Apple ’s Lisa project might be the most affluent chapter in the society ’s traditional knowledge , and thanks to theComputer History Museum , you ’ll shortly be capable to play around with one of the first graphic exploiter interfaces in history right there on your shiny State Department of the art blind . And you wo n’t have to give $ 10,000 that the original Lisa information processing system cost in 1983 .

Al Kossow , a Software Curator at the museum , recentlyannouncedthat source code for Lisa ’s operating system and applications has been recovered and a spiritual rebirth of the code is presently under recap by Apple . He wrote that after the review is done , the museum will publish a schoolbook on the significance of the Lisa projection and make the computer code usable for all in 2018 .

In an incident that would sound off off a feud between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates , the Apple team visited the Xerox PARC lab to check out its work on graphic interfaces . Asthe narrative goes , Xerox had essentially figured out the key to the modern PC but sat on the technology . Apple was riding high on the winner of the Apple II and Jobs offer Xerox the option to bribe 100,000 part in his company at the pre - IPO price of $ 10 apiece in commutation for grant his railroad engineer to play around with Xerox ’s technical school for three Clarence Day . The technologist took what they learned from Xerox and created the Lisa .

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Lisa was a cutting - edge automobile and one of the first to provide consumers a GUI , computer mouse , and file system , but it was prohibitively expensive and did n’t catch on . align for inflation , it be almost$25,000at the metre . And while the Steve Jobs fable paints him as a marketing wizardry , check out thissleepy commercial for the Lisa star Kevin Costner . The message of the ad boils down to pay us 25 grand and you ’ll be so productive , you ’ll have time to rust breakfast . It ’s a far cry fromRidley Scott ’s clipfor the Macintosh that would blow the humans away one class later .

Walter Isaacson laterchronicledthe feud between Bill Gates and Jobs that would turn out when Microsoft moved forward with Windows . Jobs criminate Gates of steal from Apple , but Gates had visit the oeuvre at the Xerox PARC research lab as well . He told Isaacson that his reply to Jobs ’ fit was , “ I think it ’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I break into his house to steal the television set set and found out that you had already steal it . ”

Isaacson would also use the origin of the Lisa name as a way of humanize the often grievous Apple founder . The official explanation for the name was that it was an acronym for “ Local Integrated System Architecture , ” but Jobs later admit that it was named after his Old daughter Lisa Nicole Brennan . That narrative twist would go on to be put to particularly saccharin purpose in the picture show adjustment of Isaacson ’s biography .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

In the Apple story , Lisa ’s failure and intragroup tiff between Jobs and his handpicked CEO John Sculley go to Sculley bump off Jobs from the projection and put him on the Mac team . Though the Macintosh was a smasher , the fundament for Jobs ’ ejector from the company had already been pave .

anyway , that ’s some in effect background signal to have in mind when theComputer History Museumfinally releases the code for Lisa ’s OS next year . In the meantime , you’re able to bet around with abunch of emulatorsfrom the favorable years of the Macintosh collected by the Internet Archive . And watch another weird - ass commercial for the Lisa below .

[ Business Insider Singapore ]

William Duplessie

AppleBill GatesLisaOperating System

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