On July 30, 1979, a group of Apple engineers began work on Lisa, which would become the first computer in Cupertino with a graphical interface and a mouse. Yet it is remembered as the first Steve Jobs flop.
The idea was to hit the market in the spring of 1981 with a more professional $ 2,000 personal computer than the Apple II. But then Steve Jobs, in a famous Silicon Valley laboratory, Xerox Park, had seen a graphical user interface and had changed the project on the run. Lisa would be a personal computer for everyone. But things did not go like this: Lisa arrived on the market two years late and at a prohibitive price, almost ten thousand dollars at the time (over twenty thousand today). The launch campaign was entrusted to a commercial where a very young Kevin Costner played the part of a Lisa owner. It wasn’t enough.
Dak 1984 instead of the Lisa on the market there was the first Macintosh and the Lisa continued to be talked about only because of the name. Why was it called that? Was it because of the daughter, born in May 1978, whom Steve Jobs didn’t recognize? He denied that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, an answer so unlikely that some jokingly said Lisa stood for Let’s Invent Some Acronym. But many years later, answering reporter Walter Isaacson’s question for his biography, Jobs will say, “Of course I called him Lisa for my daughter.”
After a long and objectively unpleasant dispute, Lisa was then recognized by her father, today her name is Lisa Brennan-Jobs and she is an American writer
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