In Pictures: The Apple family tree

Apple Lisa (1983 to 1985)

CPU class: Motorola 68K OS: Lisa OS, SCO Xenix Development status: Open Platform size: 2

The Apple Lisa met its ultimate genesis when Steve Jobs and a few other Apple employees took a stroll through Xerox PARC, a research and development center for the copier giant. There, they saw an advanced machine called the Alto which utilized a bitmapped graphical interface and a pointing device called a mouse.

Apple soon created its own bitmapped windowing platform, the Lisa, which became one of the first two commercial microcomputer systems equipped with a graphical user interface (GUI). Its high price ($10,000 when first launched ), slow speed, and troublesome proprietary floppy drives hobbled the platform out of the gate.