The Lisa pioneered features that would define personal computing—overlapping windows, pull-down menus, icons—years before Windows became dominant. Its high price and sluggish performance doomed it commercially, selling only about 100,000 units, but its technology directly informed the much cheaper and more successful Macintosh, launched the following year.
Apple engineers had drawn direct inspiration from a 1979 visit to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where researchers had already built graphical interfaces and mice for the experimental Xerox Alto, technology Xerox itself never commercialized effectively. Steve Jobs, who led that visit, became obsessed with bringing these ideas to a mass-market machine.
The Lisa (officially standing for 'Local Integrated Software Architecture,' though many suspected it was named for Jobs's daughter Lisa) was astonishingly advanced for 1983: it multitasked, supported document-centric file management, and offered a suite of integrated office applications called LisaWrite and LisaCalc.
But at nearly $10,000—equivalent to roughly $30,000 today—and burdened by slow floppy disk drives, it flopped against cheaper rivals like the IBM PC. Apple later buried thousands of unsold Lisa units in a Utah landfill in 1989 rather than pay to service them, a strange, almost poetic end for a machine that quietly rewrote the rules of computer design.