The little-known Apple Lisa: Five quirks and oddities
Thirty years ago, Apple unveiled the Apple Lisa, a pioneering machine that introduced the mouse-driven graphical user interface to a wide audience and opened a new chapter in personal computer history.
The Mac borrowed heavily from the Lisa, and the Mac went on to great things while the Lisa floundered. As a result, it’s tempting to treat the Lisa as merely a footnote in the history of Apple. But as anyone who has used a real Lisa knows, Apple’s first GUI-based computer played host to many distinctive quirks and traits that tend to get overlooked in the history books.
The machine’s 30th anniversary is as good a time as any to take a look at a handful of both odd and useful features that truly made the Lisa something unique.
Extreme copy protection
At the factory, Apple assigned every Lisa a unique, unchangeable serial number permanently programmed into a chip on the motherboard. The first time you ran an application from a floppy or copied it to the Lisa’s hard disk, the machine “serialized” the application by writing its serial number to the application program. From then on, you could run the application only on that particular Lisa machine.
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