The source code of the 40-year-old Apple Lisa, one of the pioneers of the computer world, has been shared

On January 19, 1983, Apple marked a milestone in computing history by launching the innovative graphical user interface on personal computers with Lisa OS 3.1 on the Lisa computer. After 40 years, the Computer History Museum has shared the source code of the operating system Lisa OS 3.1 with Apple’s permission.

Apple’s best fail

Lisa Office System 3.1 and the Apple Lisa computer were actually completely commercial failures, but with the Macintosh that arrived less than a year later, this failure was covered up and a new era began. However, until we get there, we can say that the foundations were actually laid with Lisa OS 3.1. All of the historical Pascal source codes published by the Computer History Museum are approximately 26 MB in size. The package contains more than 1,300 source files nicely divided into subfolders that display the code for various applications, including Lisa OS, and the Lisa Toolkit development system.

Lisa laid the foundation for modern operating systems

The Apple Lisa remains an influential and important machine in Apple’s history, pioneering the mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI), which replaced it with the Macintosh a year later. Despite its innovations, Lisa’s high price ($9,995 at the time, $30,300 today) and very limited app support kept it from being a successful platform. Later, with the advent of the Macintosh, which was much more affordable and offered similar features with wide application support, Lisa computers came to an end and development of the platform was stopped in 1985. Two years after the Apple Lisa was released, it only sold 10,000 units.

The Lisa, on the other hand, was not the first commercial computer to ship with a GUI, as some have claimed in the past. Because this honor belongs to Xerox Star, which was released in 1981. On the other hand, Lisa OS 3.1 was the pioneer of the features we still use today. Besides drag-and-drop icons, Lisa offered basic functions we still use, such as trash, portable windows, copy-paste, multiple overlapping windows. Even one touch automatic system shutdown came with this OS. In short, we can say that Lisa OS was the macOS Ventura of its era, Windows 11.

If you want to download this historical work from 40 years ago and examine the source codes, I leave the download link here.