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Apple has a number of notable product failures, including the round mouse, eMate, Pippin, and Newton, among others. But none as famous as the one that bears the name of Steve Jobs’ first daughter, Lisa. If this computer line had been successful, it would be 40 years old today.
Apple began developing Lisa on July 30, 1979. The company officially stated that “Lisa” stood for “Locally Integrated Software Architecture.” However, it was a known secret that the computer was actually named after Steve Job’s daughter, Lisa Nicole Brennan (later Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs). But, since Jobs denied paternity at the time, the acronym was invented to obfuscate the origin of the name. Jobs only admitted the truth to his biographer Walter Isaacson shortly before his death, saying, “Obviously he was named after my daughter.”
Lisa stands out among early Apple computers as the first model to use a mouse and a graphical user interface. Steve Jobs was initially on the Lisa development team, but was soon ousted due to conflicts within the company. He then went on to head up teaching Macintosh development, which eventually led Lisa into sales and became the company’s flagship line of computers.
For her part, Lisa was not a bad machine. It not only pioneered concepts like the mouse and the GUI, but also featured a task-oriented workflow, a 5 MHz processor, and RAM expansion slots. However, it was very expensive. At launch, an Apple Lisa sold for $10,000, a hefty sum in 1983 that would translate to more than $30,000 today. It was also plagued with software glitches and performance issues that Apple later fixed.
In total, Apple invested $50 million in the development and marketing of Lisa. And when the company discontinued the line in 1986, only 10,000 Lisas had reached customers. In a sad coda to the Lisa saga, the company bought a landfill in Logan, Utah, to bury 10,000 unsold units in 1989.
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