Apple's Lisa pioneered the mouse-driven desktop and ended up in a Utah landfill
In 1989 Apple buried roughly 2,700 unsold Lisa computers in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, to claim a tax write-off. Six years earlier the Lisa had launched as the first mass-market computer run through a graphical interface of windows and a mouse, priced at $9,995.
Work began in 1978 as an attempt to modernise the Apple II, with a ten-person team in an office next to the Good Earth restaurant. Under John Couch it turned into a window-and-mouse machine. The decisive moment came in 1979, when Steve Jobs let Xerox buy Apple stock in return for two demonstrations at its Palo Alto Research Center, where the Lisa team saw the Alto's graphical desktop at work. Apple reportedly poured more than $50 million and over 90 designers into the project.
The finished Lisa, unveiled on 19 January 1983, ran a 5 MHz Motorola 68000 with 1 MB of memory, a 12-inch black-on-white screen, memory protection and a bundled office suite. Critics admired the ideas but not the execution. Its Twiggy floppy drives held about 871 kB each yet proved unreliable, outside software was scarce, cost-cutting slowed it down, and the price put it in workstation territory. Even the name got muddled: Apple said it stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture, while many assumed it honoured Jobs's daughter Lisa, born in 1978.
The Lisa's biggest problem came from inside Apple. After Jobs was pushed off the project, he took over Jef Raskin's Macintosh, originally a cheap text-based appliance, and reshaped it into a friendlier, far cheaper graphical machine on the same processor. The press was full of leaks about a baby Lisa before the original even shipped, and once the Mac arrived in January 1984 Lisa sales collapsed.
The Lisa 2 followed that same month at $3,495 to $5,495, swapping the Twiggy drives for a single Sony microfloppy, and software called MacWorks let it run Mac programs. Estimates of total sales range from 10,000 to 60,000. The last version became the Macintosh XL, and the whole line was dropped in 1986.
Source: Apple Lisa
