24 Facts About Lisa OS

The hardware was more advanced overall than the forthcoming Macintosh 128K; the Lisa OS included hard disk drive support, capacity for up to 2 megabytes of random-access memory, expansion slots, and a larger, higher-resolution display.

Complexity of the Lisa OS operating system and its associated programs, as well as the ad hoc protected memory implementation, placed a high demand on the CPU and, to some extent, the storage system.

Newer Lisa OS models were eventually introduced to address its shortcomings but, even after lowering the list price considerably, the platform failed to achieve favorable sales numbers compared to the much less expensive Mac.

Privately, Hertzfeld and the other software developers used "Lisa OS: Invented Stupid Acronym", a recursive backronym, while computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit the Lisa OS's name.

The Lisa OS team put a great deal of work into making the graphical interface a mainstream commercial product.

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Jobs redefined Macintosh as a cheaper and more usable Lisa OS, leading the project in parallel and in secret, and substantially motivated to compete with the Lisa OS team.

Newer versions of the Lisa OS were introduced that addressed its faults and lowered its price considerably, but it failed to achieve favorable sales compared to the much less expensive Mac.

Lisa OS had been in development for such a long time that it was not initially developed for the 68000 and much of its development was done on a pre-chip form of the 68000, which was much slower than the shipping CPU.

Lisa OS software was primarily coded in Pascal to save development time, given the high complexity of the software.

Sophistication of the Lisa OS software, coupled with the slow speed of the CPU, RAM, lack of hardware graphics acceleration coprocessor, and protected memory implementation, led to the impression that the Lisa OS system was very slow.

Lisa OS was designed to use slower parity memory, and other features that reduced speed but increased stability and value.

Lisa OS is able to operate when RAM chips failed on its memory boards, unlike later Macintosh systems, reducing the cost to owners by enabling the usage of partially-failed boards.

Late in the product life of the Lisa OS, there were third-party hard disk drives, SCSI controllers, and double-sided 3.

The report that many Lisa OS machines were never sold and were disposed of by Apple is particularly interesting in light of Sculley's decision concerning the increased demand.

Unlike the first Macintosh, whose operating system could not utilize a hard disk in its first versions, the Lisa OS system was designed around a hard disk being present.

Conceptually, the Lisa OS resembles the Xerox Star in the sense that it was envisioned as an office computing system.

Consequently, Lisa OS has two main user modes: the Lisa OS Office System and the Workshop.

In 2018, the Computer History Museum announced it would be releasing the source code for Lisa OS, following a check by Apple to ensure this would not impact other intellectual property.

Significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa OS was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa OS Office System could not be used to write programs for itself.

Later, the same Lisa OS Workshop was used to develop software for the Macintosh.

For most of its lifetime, the Lisa OS never went beyond the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to "do everything", although UniPress Software did offer UNIX System III for $495.

Apple Lisa OS was a commercial failure for Apple, the largest since the failure of the Apple III of 1980.

The Lisa OS was designed to readily support multiple operating systems, making booting between them intuitive and convenient — something that has taken a very long time to achieve since Lisa OS, at least as a standard desktop OS feature.

Apple's culture of object-oriented programming on Lisa OS contributed to the 1988 conception of Pink, the first attempt to rearchitect the operating system of Macintosh.