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Apple Lisa Facts

Apple Lisa Facts
Apple Lisa was a computer designed by Apple that began to be developed in 1978. It was released as a desktop computer in 1983 as a personal computer for business users. When it was released it cost almost $10,000 US and had a 5 MHz hard drive with low performance ratings and unreliable floppy disks. Only approximately 100,000 unites of the original Apple Lisa were sold. As Steve Jobs pushed Macintosh to improve on the shortcomings of Apple Lisa and released the Mac which outsold it. Apple Lisa was revised several times but the last version was sold as the Macintosh XL.
Interesting Apple Lisa Facts:
If the Apple Lisa were to be released today at today's prices it would cost almost $25,000 US.
LISA stood for Local Integrated System Architecture. Because of so much speculation surrounding the true meaning of the acronym, there was a joke that it stood for Let's Invent Some Acronym. Steve Jobs later said it was named after his daughter.
Steve Jobs was forced to leave the Apple Lisa project in 1980 so he focused on the Macintosh project.
Some believe that the Mac is a direct descendant of Apple Lisa but was not - the Macintosh XL was the final version of the Apple Lisa.
The Apple Lisa was one of the very first personal computers released commercially to have a mouse and a GUI. The Apple Lisa's CPU was a Motorola 68000. It had a 5 MHz clock rate and 1 MB of RAM.
The original Apple Lisa had two floppy drives for 5.25 inch disks. These disk drives were often referred to as Twiggy.
When the Apple Lisa II was released in 1984 it cost between $3,495 and $5,495 US. It had a SONY microfloppy drive instead of the earlier Twiggy double drives.
When the Apple Lisa II was released Apple offered to exchange all the Twiggy drives from the Apple Lisa originals for the new 3.5 inch disk drives.
The Apple Lisa had expansion slots that made it possible to upgrade the CPU.
The Apple Lisa is considered to be a big failure commercially for Apple. Consumers found the price to be too high and opted for the IBM PCs that were less expensive.
When the Apple Macintosh was released in 1984 it was marketed much better than the Apple Lisa. It was much less expensive.
In 1986 Apple made an offer to Lisa/XL owners that they could return their computers and pay $1,498 to receive a Macintosh Plus computer and a Hard Disk. The value of the new system at the time was $4,098 US.
One of Apple Lisa's biggest consumers was NASA. NASA used LisaProject but had major problems when the Apple Lisa was discontinued as it had been used for project management.
When Apple Lisa was released in the United States, it was only a few months later that it was released in other countries and languages including Italian, Spanish, German, French, and Scandinavian.
Apple Lisa was finally discontinued in 1986.


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