The Apple Lisa was the home computer that introduced the graphical user interface (GUI) to the masses. Without this pivotal step in computing, we might have seen a very different desktop. Maybe we would never have seen a desktop at all. The concept of windows, files, folders, and navigating them with mouse input was what Lisa brought to the average computer user at a cost of $50 million in R&D to Apple.

Indeed, Apple was not the first to incorporate a GUI into a functional machine. It was Xerox's groundbreaking claim to fame, first appearing as the Xerox Star operating system and its accompanying computer. However, it was Apple's machine that introduced the concept to the world in a somewhat more affordable machine. Steve Jobs and a delegation of Apple engineers famously visited Xerox's PARC R&D campus and sniffed out the idea of this newfangled GUI that the company was working on, and Jobs decided to adopt it for the Lisa project that Apple was working on at the time

And then there was Apple.

Apple then began to create its own GUI and eventually introduced it on the Apple Lisa.

The Apple Lisa was released in 1983 for $9,995. This was a high price to cover what was effectively a workstation-grade home computer. It was a high price to cover virtually any workstation-grade home computer. And imagine, a top-of-the-line 12-inch screen. And it included a brave new concept that had been talked about in the back rooms of some labs since the 1960s: the computer mouse.

But even with these high-end features, Apple could not sell enough units to make the Lisa commercially viable.

Exactly one year after the Lisa's launch, Apple's upper management decided to lower the cost of entry by redesigning the machine to be more attractive, cutting RAM in half and replacing the Twiggy drive with Sony's reliable floppy disk drive. The new Lisa 2 sold for $3,495. But even then, it didn't make much sense in the long run. Shortly after the launch of the Lisa 2, the low-cost Macintosh was introduced, and the home computer became a huge success.

The Lisa and its big price tag soon became the ancient history version of computing.

We can still look back on the Lisa as an important piece of home computing history. The Computer History Museum (opens in new tab) is giving away all of the Lisa source code for free as part of its Art of Code series (via Digital Trends (opens in new tab)) to celebrate 40 years since the machine's first release.

It is 26 MB long.

Yes, computers back then were powered by the dreams and hopes of the free market and the California sun. In fact, Lisa's storage options were much more limited than the 26 MB needed today to bundle software into one small file.

Ultimately, the Apple Lisa was a failure, but it was quite influential. Without it, there would have been no Macintosh, and there would have been no competing PC product that started the PC game as we know it today. Sometimes it's important to celebrate failure. Because without them, no one would have found something better.

If you want to read about the history of the Apple Lisa, the Computer History Museum has a great blog post (opens in new tab). I've also been reading "Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation" (opens in new tab) for the past few weeks. It's a beautifully put together book about the earliest machines of home computing. The Apple Lisa details above are also excerpted from the book. If you are interested in the early days of home computing, I highly recommend checking out this book as well.