Apple Lisa

In January 1983 Apple shipped a computer almost nobody could afford. The Lisa cost $9,995, which in today's money runs past $25,000, and it was the first commercial machine to put a graphical interface, overlapping windows, pull-down menus and a mouse in front of paying customers. Those ideas came out of a visit Steve Jobs and his engineers made to Xerox PARC. Apple turned them into something you could actually buy. The hardware was serious for 1983. A 5 MHz Motorola 68000, a full megabyte of RAM, and an operating system doing protected memory and real multitasking years before that was normal on a desk. The bundled Lisa Office System let you cut and paste between documents and see fonts on screen roughly as they would print. WYSIWYG, people started calling it, and desktop publishing grew out of that. Businesses looked at the price, looked at the IBM PCs filling their offices at a fraction of the cost, and passed. Software houses stayed away. The 5 MHz 68000 buckled under the weight of that ambitious OS, so the machine that looked like the future often felt sluggish in front of you. Apple cut the price with the Lisa 2, then quietly recycled leftover units as the Macintosh XL. Neither worked. In 1989 the company buried thousands of unsold Lisas in a Utah landfill rather than keep servicing them. History has treated the Lisa better than 1983 did. The desktop metaphor, the trash can, drop-down menus, document-centric computing, all of it came back a year later in the Macintosh, cheap enough to sell this time, and all of it is still sitting in whatever operating system you are reading this on.