On April Fool's Day, 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released the Apple I computer and started Apple Computers. The Apple I was the first with a single circuit board used in a computer.
The first home computer with a GUI or graphical user interface was the Apple Lisa.
A GUI (pronounced GOO-ee) is a graphical user interface to a computer. Most of you are using one right now. Take a look at your computer screen, the GUI provides you with windows, pull-down menus, clickable buttons, scroll bars, icons, images and the mouse or pointer. The first user interfaces to computers were not graphical or visually oriented; they were all text and keyboard commands. MS-DOS is an example of a text and keyboard method of computer control that you can still find on many PCs today.
The very first graphical user interface was developed by the Xerox Corporation at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, but it was not until the 1980s when GUIs became widespread and popular. By that time the CPU power and monitors necessary for an effective GUI became cheap enough to use in home computers.
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers, visited PARC in 1979 (after buying Xerox stock) and was impressed by the "Alto", the first computer ever with a graphical user interface. Several PARC engineers were later hired by Apple and worked on the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.
The Apple research team contributed much in the way of originality in their first GUI computers, and work had already begun on the Lisa before Jobs visited PARC. Jobs was definitely inspired and influenced from the technology he saw at PARC. Although Apple spent an incredible amount of time and money developing the Lisa, four years and $50 million, it turned out to be an unpopular system, due to its high price and few available software applications. Additionally, it was rather slow, as the large and complex operating system was a huge burden on the 5MHz CPU.
Apple designed the memory bus to be shared between the central processor and the video circuitry. This cut its potential performance from 8 Mhz to an effective 4 Mhz, and possibly even less due to other design constraints.
In addition to the external 5 Megabyte "Profile" hard drive, the Lisa has two internal non-standard 871K 5-1/4 inch "Twiggy" floppy drives.
Unfortunately, the floppy drives were slow and unreliable. Because of this, after selling about 6,500 Lisa computers, Apple offered an upgrade path for Lisa owners, replacing the two "Twiggy" drives with a single 400K 3-1/2 inch Sony floppy drive. The new drive holds half as much data as the old one, but is much more reliable.
This new Lisa is refered to as the Lisa 2/5, with the "5" representing the external 5 Meg Profile drive. The Lisa can be run without any hard drive, using floppy disks only, but this is a slow and tedious method, and most applications won't even fit on a single floppy disk.
Apple also released the Lisa 2/10, with an internal 10 Meg "Widget" hard drive. The System I/O board was redesigned to support the new hard drive, and the parallel port was lost in the process. The external Profile HD can not be used with this system unless a parallel port expansion card is installed.
The upgrade from the original Lisa 1 to the Lisa 2/5 was free to Lisa owners until June 1984, after which it cost $595.
To upgrade from the Lisa 1 to the Lisa 2/10 cost $2495.
An additional 512K of RAM could be purchased for $1495.
About a year later, Apple again changed the Lisa. It would now be known as the Macintosh XL, and would run the Macintosh operating system instead of the original Lisa OS.
Sales did pick-up, but Apple discontinued the Lisa line with 100,000 units sold after 2 years. By this time, the popular (and cheaper) Macintosh line of computers was available, of which Apple sold 70,000 in the first 3 months.
The Lisa was a victim of politics as well as economics. With the advent of the portable, robot-manufactured Macintosh, the handmade desktop-sized Lisa became too costly to produce and was dropped from the Apple line.
The Lisa is very technician-friendly - once the back panel is removed, the entire electronics assembly slides out in one piece, and the circuit boards are easily removed from their sockets.
The power supply is just as easy to remove and replace, it is held in place by a single thumb-screw, and slides out with just a tug.
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