Apple's Lisa pioneers the mouse-driven personal computer
On this day · 19 January 1983
Apple bet $10,000 that ordinary people wanted to point and click. They were right, but a decade early.
On January 19, 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, one of the first personal computers sold commercially with a graphical user interface. Instead of typing cryptic commands, users moved a mouse to point at windows, icons, and menus on a bitmapped screen, a way of working Steve Jobs had glimpsed at Xerox PARC in 1979.
Under the hood sat a Motorola 68000 processor, memory protection, and a bundled office suite, genuinely advanced for its era. The problem was the price: a staggering $9,995, roughly $30,000 in today’s money. Few buyers could justify it, and third-party software was thin.
The Lisa flopped commercially and was discontinued within a few years. Yet its ideas did not die. The mouse, the windows, and the point-and-click desktop migrated into the cheaper Macintosh of 1984 and, eventually, into nearly every computer on Earth. The Lisa was Apple’s most influential failure.
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