Microcomputer, Cupertino, CA, 1985, 475 x 350 x 372 mm, Model A6S0200, serial number A3321201, with built-in monitor, 800K 3 1/2-inch disk drive, built-in hard drive, Sun Remarketing I/O ROM chip on I/O board. With: A6MB101 keyboard; A2M2070 Mouse (Apple IIe); and with original box.

The Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 in order to foster new ideas in the digital realm. Alan Kay, one of the visionary computer scientists who worked there, had a vision for a personal computer, which he called the "Dynabook," that would be simple enough for even a child to use. The computer would trade the command lines and DOS prompts for a graphical user interface (GUI). Steve Jobs had already been working with a team to create a computer that would be many steps ahead of the competition thoroughly integrating graphics and text before he made a deal with Xerox during the summer of 1979 where he allowed them to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock in exchange for access to Xerox PARC's technology. At first, some of the Xerox PARC team resisted the instructions sent down from the head office and showed the Apple team very little, but eventually, after Jobs complained to the Xerox venture capital division, they were finally given full access.
"When Tesler (Xerox scientist Larry Tesler, who would eventually leave Xerox for Apple) finally showed them what was truly under the hood, the Apple folks were astonished. Atkinson (who would design the Apple Lisa's GUI including the revolutionary overlapping windows and later become a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team) stared at the screen, examining each pixel so closely that Tesler could feel the breath on his neck. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly. 'He was hopping around so much I don't know how he actually saw most of the demo, but he did, because he kept asking questions,' Tesler recalled. 'He was the exclamation point for every step I showed.' Jobs kept saying that he couldn't believe that Xerox had not commercialized the technology. 'You're sitting on a gold mine,' he shouted. 'I can't believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.' Jobs later recalled the event: 'It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be'" (Isaacson p 97).

Jobs closely guided the Lisa's development. The project was so personal that he named it after his own daughter even though the company officially stated that the name was an acronym for "Locally Integrated Software Architecture." He often rankled John Couch, who was supposed to oversee the project, by dealing with the engineers directly. He pushed for a white background rather than a dark one, a smooth rolling mouse that used a ball rather than the two wheels that the Xerox example utilized, and to make the computer simple and inexpensive. But Couch and several others were aiming for a corporate market and eventually Jobs was removed from the project.

The Apple Lisa was released in January of 1983. It was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface. Unfortunately, due to the high price ($9,995) and the unreliable "Twiggy" floppy disks, only 100,000 units were sold. A year later the Macintosh was released, also based on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor, but running at a faster speed and for a much lower price. Apple revised the Lisa and dropped the price. The Lisa 2 came first, released the same month as the Macintosh, January 1984, then the Lisa 2/5 and 2/10, both Lisa 2s with a bundled 5 or 10MB hard drive. With the success of the Macintosh, the Lisa 2/10 was rebranded the Macintosh XL and shipped with MacWorks XL, a Lisa program that allowed 64K Macintosh ROM emulation.

The Sun Remarketing company purchased Apple's back stock of Lisa 2/10s and upgraded them with an 800K floppy drive and their updated version of MacWorks XL, MacWorks Plus. They offered the machines through 1989 after which they reportedly had the remaining units sent to a landfill in Logan, Utah. Isaacson. Steve Jobs. NY: [2011].