Apple made the Lisa computer before the Mac was ever conceived, and it was a huge deal for apple, as it contained the original graphical user interface which has today become the foundation for operating systems including those on smartphones. People who were keen to test this out, had to source a working Lisa computer and then extract the software and run it on an emulator.
However, in 2018, things are about to get easier and free. The Computer History Museum will publish the source code of the Lisa computer for free in 2018, Apple has already given its nod for the release and is assisting and verifying the Lisa code for the museum.
The Lisa computer ran the Motorola 68000 processor which was the bran behind the processing powers of the operating system. While the computer itself was named after Steve Jobs’ eldest daughter, it was extremely expensive for the time it cost almost US$10,000 at the time and eventually ended up being a bust.
The OS remains an integral piece of computing history and the first mouse based user interface to be available on a personal computer. It was also the reason behind the big fight between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as Steve believed that Microsoft had stolen the lisa OS code for use in MS windows.
