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Apple Macintosh Lisa - XL
The Apple Lisa was a personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple, Inc.) during the early 1980s.
The Lisa project was started at Apple in 1978 and evolved into a project to design a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that would be targeted toward business customers.
In 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, so he joined the Macintosh project instead. The Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between the systems and the final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL. |
| The Lisa was a more-advanced system than the Macintosh of that time in many respects, such as its inclusion of protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM, expansion slots, a numeric keypad, data corruption protection schemes such as block sparing, non-physical file names (with the ability to have multiple documents with the same name), and a larger higher-resolution display.
It would be many years before many of those features were implemented on the Macintosh platform. Protected memory, for instance, did not arrive until the Mac OS X operating system was released in 2001. The Macintosh featured a faster 68000 processor (7.89 MHz) and sound. The complexity of the Lisa operating system and its programs taxed the 5 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor so that consumers said it felt sluggish, particularly when scrolling in documents.
The Lisa was a major project at Apple, and with more than 90 people participated on the design, with more on the sales and marketing effort to launch the machine. The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II. Initial team lead Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved to the 'windows&mouse-driven' form that was finally released. Trip Hawkins, who was then on the marketing team for the nascent Lisa project, and Jef Raskin contributed to the change in design.
Byte magazine credited Wayne Rosing with being the most important person on the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became technical lead for the entire Lisa project. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, and Larry Tesler was in charge of system software. After a six-month period in which the user interface was designed, the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel.
Related Links : wikipedia.org - lowendmac.com |
