A tour of the Apple Lisa OS and Applications

The Lisa at introduction in January 1983 (with two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives)

The following screen shots were excerpted from the article: “The Lisa computer system” by Gregg Williams, from Byte 2/1983. (reproduced courtesy Marcin Wichary). Lisa was Apple's first attempt at a computer system with a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI). Introduced two years after the Xerox Star 8010 and just before other windowing application shells like VisiOn or GEM or Windows 1.0, the Lisa, although a failure in the marketplace, was followed by the successful Macintosh.

First we look at file management on the Lisa system. Files, collections of files, and peripherals appear in a separate window. The user can dynamically manipulate the window in several ways.

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This series of screen captures shows creating a chart using the Lisa Graph and Lisa Draw programs.

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Additional pop-up menus for the Lisa Draw program.

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A document being prepared using Lisa Write.

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The Lisa Project Manager program. The first photo below shows a simple PERT chart with tasks on the critical path being heavily outlined and the second photo shows a Gantt chart, which shows personnel utilization; the third photo shows the kind of typical error message used throughout the Lisa system.

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The Lisa Calc program. The first photo shows a spreadsheet and the second shows the same spreadsheet after the “Show Formulas and Values” command is executed.

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The Lisa List program, a single-user list-management program.

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See Also

Our Lisa II/XL

Our Story The Mac at 20 on the development of the Macintosh