Apple Lisa Collected Papers

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This collection of papers attempts to provide both general and detailed information about the Apple Lisa computer’s software and hardware features. The Lisa development occurred from 1978 to 1984. Lisas were sold from 1983 to 1985 by Apple Computer.

This information attempts to show how the Lisa computer introduced several important features to the computing world. One of these features was the graphical windows- and icon-based user interface.

These papers also document the amount of effort that Apple Computer spent designing, building, and enhancing the Lisa software and hardware. This project was the largest project for Apple at that time.

Lisa’s design was user driven and not software or hardware driven. This means that during the Lisa’s design all of its features had to benefit the user and not necessarily the underlying software or hardware implementation. This was a very rare design methodology which as far as I know was only done previously at Xerox for its Star system.

From an outsider’s perspective, I am amazed at the amount of quality work that went into the Lisa over a relatively short period of time by a rather small group of software, hardware, and marketing people.

These papers were collected starting in 1984 when the collection’s compiler used a Lisa computer to develop Macintosh programs.

Enjoy.
David T Craig
September 2003

Table of contents is below. The forward/back links below the table of contents let you navigate page-by-page. Most documents are embedded PDFs. From the toolbar you can make the PDFs full screen, for easier reading. - Tom