Apple: Lisa

Named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa is an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture. For those of you who do not know, Steve Jobs is the co-founder of Apple. Just what did Apple Lisa have to offer to its users? More than what was expected!

If your computer has a desktop today, you owe it to Lisa. If you have a mouse in your hand, you still owe it to Lisa! Lisa started the revolution of Graphical User Interface that is being built upon even today. People at that time (1980s) were impressed so much by this little piece of technology that more than 80,000 units were sold at a rate of almost $10,000 each! This is all because Lisa offered what no other computer of that time did.

What put Lisa to work was 50 million dollars, 200 men hour years, and 90,000 lines of program codes for its operating system. Additionally, an average of 50,000 lines of code was for each of its programs.

Lisa had 5 MHz of processing power under its cover. The huge operating software of Lisa heavily taxed this processor. It lagged in speed of operation due to this.

Lisa also had a 2 MB of RAM within it. This was very helpful in efficiently running the office suite that came installed with the system. The office suite contained 7 programs; these are listed below.

LisaWrite: word processor

LisaCalc: spread sheet

LisaGraph: charts

LisaList: an outline builder, idea manager

LisaProject: project scheduler

LisaDraw: drawing program

LisaTerminal: modem communications software

Lisa had a feature that even Windows 95 could not handle properly. Copy and paste job. Lisa allowed users to copy and paste data from one application to another. This alone saved people a lot of time in their jobs. Furthermore, Lisa also had a 10 MB hard disk to store a good number of programs.

With Lisa hardly being available today, owning this beautiful piece of computing history is just not possible for everyone. Having Lisa on your desk will give you an idea of where we had started from and how much ground we have covered today. Lisa is a definite buy for all those who share a hobby of vintage computer collection. Seen one? Get it before I do!