apple lisa

Following the failure of the apple III and the relaunch of the apple IIe, steve jobs commissioned two different computer designs in 1981: the lisa and the macintosh 128K.

The apple lisa was released in january 1983, a year before the first macintosh (128K), and was the first personal computer to offer a graphical user interface. The lisa was a more advanced system than the macintosh of the time in many ways, including the inclusion of protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard-disk-based operating system, a built-in screen saver, an advanced paper-tape calculator with RPN, support for up to 2 MB of RAM, expansion slots, a numeric keypad, data corruption protection measures such as block sparing, non-physical file names (with the ability to have multiple documents with the same name), and a larger, higher-resolution display. It would take several years for many of these features to be implemented on the Macintosh platform. Protected storage, for example, didn't reappear until the release of the Mac OS X operating system in 2001.

The lisa 2 was released in January 1984, concurrently with the macintosh 128K, and dispensed with the twiggy floppy disk drives in favor of a single 400k sony microfloppy disk. The lisa 2/5 consisted of a lisa 2 equipped with an external 5MB or 10MB hard drive. The lisa 2's new front panel had the notable distinction of introducing the new inlaid apple logo and the first features of the macintosh design language.

The significantly cheaper, but in every respect weaker, macintosh 128K prevailed in the market, so steve jobs bought back all the lisas still on the market and had them scrapped.