Apple Lisa - Development

Development

The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II. Initial team lead Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved to the 'windows & mouse-driven' form that was finally released. Trip Hawkins, who was then on the marketing team for the nascent Lisa project, and Jef Raskin contributed to the change in design.

Several years prior to this, research had been going on at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center to create a new way to organize everything on the screen, today known as the desktop. Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979. He was excited by the revolutionary mouse-driven GUI of the Xerox Alto and was keen to use these ideas back at Apple. By late 1979, Jobs successfully negotiated with Xerox for his Lisa team to receive two demonstrations of ongoing research projects at Xerox PARC; when the Apple team saw the demonstration of the Alto computer they were able to see in action the basic elements of what constituted a workable GUI. A great deal of work was put into making the graphical interface into a mainstream commercial product by the Lisa team.

The Lisa was a major project at Apple, with more than 90 people participating on the design, plus more on the sales and marketing effort to launch the machine. Byte magazine credited Wayne Rosing with being the most important person on the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became technical lead for the entire Lisa project. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, and Larry Tesler was in charge of system software. After a six-month period in which the user interface was designed, the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel.