Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computers to present a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Its development began in 1978.[2] It underwent many changes before shipping at US$9,995 (equivalent to $27,190 in 2021) with a five-megabyte hard drive. It was affected by its high price, insufficient software, unreliable Apple FileWare floppy disks, and the immediate release of the cheaper and faster Macintosh. Only 10,000 were sold in two years.
Though the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only refers to it as "The Lisa", Apple officially stated that the name was an acronym for "Locally Integrated Software Architecture" or "LISA".[6] Because Steve Jobs's first daughter was named Lisa Nicole Brennan (born in 1978), it was sometimes inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was a backronym invented later to fit the name. Andy Hertzfeld[7] states the acronym was reverse engineered from the name "Lisa" in late 1982 by the Apple marketing team, after they had hired a marketing consultancy firm to come up with names to replace "Lisa" and "Macintosh" (at the time considered by Jef Raskin to be merely internal project codenames) and then rejected all of the suggestions. Privately, Hertzfeld and the other software developers used "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym", a recursive backronym, while computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit the Lisa's name. Decades later, Jobs would tell his biographer Walter Isaacson: "Obviously it was named for my daughter."[8]
Lisa The First Download Mac
The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II. A ten-person team occupied its first dedicated office, which was nicknamed "the Good Earth building" and located at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard next to the restaurant named Good Earth.[9] Initial team leader Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved into the "window-and-mouse-driven" form of its eventual release. Trip Hawkins and Jef Raskin contributed to this change in design.[10] Apple's cofounder Steve Jobs was involved in the concept.
The Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computer systems with a graphical user interface (GUI) to be sold commercially. It uses a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 5 MHz and has 1 MB of RAM. It can be upgraded to 2 MB and later shipped with as little as 512 kilobytes. The CPU speed and model was not changed from the release of the Lisa 1 to the repackaging of the hardware as Macintosh XL.
The original Lisa, later called the Lisa 1, has two Apple FileWare 5.25-inch double-sided variable-speed floppy disk drives, more commonly known by Apple's internal code name for the drive, "Twiggy".[19] They had, for the time, a very high capacity of approximately 871 kB each, but proved to be unreliable[20] and required nonstandard diskettes. Competing systems implementing that level of per-diskette data storage had to utilize much larger 8" floppy disks. These disks were seen as cumbersome and old-fashioned for a consumer system. Apple had worked hard to increase the storage capacity of the minifloppy-size disk by pioneering features that Sony perfected shortly after with its microfloppy drives. Although it used a Twiggy drive in the prototype stage, the first Macintosh was launched the following year with one of the Sony 400 KB 3.5" "microfloppy" disk drives. 1984 also saw the release of the first revision of Lisa, the Lisa 2, which also included a single Sony drive. Apple provided free upgrades for Lisa 1 owners to Lisa 2 hardware, including the replacement of the Twiggy drives with a single Sony drive. The Sony drive, being only single-sided, could not store nearly as much data as a single Twiggy, but did so with greater reliability. The IBM PC shipped with a minifloppy (5.25-inch) drive that stored even less data: 360 KB. It was also slower and did not have the protective shell of the Sony microfloppy drive diskettes, which improves reliability.
The first hardware revision, the Lisa 2, was released in January 1984 and was priced between US$3,495 and $5,495.[5][22] It was much less expensive than the original model and dropped the Twiggy floppy drives in favor of a single 400K Sony microfloppy.[23] The Lisa 2 has as little as 512 KB of RAM. The Lisa 2/5 consists of a Lisa 2 bundled with an external 5- or 10-megabyte hard drive.[24] In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple offered free upgrades to the Lisa 2/5 to all Lisa 1 owners, by swapping the pair of Twiggy drives for a single 3.5-inch drive,[23] and updating the boot ROM and I/O ROM. In addition, the Lisa 2's new front faceplate accommodates the reconfigured floppy disk drive, and it includes the new inlaid Apple logo and the first Snow White design language elements. The Lisa 2/10 has a 10MB internal hard drive (but no external parallel port) and a standard configuration of 1 MB of RAM.[24]
The Lisa operating system features protected memory,[27] enabled by a crude hardware circuit compared to the Sun-1 workstation (c. 1982), which features a full memory management unit. Motorola did not have an MMU (memory-management unit) for the 68000 ready in time, so third parties such as Apple had to come up with their own solutions. Despite the sluggishness of Apple's solution, which was also the result of a cost-cutting compromise, the Lisa system differed from the Macintosh system which would not gain protected memory until Mac OS X, released eighteen years later. (Motorola's initial MMU also was disliked for its high cost and slow performance.) Based, in part, on elements from the Apple III SOS operating system released three years earlier, the Lisa's disk operating system also organizes its files in hierarchical directories, as do UNIX workstations of the time which were the main competition to Lisa in terms of price and hardware. File system directories correspond to GUI folders, as with previous Xerox PARC computers from which the Lisa borrowed heavily. Unlike the first Macintosh, whose operating system could not utilize a hard disk in its first versions, the Lisa system was designed around a hard disk being present.
A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself. A separate development OS, called Lisa Workshop, was required. During this development process, engineers would alternate between the two OSes at startup, writing and compiling code on one OS and testing it on the other. Later, the same Lisa Workshop was used to develop software for the Macintosh. After a few years, a Macintosh-native development system was developed. For most of its lifetime, the Lisa never went beyond the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to "do everything",[citation needed] although UniPress Software did offer UNIX System III for $495.[32]
2022.04.01: Released the 4th Release Candidate of 1.2.7here. 2020.08.24: Released the 3rd Release Candidate of 1.2.7 for macos X + source here. 2020.08.03: Released the 2nd Release Candidate of 1.2.7 for macos X + source here. 2020.06.05: Released the 1st Release Candidate of 1.2.7 for macos X + source here. 2019.11.11: Released the first beta version of 1.2.7 for macos X + source here. 2020.04.12: Released the second beta version of 1.2.7 for macos X + source here. 2019.11.11: Released a 2nd alpha version of 1.2.7 for macos X here. 2019.10.15: Released an alpha version of 1.2.7 for macos X here. 2019.10.15: 1.2.7 Alpha source code can be found at github here. 2015.09.03: Released a version for Raspberry Pi off the 1.2.6 tree here. 2008.03.31: Still no update just yet. 1.3.0 has some serious CPU bugs that I haven't been able to fully remove. There's one left over bug that causes Lisa Office System to get stuck in the Environments window. This seems to be CPU related and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the COPS421 emulation. 2007.12.13: LisaEm 1.2.6 is now available for download.. Provides more bug fixes. 2007.11.25: LisaEm 1.2.5 is now available for download.. Provides more bug fixes. 2007.11.11: LisaEm 1.2.2 is now available for download.. Provides several bug fixes. 2007.09.23: LisaEm 1.2.0 is now available for download.. If you don't have ROMs but wanted to try LisaEm, now's your chance. 1.2.0 is ROMLESS!!! 2007.07.10: LisaEm was added to the FreeBSD Ports 2007.07.08: 1.0.0-Release (OS X, Source) is available for download on the downloads page. 2007.07.05: The LisaEm User's Guide is available for download on the downloads page. 2007.06.28>: Release Candidate 2 is available for download on the downloads page. 2007.04.04: Release Candidate 1 is available for download 2007.04.02: Welcome Slashdotters! 2007.04.01: Happy 30th Birthday Apple, Inc. 2007.03.15: Beta 2 is up for OS X, Linux, Win32 users. 2007.03.14: New Release available today! Head on over to the downloads page for LisaEm 1.0.0 Beta. This new version fixes a lot of issues, and I'm sure introduces new bugs as well. Have fun!2007.03.04: Another day, another hard drive crash. Sorry about that, took me far longer to rebuild this machine than I would have liked. Should have a new release of LisaEm fairly soon. I'm having a bit of trouble getting printing to work the way I'd like it to.2007.01.28: New preview version of LisaEm is available for downloading, as well as the first bit of source code (just libdc42 for now.).Visit the downloads section for fun and profit!2007.01.24: Happy Birthday Lisa 2.Speaking of which, you should head on over to the downloads page and see what's there today.2004.02.22: I've let this web page stagnate for quite a long time. Sorry... there has been some work on the emulator, but it's not quite ready. :)The emulator attempts to boot, but crashes in the process. I've also done some work on the Lisa File System, and the CPU core. See the [Lisa Emulator Status] page for details.If you've found this site from a search engine (i.e. teoma) and wish to bookmark it, pleasebookmark it as and not www.sunder.net. [Why][Top][Lisa Docs] [Lisa Hardware Pics][Lisa Emulator Status][Lisa Emulator To do][Lisa Links][Downloads]Comments? Email me here(just expunge the anti-spam text and replace the "at" and "dot" with the appropriate symbols.)Want to know why I'm doing this? Click here.Ever wanted to see a Lisa's internals? Click here.Need Lisa Documentation? Click here.Curious about how the emulator is designed? Here are the project docs.Impatient? Click here to see the status of the emulator.And here to find out what's left to be doneWant to find other Lisa sites? Click here.Exactly what makes this a harder emulator than most? (Except maybe for UAE)A CPU board containing a 68000 clocked at 5Mhz (due to memory access issues,) a proprietary MMU, and a video state ROM which is really a hard to access chip containing only the serial number of the machine! 2ff7e9595c
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