Before the original Macintosh made history in 1984, there was the 1983 Apple Lisa, one of the first commercial personal computers to feature a graphical user interface (GUI) rather than a command-line prompt.Provided you had $9,995 to spare, that is.If you’ve always heard about it on podcasts but never played around with it, here’s your chance.
Never heard of it? Here’s a quick summary New Apple fans probably don’t know this story, and die-hard Apple fans are probably already pointing out corrections, but here’s the gist: the Apple Lisa’s GUI paradigm was famously… borrowed from Xerox, and that machine became one of the first commercial computers to present the user with a mouse, icons, and windows, rather than text-based commands.If this is news to you, you can find dozens of websites, podcasts, books and even movies dedicated to this saga, including the classic TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley from 1999, starring Noah Wyle (The Pitt, ER) as Steve Jobs, and Anthony Michael Hall (Foxcatcher, The Dark Knight) as Bill Gates.Here is Jobs himself on the GUI of it all: The point is, the Apple Lisa introduced a way to interact with computers that helped shape how we still use them today.
And now, thanks to a meticulous browser-based recreation, you can explore that early GUI design for yourself, no $9,995 required.Built by a Lisa 2/10 owner Here is LisaGUI developer Andrew Yaros, who actually owns a Lisa 2/10, presenting his project on (via ): One fun detail: to match its original display proportions, LisaGUI scales the interface to be 1.5x as tall as it is wide, so things may look a bit squished or stretched depending on your screen resolution.As Yaros explained on , this quirk helps the UI look closer to the real thing, especially on high-DPI displays.
Another fun detail: as old-timers will readily point out, dragging a window will show just the frame of the window, rather than the entire thing.That was due to limited processing power and memory bandwidth, as rendering the full contents in real time was just too demanding for the Lisa’s hardware.Alright, enough fun details.
Whether you’ve ever wanted to see what Apple’s early desktop vision looked like or want to remember the good old times, this is one is worth clicking through.iPad deals on Amazon iPad 11-inch (A16), 128GB: was $349, now $279,99 iPad Air 11-inch (M3), 128GB: was $599, now $479 iPad Air 13-inch (M3), 128GB: was $799, now $679 iPad Pro 11-inch (M4), 256GB: was $999, now $899 You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day.Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop.
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