Apple Lisa

Long before the Macintosh became a household name, Apple gambled its future on a strange, expensive machine called Lisa. Unveiled in January 1983, the Lisa was the first commercial computer to bring a graphical user interface, overlapping windows, pull-down menus, and a mouse to a mainstream (if wealthy) audience, translating ideas Steve Jobs and his engineers had glimpsed on a legendary visit to Xerox PARC into a shipping product. Built around a 5 MHz Motorola 68000 and a full megabyte of RAM, the Lisa was a technical tour de force for its era, running a genuinely multitasking, protected-memory operating system years before such things were common on personal computers. Its bundled office suite, the Lisa Office System, let users cut and paste between documents and see fonts rendered on-screen roughly as they would print, a novel and delightful trick called WYSIWYG that would define desktop publishing for a generation. None of this came cheap: at $9,995 (well over $25,000 in today's money), the Lisa was priced for corporations, not enthusiasts, and it showed up right as IBM PCs were flooding offices with cheaper, more familiar text-based computing. Sales were dismal. Businesses balked at the price and the unfamiliar interface, software support was thin, and the Lisa's sluggish 5 MHz processor struggled to keep its ambitious OS feeling responsive. Apple tried to save face with the cheaper Lisa 2 and later rebranded surplus units as the Macintosh XL, but the writing was on the wall. In a now-infamous episode, Apple buried thousands of unsold Lisas in a Utah landfill in 1989 rather than pay to service them. Yet history has been kinder to the Lisa than the market ever was: nearly every idea it pioneered, the desktop metaphor, the trash can, drop-down menus, document-centric computing, resurfaced polished and affordable a year later in the Macintosh, and again decades later in every modern operating system. The Lisa remains one of computing's great noble failures, a machine too far ahead of its price point and its time, but an essential ancestor of the graphical interfaces we now take utterly for granted.