Apple Lisa

The Apple Lisa was the first personal computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Before the Apple Lisa all computers used command line interfaces for every task even for simply moving a file from A to B. So when the Apple Lisa came on the scene with its window-based environment, page white screen, mouse and preemptive multi-tasking it caused quite a stir (partly because some people claim that Apple stole the ideas from Xerox).

The very first Lisa had two internal disk drives, a 5.25" and a 3.5" plus a huge external 10MB hard drive and 1MB RAM. At the time this was groundbreaking stuff and had the price tag to match. In 1983 the Apple Lisa would set you back $9,995 but for what you got this was a good price. RAM alone cost $4 per Kb back then!!

Comments




Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox, Steve bought a licence for it but for a bargain basement price as I understand, as Xerox management couldn't see any commercial future in it! They lucked out there.
jazzdude09-Dec-2011, 05:16:32 PM

The software development company I first worked for had one of the first Lisas to enter the country.
The drives were 5.25" with two slots instead of one, this is because the drive had two read/write heads opposite to each other to speed up access.

10mb seems a bit large to me. the ones we had, had two 5mb drives (called Profile).

Great machine if not very slow. The programming language of choice then was Pascal and the early Lisa/Mac machines were ALL programmed in Microsoft Pascal.

stevebasset23-Dec-2009, 11:52:45 AM

I first saw a Lisa in the flesh in 1983. It was staggerinly impressive. It was a bit like taking the step from travelling everywhere by horse to driving around in a Ferrari. Not only was it the first pixel based, as opposed to text based, interface, all the applications worked together. You could link data from the spreadsheet to the word processor.
DGM10-Jan-2006, 03:25:45 PM

eBay

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