film about Steve Jobs, the story of the Apple Lisa takes up a large portion of the runtime and is explored in depth.
You can see the story of this computer in the following films:
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
Jobs (2013)
Steve Jobs (2015)
If you want to experience what the Apple Lisa OS looked like, you can actually do it right in your browser today.
Lisa emulator in the browser: https://lisa.sunder.net