“Apple-lisa-1” by Timothy Colegrove is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Today marks the 45th anniversary of a watershed moment in personal computing history – the day when Apple began work on an ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful product that would lay the foundations for the computers we know and love today. That product was the Apple Lisa.

On July 30th, 1979, just a few years after the launch of the revolutionary Apple II, a small skunkworks team started pursuing a radical new vision – a powerful, user-friendly computer for business markets driven by a pioneering graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse input device.

It was an enormously complex and expensive undertaking at the time.

The Road to Macintosh

Led by computer scientist Bill Atkinson, the Lisa team spent years toiling over software and hardware that pushed boundaries. They developed overlapping windows, menu bars, folders, icons and concepts like copy and paste that are ubiquitous today but were mind-boggling in the late 1970s.

When the Lisa finally went on sale in 1983 after years of delays, it was breathtakingly advanced for its era. However, its $9,995 price tag (over $28,000 today) created an insurmountable barrier for most consumers.

Only around 100,000 units were sold before the Lisa was discontinued three years later.

While a commercial failure, the Lisa’s audacious attempt to revolutionize the computing experience served as the launch pad for future developments at Apple. Many of the Lisa’s interface innovations migrated to Steve Jobs’ upstart Macintosh project in 1984 and filtered into mainstream computing.

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The Wrap

Apple publicly admitted the Lisa was a remarkable failure and an expensive bout of hubris. At one point, Jobs even infamously quipped it showed “amazing grotesque deformities.” Yet out of that daring failure emerged the blueprint for generations of intuitive, mouse-driven personal computers to come.

So while the Lisa never achieved mainstream success in 1983, we celebrate its legacy 45 years later as the first attempt to knock down barriers between humans and computers. The Lisa’s radical reinvention of the user experience paved the way for the Macintosh, Windows, and every other graphical OS that followed.

Go Deeper –> Today in Apple history: Apple launches ill-fated Lisa project – Cult of Mac