Introduction:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the third episode of our marvelous trip into GUI Wonderland, where we’ll be talking about the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, the Apple Lisa!

Apple Lisa

Development

Let’s now have a look at the history of this incredible machine; its development began in 1978, in the form of a project dubbed “LISA”, whose aim was to create a new and modern iteration of Apple’s previously released Apple II and Apple III. Similarly to what happened with the Xerox Star just a year before^{[ep 2]}, in order to work on the new Project LISA, in 1978 Apple decided to create a new division, called Personal Office Systems (POS); it was purposely made not to involve the division which had previously created the Apple II and III, a team known as Personal Computer Systems (PCS).

Sometime later, in 1979, POS completed a marketing specification for the LISA Project, which shows us that the system they were planning to create was significantly different from the Lisa we all know today; it was meant to cost only $2,000 and was intended to have the then-common green phosphorus CRT, a 16-bit processor, and only a high-capacity floppy drive. Moreover, they hoped to release it in 1981, two years before its actual final release date.

Despite everyone’s expectations, this project had quite a rough start, as it was clear that they would have never made it in time for the planned release date; for this reason, the initial team leader Ken Rothmuller, former director of Hewlett-Packard, tried to express his worries to none other than Steve Jobs, whose reply to these issues was to remove the poor Rothmuller from his position and appoint someone else, another manager coming from Hewlett-Packard, John Couch (it must be funny to be removed from a project just because you were right 🙂).

In the meantime, another important project was waiting for approval at Apple, the Macintosh project; it was proposed by a man called Jef Raskin, who wanted to create a device meant for any possible consumer. It was too bad that he had to wait for approval, thus he ended up helping the LISA team instead, as it was currently having a hard time; it was late 1979, and they still had not chosen a suitable processor to base the Lisa on, plus they weren’t even that keen on working on the project itself, as it all looked too similar to the already famous and successful Apple II!

Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson

Fortunately, Xerox accepted the deal and thus, in December 1979, Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson (who was that same Raskin’s student, and an engineer at Apple) visited Xerox PARC, hoping to see a showcase of some of Xerox PARC’s programs; on that same trip, however, they were also shown a demo of the Smalltalk environment, which was running on a Xerox Alto^{[ep 1]}. Even if Steve Jobs didn’t know much about the underlying technology of Smalltalk, he was still incredibly impressed by its possibilities, thus, during a presentation by Larry Tesler (who worked on Smalltalk and the Gypsy word processor, the successor to Bravo), Jobs asked why nothing much had been done with that marvelous technology yet; as we already know^{[ep 2]}, Xerox didn’t want to invest much in computers, preferring to focus on its already established copier market. For this reason, the researchers at PARC were, understandably, extremely impressed by Jobs’s desire to finally use that technology, therefore, on the Team’s second visit, they were shown even more of PARC’s new and exciting discoveries, alongside another look at Smalltalk.

As a consequence of these visits, the LISA Project changed forever; now, it wasn’t meant to be a simple upgrade to the Apple II line anymore, but it was to be focused on both the software and the user experience. Plus, one of those features would have been an idea that Bill Atkinson had, one that was actually born from a misunderstanding; he thought he had seen Smalltalk displaying overlapping windows and he was amazed at how this didn’t impact performance in the slightest. What’s almost funny, though, is that the specific Xerox Alto he saw wasn’t, in fact, displaying overlapping windows, as they would later be proposed by Xerox’s System Development Department (SDD) to be used for the Xerox Star, though they ended up being scrapped^{[ep 2]} (for this reason, the Lisa introduced them before the Daybreak, the successor to the Star itself).

Thus, in order to implement all the features they wanted to add, Trip Hawkins, their marketing and planning manager (who, interestingly enough, later on founded two video games companies, Electronic Arts and 3DO), rewrote their previous product specification following Jobs’s wishes, by adding groundbreaking features such as an object-oriented graphical user interface, a mouse, and networking; alongside Steve Jobs, both Trip Hawkins and Jef Raskin participated in designing this new concept for the Lisa.

Trip Hawkins and Larry Tesler

As a result of the changes in the Lisa, a total of 16 Xerox employees ended up leaving Xerox and going to Apple’s POS, hoping to work on the LISA Project; the first one to join was Larry Tesler himself, who was then made in charge of the system software. At first, they designed the initial draft of the user interface, and then they started working on the hardware, the operating system, and the applications, which were all developed alongside one another; unfortunately, it was quite tricky to make the user interface they desired, because of both the graphical limitations of the hardware they had at their disposal, and the fact that they had to program the new applications on an Apple II. Luckily, the first programs to be developed, the word processor and database management ones, didn’t require high-resolution graphics, so our developers were still able to work on something despite the issues.

Later on, in the Summer of 1980, Larry Tesler started conducting the first tests on users, which were also observed by psychologists, hoping to understand the impact of the Lisa’s GUI on the actual end-users. These tests influenced a special document that was released in the same period, the Lisa User Interface Standards; it was meant to regulate and explain how the UI of both the system and the programs should have been, and it even included some aspects of the hardware, in order to make the Lisa as user-friendly as possible.

Subsequently, but with different aims, in around 1981, POS started giving sneak previews of the Lisa in a special hidden room, so that no one else apart from potential corporate customers could see the new system; in these events, the participants were challenged to learn how to use the Lisa in under 30 minutes, and POS received positive feedback, whilst also making sure to note all of the witnessed hiccups down, so that the GUI could be adapted to its users and fixed.

It was too bad that, in September 1981, InfoWorld magazine reported that Apple was working on three computers, which were the Lisa, the “McIntosh” (that same project we met before, which had been accepted at some point), and another secret system; talking about the Lisa, they suggested that it would have been a competitor to the Xerox Star, especially given its lower price. The only issue with all of this was that not long after, in May 1982, the press started to hear rumors of a “baby Lisa”, which was a very similar system that would be faster and cheaper, called Macintosh (at least this time they got the name right). In regards to the Macintosh, in 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the LISA Project and ended up working on the Macintosh instead, secretly turning it into a “better” Lisa; thus, this baby machine was meant to directly compete with its “role model”, which would have come out only a few months before the Macintosh!

Going back to our Lisa, sometime after, in mid-1982, the development of the UI was sped up, hoping to get the Lisa ready to ship in 1983; thus, Bill Atkinson and his colleague Frank Ludolph (who would subsequently go to work at Sun Microsystems, which we’ll cover in a future episode of this series) met at Atkinson’s house to spend a weekend working on the Lisa’s UI and, somehow, on Monday morning, they had a preliminary version of the Desktop Manager (let’s not start to imagine how stressful and crazy that weekend must have been).

In the end, the Lisa was finally completed and ready to come out, and Apple spent a lot of money to market it, trying to make the “Lisa Revolution” as widespread as possible; thus, the Lisa ended up eventually being launched in January 1983.

GUI

Let’s finally talk about the reason we are even here for, the GUI! First of all, the Lisa has two main user modes, the Lisa Office System and the Lisa Workshop; the former is the GUI environment meant for customers of the machine, whilst the latter is an almost entirely text-based program development environment, though it does feature a GUI text editor. For the purposes of this article, we’ll mostly be talking about the Lisa Office System, shortened to LisaOS, as it’s the “main attraction” of the system, however, we’ll very briefly have a look at the Workshop too.

As we said before, the Lisa’s target customers are practically the same ones as the Star^{[ep 2 a+b]}, as they were both meant for office professionals who didn’t know how a computer worked and didn’t have any desire to learn its usage; even so, contrary to what happened for the Star, which was mainly meant for important companies, the Lisa was significantly cheaper and worked just fine on its own, so it was also suitable for medium-sized businesses, and not solely for the larger ones.

In order to appeal to their potential customers, the UI was designed to be as intuitive as possible, plus, everything you required was visible on the screen, and there was no need to remember any complicated and abstract text-based commands to type (the logic behind this was known as WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get); in addition, whatever the user didn’t need was hidden until it was necessary, to allow for the user to gradually learn how to use the Lisa without feeling overwhelmed, and with no need to study how it worked beforehand. Even error messages were designed to be friendly and calm the user, and there were measures in place that prevented obvious and common mistakes! Furthermore, the Lisa included a “Set-up” program, meant to allow the user to personalize the machine on their own, and without any effort.

You see, all these measures were intended to address a known issue of the Xerox Alto, because its software was still quite difficult to use, despite all the effort that went into making it as straightforward as they could; for this reason, POS strove to make its Lisa truly for everyone. In that regard, it was Larry Tesler’s job to make sure that each of the features would only be implemented if a novice Apple employee could figure it out, and if they weren’t able to understand it, it would be redesigned. Apart from the GUI itself, something else they also tested was several features including the keyboard layout, how you turned on and off the machine, how to open and fix the Lisa, and seemingly trivial things such as whether they should add a door on the disk drive or not.

The Development of the Desktop Interface

Something the Lisa shared with the Star is that its main interface, the Desktop Manager, followed the desktop metaphor, which stated that each item found in that view of the system had to resemble some object or action found in an office setting (such as folders, files, wastebaskets…)^{[ep 2]}, in order to make sure that the end user would find such an interface to be familiar with their own work environment; each type of document would be displayed in its own window, which could be resized, moved, and overlapped with other windows as the user desired.

Whilst this design looks pretty familiar to us, at least judging by its final release, that wasn’t true at all times; in fact, at the beginning of its life, the Lisa’s interface was vastly different from how it looked when it was shipped, and it took a long while for it to reach its final stage. Now, let’s go over how it became the one we know today.

Initially, the team wanted to make something that resembled the Smalltalk browser, with its window displaying four lists of categories, which allowed you to narrow down whatever you needed to retrieve; thus, it was easy to find something if you knew what it was and if you could remember some details about it (which, admittedly, isn’t a given when talking about computer novices). Unfortunately, though, the problem with this method was that it was hard to create, copy, or move a file, and it all seemed too abstract to beginner users.

Then, in 1980, Dan Smith, one of the most important contributors to the Lisa’s GUI, tried something new, inventing an interface called the Filer: it would ask questions to the user in order to understand what task they wanted to accomplish (such as the folder where to look for a specific file), and once it had collected enough information, it would run the desired action. Seeing how even this one wasn’t implemented, we can expect that it had some kind of issue; you see, it was easy to use in case you were an expert user, but it didn’t work with the kind of customers POS wanted, and it wasn’t fun to use in the slightest, so it ended up being scrapped as a result.

Then, it was decided to use icons on the desktop in order to accomplish basic filing functions (moving and deleting files); you could move files by dragging them around, and if you wanted to delete them you had to drag them to the wastebasket icon (although, originally, the wastebasket was to be used as the Clipboard, and there was a separate Delete button, which you can imagine led to some confusion). Similarly, you would see each diskette as a drawer, which you could then open to reveal its folders inside; the problem with this was that the Lisa’s screen wasn’t too large, and POS feared that the user would lose the icons they needed under many application windows, making it complicated to do whatever they had to do. Just like in real life, they were worried that the user would fill their desk with infinite amounts of documents, getting things lost in the way; plus, if there weren’t enough problems already, it was also argued that the real-life office filing system itself had already many issues (especially when you had to find something among a large number of documents) and that it wasn’t wise to mimic something so problematic to begin with.

Thus, they rejected that option too, and tried to design something even better.

Thus, looking for more intriguing ideas, our Team asked Bill Atkinson for help; hoping it would aid them, he recounted one of his trips to the M.I.T. Media Lab, where he saw a futuristic data navigation system, named “Spatial Data Management System”. This interface was extremely special, as in order to operate it, you’d sit on a chair with two hand controls, and you had a large screen in front of you that showed a bizarre view, referred to as “Dataland”; thanks to your unique controls, you’d “fly” over the data shown on the screen (it reminds me of how Cyberspace was conceived in the Cyberpunk novels of the 80s), and your data would be displayed as a geographical map you could zoom in and out, based on what you needed to accomplish. You could move documents around extremely quickly, almost as if you were actually filing their paper counterparts, and you could organize your Dataland as you wished; the only issue was that it would start to become problematic to manage your files when their number increased too much and when multiple disks were connected and available (plus, you’d have to acquire suitable equipment, which must certainly have been costly and cumbersome).

While the LISA Team appreciated Dataland, they couldn’t go for something similar, as they needed a system that was more familiar to an office worker; this meant they ultimately had to revert to using the same icons they had scrapped before, which might have had some issues, but were still more viable than anything else they had tried. Plus, even the Macintosh team was using icons for their Finder, so they figured they could do the same, as that method would have been simpler and more approachable.

Something I found intriguing while I was reading through the papers I found was that, understandably, the Apple employees who came from Xerox were under a confidentiality agreement, and they couldn’t simply reveal details regarding the Xerox Star, even if it was something that would have helped the Lisa; thus, whatever looks similar between the systems might have not technically come from the Star (just like what we’ve seen before with the icons).

Going back to our story, once the GUI’s appearance and usage were mostly confirmed, it was time to run some tests once again, and two things were checked; whether the user could install and start up the Lisa by themselves, and if all the assigned names made sense. In regards to the first point, the user would be granted a manual and all the necessary equipment, and they would be given free rein on what to do; it turned out that, starting from when they opened the box until they were running some program, an average of 10 minutes would pass, which was not too bad. Whilst this was a pretty common test, I found that what they did for the names was quite fascinating; the employees running the demos wouldn’t name the things visible on the screens, but would rather ask questions such as “If someone were to bring you this, if you wanted someone to bring you this, what would you say? Bring me the…” and the person would name that object in a way that was natural to them, without realizing what they were actually doing and with no pressure whatsoever. Thus, we can unquestionably see that these tests were truly important to the Lisa’s development cycle, and that the Team did its best to make it truly appealing to the users, rather than doing what was simpler to program.

In the end, after all these oh-so-wild adventures, the system that they ended up sticking with was the one we know today, with a desktop containing small icons and full-sized documents; let’s now have a more in-depth look at some fascinating details about it!

Task-oriented Workflow

First of all, something that makes the Lisa’s Desktop Manager different from the GUIs of the time and from most GUIs nowadays is that it is fully “document-centric” or “task-oriented”; in this kind of interface, rather than opening a program and pointing it to a file, you open the file first, which then calls forth its own assigned program. This method was chosen so that the users didn’t have to remember which program they needed for which task, and thanks to this, users could even ignore the existence of programs altogether; it was also effective in avoiding all those cases found in command-line programs, where you had to remember and type an application-specific sequence of commands in order to open a file. Most importantly though, thanks to this unique feature, users could focus on the task at hand, rather than on the programs and commands needed to complete it.

Thus, when you needed to create a new file (or even a new folder!), you’d tear off a virtual stationery pad, which would automatically create a file of the requested type, give it a name based on the current date, and finally, it would open the document with the suitable application; later, when you were done with it, you’d simply put it away, and it would be minimized to its own icon, located somewhere on the desktop.

The only time you needed the program icon to be present and reachable was when you had to move it to another disk; thus, the average user would keep their stationery pads on the desktop and hide the program icons away in some folder that they never opened unless they absolutely needed to.

Windowing

Unlike what happened with the first iterations of the Xerox Star^{[ep 2]}, the Lisa allowed all types of windows to overlap, and you could resize your windows in any way you fancied; you could also freely move them around the screen, by placing the cursor on a window’s title bar and pressing and holding the mouse button, only to release the button once you were okay with the window’s placement. Furthermore, if you had some overlapped windows and wanted to call forth one of them, you’d simply click on it and that would make it come forward, without you having to manually move the others away.

Desktop Utilities

• Wastebasket: A virtual wastebasket where you drag files that you want to delete, which can be recovered in case you need to; this was specially made to avoid some cases where, even if a confirmation dialogue comes up, you end up accepting the default option, no matter its connected risk^[2];
• Clipboard: A menu where you find the most recent information you copied or cut from any document, no matter the program; in order to view its contents, you can simply open it, and whatever is inside will be shown in a window. You can then paste this information into any program you want (with a few exceptions), and the Lisa will automatically adapt it and place it in its new home; for example, you can easily add a piechart into a text document, or into the LisaDraw program in order to further customize it. This would be immensely hard to do on a system that doesn’t allow different programs to talk to each other, whilst it’s extremely straightforward to do on a consistent system such as the Lisa;
• Preferences: A menu that consists of a list of settings and options to further personalize your Lisa; all the options are simple to understand and change, even for the average user;
• Clock: The most straightforward of them all, as it opens a window that shows the current time and date; for some reason, the date doesn’t go beyond 1995, but we’ll talk about that later on;
• Disk icons: It shows the disks that are currently inserted or attached to the Lisa and are available for use; you can see different icons for the various types of disks (Twiggy disks, 3.5″ disks, Profile external hard drives, and internal Widget hard drives), so that they are easier to distinguish.

Copy-Paste

These now-famous actions came from Smalltalk, and were invented by Larry Tesler; at first, the developers of the Lisa were supposed to use “Move, Copy, Delete, and Transpose” instead of the ones we know and love, however, they ended up preferring “Copy/Cut” and “Paste”; the reason was that, despite the added click, if you use the latter method you have no need to be able to see where you want to place your file, which is a lifesaver when your desktop is particularly messy. The only issue with the Lisa’s copy-pasting is that if you drag and drop a file to another disk, then the Lisa will actually move it rather than copy it, which might be problematic if you want to copy a file to a floppy, only to then remove it afterward and find out that your file is now gone!

Software

Let’s now have a look at some intriguing info about the Office System!

The Scavenger

First of all, LisaOS’s file system was designed to be reliable, so that the users would trust the Lisa with their documents; in this regard, to reduce the damage that a system crash would cause on the operating system, the Lisa kept several redundant copies of critical files, alongside some information on how to recover the most important files for the system, with each piece of it being properly tagged, so that it could be possible to tell where it originally belonged. In case something ever happened, the system would activate a utility called “Scavenger”, which would reconstruct damaged data thanks to all that redundant information that the system kept; the user would get a dialog about this process, and they could choose whether to proceed with the repair or to eject the affected disk instead.

Blocks, Folders, Filenames

Something unusual about the Lisa’s file system (at least to a contemporary PC user, that is) is that files are sized in “blocks” rather than in bytes; while blocks can be easier to understand as a custom unit than as bytes, it is also true that it can cause issues if someone has used two systems with differently-sized blocks (an example of a famous and recent system that uses blocks is the Nintendo 3DS console).

But what about the filenames? First of all, just like what happened with the Xerox Alto^{[ep 1]}, you could have filenames containing up to 31 characters (whilst the Alto allowed you to insert up to 39), which couldn’t contain “-”, as it was used as a directory separator. Furthermore, it was even possible to give the same name to two different files, as all your documents had an additional hidden name that was meant to distinguish them (a good example of one of these bizarre names is “{T3D456}”); this was meant to mimic how a user can have two or more paper documents with the same name simultaneously, and they should be allowed to continue with this behavior even when using the Lisa.

Duplicating and Backing up Diskettes

Say that we want to back up a diskette, how will we do it? Will it be complicated? Luckily for us, it was pretty simple to back a disk up, as you could literally copy the whole diskette in the same way you’d copy a normal file; when asking to duplicate a diskette, the Lisa would understand that it was supposed to work on an entire removable device, and it would ask if you wanted to back up its contents to another diskette or to the hard disk. What’s frankly incredible is what happened when, whilst copying anything (a document, a hard disk, or a diskette), you found that it wouldn’t fit on a single diskette anymore, and the Lisa would suggest you split it across multiple diskettes! Even if the file would probably be unusable in its current split state, at least you could easily slip a copy of it into an almost full diskette.

Other Environments

As we said before, the Lisa wasn’t only capable of booting into LisaOS, but it also had a special development environment called Lisa Workshop; it could be used to write and compile code (and, subsequently, also to program for the Macintosh), which could then be tested only when the computer was in LisaOS mode. The issue with this method, apart from the fact it was comprehensibly irritating to have to switch between OSes all the time, was that, apparently, users couldn’t obtain the Lisa Workshop so easily (always assuming they even could), and as such, this ended up heavily impeding third-party software development.

Thus, in case you had multiple of those systems all installed and available at once, you could choose between them at startup, thanks to something called Environments Window; we can definitely say that this is undoubtedly more convenient than the hilarious nose-boot found on the Xerox Alto^{[ep 1]}.

Programs

In an Apple Lisa, you would obtain the most important programs included in the Lisa Office Suite, which was later renamed Lisa 7/7 to signify how there were 7 programs included in it; it was shipped alongside the system, and that makes it the first integrated personal office suite (Microsoft Office, which had to be bought separately, would come out only several years later, so you can imagine how impressive this was). They don’t even take up too much of your system, as they take up about 2.5 MB of storage, alongside LisaOS; it is also true that the default hard disk was a 5 MB one, so you didn’t have much left after that, however, you most probably wouldn’t have installed any other program besides these, so I guess it was fine.

Something incredible about these programs, apart from their GUI, is that you can literally copy-paste information between these various applications, all without having to close the starting program and open the other one; the Macintosh only got this feature starting from System 7, so a long time after the Lisa came out (we’ll meet System 7 later on in the series).

• LisaWrite: A word processor, that had a few interesting features; for example, it allowed you to search inside your text for an exact match, thanks to the “Find What?” command, and then substitute said text with something else. Plus, you could even set if you wanted your target text to specifically be upper or lower case, in order to get more relevant results! Something else you could do was find a string of text’s next occurrence, just like in modern word processors; this was pleasantly connected to the “change” feature, as you could opt to “Change & Find Next” or “Find & Change All”, which are incredibly helpful to anyone using such a program;
• LisaCalc: Similar to Microsoft Excel, it makes spreadsheets and helps with financial modeling;
• LisaGraph: Makes charts and graphs; if you add data from LisaCalc, it can create them automatically;
• LisaList: Helps you make outlines, keeps track of your ideas, and allows you to create a database;
• LisaProject: Works as a project scheduler, as simple as that;
• LisaDraw: A drawing program that is intentionally made to draw diagrams, maps, symbols, and some simple pictures; it is the predecessor to MacDraw;
• LisaTerminal (from LisaOS v2): This one is slightly more complicated, as it’s a telecommunications terminal emulation program, which makes the Lisa function as a teletype terminal^[5], or as an IBM-compatible terminal. LisaTerminal allows you to send information from LisaCalc or LisaWrite documents to other computers; it then keeps a “log” of whatever it has received from other machines, so that you can paste it into LisaWrite documents.

As you can see, these did cover practically everything an office worker would need, and having all of these ready alongside your system was a huge advantage.

MacWorks

Some months after the Macintosh release (specifically in April 1984), Apple started offering a software emulation environment called MacWorks, that allowed the Lisa to run the original Macintosh 128K software; while it didn’t initially support hard disks (due to MacOS’s limitations), it still made the Lisa more attractive to users who needed Macintosh applications. Later on, in 1985, it was rebranded as MacWorks XL, which was the primary offering of the Macintosh XL (which was, in reality, a rebranded revision of the Lisa, but we’ll see that soon enough). While you could have simply bought a Macintosh, it is true that the Lisa had more RAM and a hard disk; plus, it was already present in some businesses, that didn’t want to substitute all their new machines right away.

At IT School with Apple Lisa

Apart from the office-related applications, the Lisa also had a few more intriguing pieces of software; in fact, in order to learn how to use the Lisa, Apple provided a well-comprehensive service that included a program, called LisaGuide, a set of documentation, a couple of videotapes, and even entire in-person courses for the sales assistants!

First of all, after having powered the machine on, the user would start up LisaGuide, an “interactive manual” that would teach them every nook and cranny of how to properly use the Lisa, all in about 30 minutes. This comprehended things such as naming, opening, closing, and filing documents; selecting and choosing from menus; cutting and pasting; moving and re-sizing windows; and, finally, organizing documents on the desktop.

What was special about this program is that was self-paced, and it allowed the users to take their own time in learning the usage of the system, by letting them go onward and backward as necessary; it contained both explanations and small tasks, which let you try out the various features of the system, and LisaGuide could understand whether you had mastered a certain part of the program or not. In this way, once you had completed the Guide, you were perfectly able to use the system, even without outside help; if you still wanted to learn more, there was another part of that program, called Tutorial, that would go over even more useful features, though it took about three or four hours to complete.

Moreover, you could also check a Reference Guide and some sample documents, so that you could mess around with peace of mind (and without angering your boss) and without having to type whole essays or create whole spreadsheets just to learn a couple of features; we can undoubtedly say that this kind of help was really valuable, especially seeing how people would start using the Lisa with absolutely no computer experience!

Whilst it is admirable that so much documentation was available to read, its very existence might imply that the Lisa must have been a difficult system to use, or else there would have been no need to have all these tutorials to begin with, right? In reality, the Lisa was uncomplicated to learn as a direct result of these manuals, and it’s so consistent that everything you learn can be applied later; compare that to a system like the Xerox Star, which is certainly easier to use than a system with a command-line UI, but can be pretty unintuitive at times (I might or might not have spent a good 10 minutes on the log-on prompt as it would refuse to accept the right username and password, and I might or might not have struggled a lot to activate the office tools). I’m not saying that the Lisa is the best system out there, but at least they put in the effort to make you feel less stupid. 🙂

Ahem, in addition, if you still felt like it was all too overwhelming for you, you would have been glad to know that each shop’s sales assistant got specially trained to be able to help users learn how the system worked; there were two kinds of courses available, and both were perfectly capable of teaching qualified Apple dealers how to instruct others on using the Lisa. The first one, which lasted 2 days and a half, was free, and mostly went through LisaGuide and the basics; the second one, on the other hand, wasn’t free, it lasted three days and would focus more on the office tools (the Lisa 7/7), rather than just giving you a general view of the system. Thus, based on your needs, you could participate in one or both, and your customers would never feel like they’re being left alone.

Third-Party Software

This is a tricky topic for the Apple Lisa, as on one hand, it technically wasn’t too complicated to program software for the Lisa, as there was a collection of 100 modules that you could use to make your own programs, thanks to the Lisa Toolkit; on the other hand, to actually code those programs, you needed the separate Lisa Workshop environment, as you couldn’t program and compile code inside the default LisaOS. It was too bad that, despite the Lisa Toolkit being somehow available for users, Apple decided to invest more into Macintosh development and, as a result, ended up disregarding Third-Party Software support for the Lisa; while those modules existed, they were poorly documented, which heavily impeded outside developers from properly doing their job. This ultimately proved to be one of the causes for the Lisa’s demise, but we’ll see that later on.

If you still wanted to create some software for the Lisa, you had an easier time programming it in COBOL, BASIC-Plus, or PASCAL, which were all available for purchase and easier to use; understandably, though, these programs couldn’t make use of the new and exciting GUI the Lisa offered, but they could be run on other systems too, with some modifications.

When Your Lisa Stops Working

Well, this isn’t a joyful occurrence, isn’t it? Luckily, at least at the beginning of the Lisa’s life cycle, users were granted a special diagnostic program, called LisaTest, that could help them understand what the issue was; at some point, though, the program wasn’t available to new users anymore, and they’d have to go to their local Apple dealer to fix their machine. This program, checked every peripheral and part of the software, and if something were wrong it would tell the user what to do and where to go; it did take about 3 minutes to run, but at least users weren’t alone in troubled times. Additionally, to further solve the computer problems, it was possible to activate Service Mode; if you were an expert user or an Apple dealer, you would be able to run some special diagnostic tests that were unavailable in the default LisaOS.

Hardware

Appearance and Screen

The Lisa was meant to be put in a rather “approachable” case, that contained every part of the system (including the screen) besides the keyboard and the mouse, and was supposed to be small enough that you could theoretically (disregarding its weight) carry around; its case and internal components were also organized in a way that let you easily access them, so that you could repair the machine by yourself, if you so desired (to think that, nowadays, almost every piece of technology is purposely made to NOT let you easily repair them…).

Unlike the Xerox Star, the Apple Lisa has an in-built display which, whilst technically smaller than the Star’s, was still phenomenal back then, as it was both bitmap and black-on-white, unlike the then-common green or amber-on-black; black-on-white was chosen because of certain research that was done on the ergonomics of CRT displays, that showed how black-on-white was the best as it mimicked paper, assuming that it wasn’t too bright.

What about color screens, though? Whilst it would have been certainly nice to have a color screen, Apple stated that the addition of color would have caused the price of the whole system to increase by about 30-50%; thus, they said they would have considered color screens only when the price would have gone down enough to be viable, but sadly, we all know that the Lisa was discontinued well before that time arrived.

CPU & RAM

Unfortunately, there was something else that suffered due to cost-cutting, the processor; the Team chose the slowest-clocked version of the Motorola 68000, as the faster version of that CPU was particularly high-priced. It is too bad that, even when the price became suitable for their needs, they had already planned everything based on the slow processor, and they couldn’t exactly change it as they were going.

Mouse

Even if the mouse was already in use on the Xerox Star, unfortunately, some more experienced users were still wary of that tiny device, as they thought it was simply a toy; some more time would need to pass before the mouse became accepted.

Drives & Disks

As we saw in the info box before, the first iteration of the Lisa had two Apple FileWare 5.25-inch double-sided floppy disk drives, known as Twiggy; the compatible diskettes (FileWare) retailed for $60 per box (which contained 6 diskettes), and had the impressive capacity of about 851kB each, however, they were unreliable and nonstandard. Even if they were undependable (which defeated one of the Lisa’s aims, being reliable), Steve Jobs and the Team decided that they would have managed to solve their issues, somehow (spoilers, it didn’t happen); plus, they were smaller than the regular but too cumbersome 8-inch diskettes of the time. Unfortunately, though, the Twiggy drives ended up not being very appreciated, and thus, they were swapped out both on the Lisa 2 and the Macintosh, being replaced with Sony 400kB 3.5″ “microfloppy” disk drives; while their diskettes couldn’t store as much data as the FileWare ones, they were more reliable, and they could still store more information than the IBM PC’s 360kB drives.

In regards to the hard drives, apart from the default 5 MB ProFile, you could opt for an optional external 5MB or 10MB ProFile, and later on, Apple started producing yet another 10MB hard drive called Widget.

Networking

Just like the Xerox Alto^{[ep 1]} and the Xerox Star^{[ep 2]}, the Apple Lisa also had network capabilities thanks to Ethernet (which Xerox had just invented), and they were mostly related to AppleNet, which served as a way to transfer files between Lisa’s, print documents and allow users to share entire file servers; when you received a file, the Lisa would display it as an envelope, which could then be opened like a regular folder.

When It’s Time To Go Home

Unlike other computers of the time, when you turned off the Lisa with its power button, it would go into a special low-power mode (soft power-off); it would save all edited documents, close all programs properly, and, most importantly, remember where all the windows were placed on the screen, so that they could be summoned later on (soft power-on). Thus, one could just resume doing what they needed to do, without worrying about setting everything up again; it might have been inspired by the fact that, when you need to go home from work, you can just leave a document on your real desk, and it won’t disappear or anything. I’m not sure if this is what they were going for, but it does look plausible enough. Whilst the Macintosh didn’t have this function, MacOS got a similar one in OS X Lion 2011; you can easily see that the Lisa was about 30 years ahead of its time!

The End of the Lisa: Lisa 2 & Macintosh XL

Let’s now fast forward to the time the Macintosh was announced, in 1984; Apple announced a revision of the Lisa, called Lisa 2, alongside its many variants. Let’s have a brief look at them:

• the Lisa 2 could only run MacWorks because it didn’t have enough RAM (even so, if you purchased more RAM the Lisa suite would work); plus, it lacked a hard disk;
• the Lisa 2/5 wasn’t capable of running the full LisaOS because it also lacked the required RAM (again, if you bought more RAM you’d be able to run those applications), but it had an external 5MB hard drive;
• the Lisa 2/10, on the other hand, was the full-fletched Lisa, and the most expensive one.

Moreover, if you desired to simply upgrade your Lisa 1, “fortunately”, Apple could swap your two Twiggy drives for a Sony Drive, update your machine’s boot ROM and I/O ROM, and install a screen mod to turn the Lisa’s pixels into squares to fix the weird aspect ratio; this was done because of the Macintosh’s different pixel size, as without the mod, your programs would look stretched (the huge problem with this, though, was that, whilst the Macintosh software would look perfect, this prevented you from running the Lisa software, and as such, you can bet that this mod wasn’t always so desirable). But what if you wanted to simply purchase the 2/10? You would have still had a few hiccups as, quite strangely, even when you bought a Lisa 2/10, the Lisa 7/7 suite wasn’t included, so you had to purchase that separately.

Alongside these hardware upgrades (would we really call those “upgrades”? I’m not entirely sure), we also got a second version of LisaOS, which added support for the new Sony disks, added LisaTerminal, and, most importantly, v2 renamed the “View and disk” menu to… “Housekeeping”. Ahem, apart from these small changes, the most relevant addition, in my opinion, was actually the “Desk” menu; you could use it to jump to any program that was currently opened, no matter where it was on the screen. 

Macintosh XL

Unfortunately, the new revision didn’t do much to improve the Lisa sales, and because of this, Apple decided to rebrand the higher-end Lisa 2/10 as the “Macintosh XL”, giving it the possibility to reboot into Macintosh mode, and lowering its price once again; this ended up increasing sales, but Apple wasn’t entirely satisfied as it would have lost money if they produced several more of those machines.

If you had a Lisa and decided to get a Macintosh XL, you didn’t have to start from scratch, as in order to have your stuff moved from Lisa to Macintosh, you could purchase a Macintosh XL Migration Kit, which contained the Lisa-to-Macintosh application (which would move your data on a Macintosh disk) and some data conversion programs (which would then convert such data to make them run on the appropriate applications, such as MacWrite, MacDraw, and so on). It really looked like the end had come for the poor Lisa.

Discontinuation 

Despite Apple’s best efforts, the entire Lisa line ended up being discontinued in 1986; after this moment, Apple would support the Lisa hardware for 5 additional years, during which you could still service and repair your machine. Later on, in 1987, Sun Remarketing (which has nothing to do with Sun Microsystems) purchased about 5000 Macintosh XLs, hoping to upgrade and resell them, however, two years later, Apple sadly had to dispose of 2700 of these unsold Lisa computers to a landfill in Logan, Utah, which would apparently grant them a tax write-off (this sounds suspiciously similar to what happened a few years prior with the famous ET game for Atari 2600, almost if even computers wanted their own version of that tale…), although there is the possibility that it might have been a last resort idea to get them off the market, so that people would be forced to buy a Macintosh instead (and as a supporter of computer, software, and gaming preservation, my heart breaks every time I read something like this). Still, they kept some leftover units and spare parts until the company that bought Sun Remarketing ultimately went out of business.

Sadness aside, if you want to see some Lisa’s in person, it looks like there might be some at the Apple Corporate Museum and at the Vintage Mac Museum, and I’d personally love to go there one day.

Marketing & Reception

Now that we have found out more about our incredible Lisa, we must face the unfortunate truth that it wasn’t a commercial success; but why? Let’s try to examine what happened to make it fail.

What Made it Incredible

Let’s start right away by seeing what the Lisa succeeded in doing; first of all, it had a huge quantity of RAM for the time, which was very expensive. If we do the math, we can see that a kB of RAM cost $4 and the Lisa had 1MB of it; that would mean that the RAM in a Lisa would have cost you more than $4000! Plus, a 10MB external drive cost about $1000, so you can imagine that the Lisa was amazing quality for this price (actually, this would explain why they didn’t earn much off them)!

Money-related matters aside, the Lisa had many features that were ahead of its time (apart from its GUI), such as having a system-wide clipboard, easy support for multiple operating systems (which was also possible on a Xerox Star^{[ep 2]}), an office suite, and, lastly, a document-oriented workflow; it’s sad to see that, despite all the incredible features it had, it all wasn’t enough to make the Lisa popular.

What Made it Fail

Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, the Apple Lisa didn’t sell as many units as they hoped; as you can imagine, there were many reasons why it failed, so let’s have a look at most of them. First of all, despite its high quality, it was still too expensive of a machine, especially seeing how it was too costly to be a personal computer, but lacked some of the features that other proper workstations had; plus, its LisaWrite wasn’t the best option for whoever had to deal with long texts, which limited its potential and its marketability, and we’ll see the reason for that in our next paragraph.

In fact, one of its great features, its bitmap screen, was actually more problematic than it may have looked like; first of all, a bitmap display required more display memory, and it needed more time to refresh itself whenever something was moving around or needed to be drawn from scratch. This heavily impacted LisaWrite as, if you typed too fast, the screen couldn’t keep up with all the new text being added (which can be pretty annoying, especially if you look at the screen as you type); plus, it also happened when you were scrolling through a document, and you can expect that the longer the document, the more annoying the user experience would be. They did try to fix the problems with the screen, by making the Lisa only draw the outline of an object when you are moving it (which, by the way, is a memory-saving feature in modern Windows too) instead of the entire window with its full contents; whilst this was effective for most of the Lisa GUI, it didn’t help LisaWrite in the slightest, which sadly retained its issues.

Moreover, to add insult to injury, remember when we said that this machine’s CPU was quite slow? Well, all the various underlying complexities of the Lisa placed quite a burden on the CPU, and this made users think that the Lisa was needlessly slow because of its lack of snappiness; now, I’m not saying that the system was particularly fast to begin with, but the UI felt needlessly slower than it should have. To further show the Lisa’s lack of speed, I’ll paste some stats taken from a magazine of the time, the first volume of “The Seybold Report On Professional Computing”, which will give you an idea of how… not so fast the poor Lisa was:

	From Folder	From Desktop
LisaCalc Document:	34-57 secs.	14-15 secs.
LisaGraph Document:	20-57 secs.	11-23 secs.
LisaDraw Document:	19-46 secs.	11-12 secs.
LisaProject Document:	30-50 secs.	12-18 secs.
LisaList Document:	18-20 secs.	13-19 secs.
LisaWrite Document:	35-47 secs.	14-15 secs.

Apparently, this was because of the fact that as soon as you clicked on a document to open it, the computer had to load the corresponding program, and it was further made worse by loading a different document type than the previous one or, weirdly enough, by loading such a document from a Folder instead of the Desktop (I personally have no idea why that happens); it is also true that this magazine was using a trial version of the OS, which might have had slower loading times due to optimization still being underway, but it does still give you a decent idea of how it all must have been.

Even so, not only was it slow, but it was also quite unreliable, as both the Twiggy and the Widget tended to cause problems; on the other hand, the ProFile would last for a long time. These caused many issues, especially when coupled with the Lisa’s warranty, which stated that the software worked as expected, and thanks to this, users could obtain full refunds for any problem that came up; thus, you can imagine these costs ended up impacting on the sales (and I bet Apple wrote better warranty documents after this experience).

When They Thought DRM Was Cool

I’m sure you know what DRM is, right? Unfortunately, DRM isn’t only an annoying problem of today’s age as, even back then, there was some form of it being put into place, especially when talking about Lisa software; in fact, all of the Lisa applications were copy-protected. This was done by giving each Lisa a unique serial number, and by making it serialize every copy of a program; this meant that you couldn’t copy said program to another Lisa and, most importantly, it was a problem if you had to replace your Lisa because it had broken down, or if you wanted to acquire second-hand software. It is possible that, had the Lisa been more widespread, users would have complained, however, that was just a dream that couldn’t come true. Ultimately, this has an effect on software preservation too, as, without modifying the programs, it’s tricky to preserve a piece of software if every copy you can find is pre-owned, and it can only run on a specific Lisa that might not exist anymore (although, there was a way to fix this, and you can see it here).

When the Macintosh Stole the Spotlight

What a terrible time for the Lisa to be alive! We saw before how the Macintosh came out just a year later, in 1984, and we also read how it was fundamentally marketed and perceived as a better Lisa; plus, the two systems weren’t compatible, and it felt like Apple was abandoning the Lisa, which made people prefer to jump on the Macintosh wagon.

Even so, the Macintosh was not as advanced as the Lisa, as it lacked certain features or had less advanced hardware:

• it had a small amount of RAM, and you couldn’t upgrade it later;
• it didn’t have hard disk support;
• it had a smaller display with a reduced resolution;
• it had no multitasking capabilities;
• its office software was more primitive than the Lisa’s.

Still, it was cheaper, it seemed faster, and users preferred it to the Lisa; now, this is not to say that the Macintosh was completely “inferior”, as it had sound support, square pixels, and a better CPU.

Ultimately, the launch of the Macintosh was probably the main reason the Lisa didn’t even get a proper successor, instead of the few iterations we saw; perhaps, had the Lisa sold more units, they would have been capable of fixing its problems.

Two Challengers Approach: vs VisiOn and the Xerox Star

Let’s now have a look at VisiOn, an operating environment that offered a GUI office suite; first of all, while it was rich in programs and features, these weren’t seamlessly integrated with the OS it was running on, unlike how the Lisa worked (as VisiOn was literally running on a virtual machine). Plus, it had steep hardware requirements, which would require you to upgrade your current machine; even if it looked cheaper (the whole VisiOn software pack retailed for $2295), you also had to include all the necessary hardware costs, and in the end, you weren’t spending much less than what you would have spent on a Lisa (yes, MS-DOS has endless programs available, but we need to consider this from the perspective of someone only using this machine for office tasks). To see how much you would have spent and what you needed to acquire, you can have a look at a price comparison table below, taken from the 1983 Apple Lisa Marketing Binder.

In regards to the Xerox Star, we can see how the Lisa was significantly cheaper than the Star (which was $75,000 for a basic system + $16,000 for each added workstation, thus $257,699.67 + $54,975.93 in 2024), which surely made it a more popular choice for whoever didn’t need to build a PC network; even so, both systems came with an office suite with similar contents, which would have made them both quite appealing to users. As far as I’ve seen, even if the Lisa had a few solutions for networking, the Xerox Star was still superior in that regard; still, not many companies needed such features, so a Lisa would have been more desirable to them. Finally, as we mentioned before, the Lisa was easier to use than the Xerox Star, and it would have been a good choice for people with little to no computing experience.

Legacy and Resources

It’s incredibly unfortunate how a system that took so much effort, patience, and user testing, ended up being put aside, however, that doesn’t mean that it did nothing for computer history!

In fact, both the Lisa and the Star helped make GUIs even more widespread, which led to the development of various GUI environments that would run on top of command-line OSes (one of these is VisiOn itself, and we’ll see several of them in future episodes); moreover, its applications ended up influencing Macintosh software, which then influenced the programs we use nowadays, with some of the Lisa’s being straight up converted to run on the Macintosh (such as LisaDraw, which became MacDraw). Plus, I’d like to add something incredibly important to this list, something that also gives us the perfect title for this episode; the Lisa truly strove to teach its users how to use a computer, instead of giving them the tools and leaving them be. I’m sure that we can all recognize how learning to use a GUI has helped many of us approach computers in the first place (I wouldn’t be here without Windows XP’s ease of use)!

Conclusion

We have finally reached the end of our third episode of GUI Wonderland; I hope you enjoyed our look into the groundbreaking Apple Lisa! Before you go, I recommend you have a look at the Further Reading section, to find several more materials you can read!

I had a lot of fun writing and researching for this episode, especially as it allowed me to find the Xerox Alto and the Xerox Star; in fact, while I was initially researching Windows 1.0, I came across an article talking about the Apple Lisa, and thanks to this system, I ended up finding the rest, and that’s how the series took its GUI-inspired turn! Now, for the next episodes, we’ll be going back in time a little bit, as I found even more GUI systems that were released before both the Star and the Lisa, and it would be a pity not to talk about those too; they are the PERQ workstation (which will 99% be the topic of the next episode) and the Apollo/Domain. Thus, I hope you’ll be looking forward to those!

I sincerely thank you for reading this long but hopefully fascinating article, and I hope I’ll see you either in the next Journal Page, in the next episode, or anywhere around the site!