The MITA display in the Teen Center of the Arlington Public Library currently contains an Apple Lisa.
The Lisa was introduced in 1983 at a price of $9,995. In 2007 dollars that would be over $20,000. It was the first commercial personal computer to have a Graphical User Interface (GUI), drop-down menus, multi-tasking, a hierarchical file system, copy and paste, icons, folders or a mouse. It used a 5 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU with from 512KB to 2MB of memory. This was an enormous amount of RAM for the time. The first Lisa had a 5MB hard drive, two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives (nicknamed the "Twiggy" drive after a young and very thin fashion model of the time), and an optional external 5MB hard drive. The black and white screen was only 12 inches on the diagonal with 720 x 360 pixels.
The Lisa was a rare commercial failure for Apple. They spent over $50 Million to develop the hardware and over $100 Million for the software. Only 10,000 units were ever sold. Business customers balked at the price and chose to run IBM PCs costing about $2K which were beginning to dominate business desktop computing even without a GUI. The Lisa was also seen as being a bit slow. The beginning of the end for the Lisa was the release of the Macintosh in 1984. It helped discredit the Lisa since the Mac also had a GUI and a mouse but was far less expensive. The Lisa was too far ahead of its time. At the time 96 KB of RAM was considered extravagant. Much of the Lisa's high price, and therefore its commercial failure, came from the large RAM. Most PCs only began shipping with megabyte-sized RAM in the 1990s.
The Lisa operating system featured multitasking and virtual memory. These were extremely advanced features for a PC. But the virtual memory coupled with a slow disk made performance very poor. A year after the first introduction the Lisa 2 was released with a 3.5 inch drive instead of the two 5.25 inch drives and the price was cut in half. The system seen here is a Lisa 2.
In 1986 the Lisa line was ended and reportedly the remaining inventory was buried in a landfill in Utah. Steven Jobs quit Apple a month later to found the NeXT Computer Company.
This system was donated to the Museum by Dr. Lynn Peterson of the UT Arlington College of Engineering.
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