Lisa

Before there was a Macintosh, there was the Lisa. Released in January 1983, Apple's first machine with a graphical interface and a mouse cost a staggering $9,995 and never found the business audience it was built for. Its follow-ups, the Lisa 2 and the Macintosh XL (a rebadged Lisa running Mac software through an emulator), tried to salvage the platform before Apple quietly let it go.

The Lisa's commercial failure is easy to overstate, because its influence wasn't. Windows, icons, menus, and a mouse-driven desktop all showed up here first at Apple, a full year before the Macintosh made the same ideas cheap enough to matter. If you want to see where the Mac's whole visual language actually started, this is it.