Steve Jobs on Lisa: Apple’s personal office system

The cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in out basket, the calculator. These are the tools of the office professionals past. Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful. But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsible for the look, shape, and feel of tomorrow, the decision makers. Until now, they have only been visitors to the information age. Today, there is a personal office system that presents the familiar environment of their desktop and combines it with the simple natural ways in which professionals do their work. Presenting, Lisa, a 16 bit dual disk drive personal office system from Apple Computer.

Lisa, integrated software with a common user interface. Lisa, the next revolution in computing. The breakthrough release of program is the software technology. The use of graphics to emulate the way an individual works in an office environment, and a software architecture that allows us to integrate the typical functions of a person's computer, word processing, modeling, business graphics, database management, and data com. Lisa began as the dream of key Apple executives, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and John Couch.

Then Apple had to build it. If you sort of dig beneath the surface, one of the real successes of the LISA program was creating an environment where all these crazy people that could really be very, very successful. And I guess that's one of things that Apple's done best. Engineer Rich Page pushed for the first critical decision, the selection of the 16 bit m c 68,000 as the CPU. Along with the 68,000, one of the things that you have is a larger address capability. So you're not limited to a smaller amount of memory. Lisa typically would have upwards of half a megabyte of memory. It was really the only chip that had a sufficient address space that we could write programs of this size and have an architecture that would last us over a period of at least a decade, which we felt was very important.

The power of the m c 68,000 permitted another breakthrough, the common user interface. On Lisa, we make each of the programs have a similar user interface so that what you've learned from using one program carries over and you feel naturally how to use the next. A key element in the common user interface is the mouse, an ingenious cursor positioning device that makes using the system as easy as point and press. In the design of LISA, we chose to use graphical menu items instead of word commands that you type in, because it's a lot easier to learn. Instead of remembering a whole long list of commands and remembering how to spell each correctly and all of those things, we just present a picture of a menu of options.

And to choose one, you just point at it with a mouse, and it's really easy to learn. Take, for example, a graphics editor. My 10 year old niece walked up to my machine and started playing with it. In five minutes, she knew how to use the graphics editor, she'd start off her picture and printed it out. That's what's so beautiful about Lisa is anybody can use it. Lisa is the only personal office system to offer word processing, electronic spreadsheet capabilities, business graphics, list management, complex scheduling, and graphics editing in one integrated software package. The bitmap display feature permits the user to choose a multitude of typefaces and fonts and to draw virtually any composition imaginable. An interactive tutorial program, Apple Guide, introduces the basic concepts necessary to use LISA.

Because LISA is such a revolutionary design concept, Apple built a special sneak room to preview Lisa to corporate executives. The reaction of the executives? An individual from one of the larger corporations, after having viewed Lisa, commented to me. You know, there's only been two revolutions in the computer industry. The transistor, the invention of integrated circuit, and I think I just saw the third. The design and construction of Lisa took more than two hundred man years of development, testing, and debugging. Hundreds of thousands of hours were dedicated to creating an office system that would incorporate the simplest and most natural interface ever developed. More than 30,000,000 Americans and millions more abroad work in offices.

Executives and managers in the accounting, marketing, financial, engineering, and planning professions are the prime targets of the Lisa marketing push. IBM, company The company company's company's company's world. Company is represents an extremely large and untapped market. Lisa is years ahead, setting the standards for the future of office software technology. Lisa will be the flagship of the Apple product line. The Apple two serves the needs of those who need a small home unit for work or personal use. The Apple three serves the small business marketplace.

Lisa will address the needs of the knowledge workers, the corporate executives, and professional personnel. You can describe Lisa verbally till you're blue in the face, and you won't have nearly the impact of letting somebody sit down and play with it. Once somebody sits down and plays with a Lisa, they're hooked. Lisa is by far and away the most ambitious technical undertaking that Apple's ever attempted, and it really is the most massive investment of dollars and human resources and really risk since we did the Apple two. With the Apple two, we had all of $1,300 to use. But I think what we've done is, again, really put all our chips back on the table and said, we're willing to bank the company on this, on what we believe is the future direction of personal computing. I think it's fair to say that everyone working on the LISA program and everyone outside of the program has seen the product wants one, at least one.

Lisa, Apple's demonstration of its leadership and bringing technology to the knowledge worker. Lisa, the personal office system of tomorrow.