I have the main unit, keyboard and mouse.
type computer
country USA
year 1984
os Lisa OS
cpu Motorola MC 6800
speed 5 MHz
ram 512 KB
disk 3,5″ floppy drive 400 KB
graphic 12″ monitor 720×364 dots
colors monochrome
sound yes
ports 2 x RS232
The Apple Lisa 2 — Pioneer of the Graphical Interface
The Apple Lisa, released in January 1983, was the first commercial personal computer to feature a graphical user interface driven by a mouse — predating the Macintosh by nearly two years. The Lisa 2, released in January 1984, was a revised version that replaced the two 5.25-inch floppy drives of the original with a single 400 KB 3.5-inch Sony floppy drive and reduced the price from $9,995 to $3,495 — still extraordinarily expensive by 1984 standards, but a significant improvement.
The First GUI Computer
The Lisa’s interface — windows, icons, menus, and a pointer controlled by a mouse — was directly inspired by research at Xerox PARC, which Steve Jobs and a team of Apple engineers visited in 1979. But Apple dramatically extended and refined what they saw at PARC, creating a far more polished and practical system. The Lisa OS introduced features that would not appear in mainstream computing for years: drag-and-drop file management, a clipboard for copying between applications, and a trash can for deleting files.
Under the hood, the Lisa used a Motorola 68000 processor running at 5 MHz with 1 MB of RAM — generous specifications for 1983. Its hard drive option (5 MB in the original Lisa) made it capable of running the sophisticated Lisa Office System software, which included a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, project management tool, and database — a remarkably complete productivity suite for its time.
Commercial Failure, Historical Triumph
The Lisa was a commercial failure — its price was simply too high for the market, and software availability was limited. Apple discontinued it in 1985, famously burying unsold inventory in a Utah landfill. Yet historically the Lisa is enormously significant: it proved that graphical computing was viable and desirable, established the conceptual framework that all subsequent personal computers would follow, and laid the engineering groundwork for the Macintosh. Finding a Lisa 2 in a private collection today is a rare and remarkable thing — it is estimated that fewer than a few thousand survive worldwide, making the Computer Museum Ata’s example a genuinely precious historical artefact.