This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1983 debut of Apple’s Lisa computer, the first commercially available personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI). In late 1979, Steve Jobs and a group of Apple engineers visited Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California. Jobs was impressed by the Xerox Alto computer (which had a mouse-driven GUI, windows and desktop). Many of the Alto’s interface elements were incorporated into the Lisa.
Given its high price ($9,995 – approximately $30,000 in 2023 dollars) and a variety of hardware and software issues, the Lisa was not a commercial success.
The remarkable impact of computer technology on our lives and culture in just a few decades is the result of progressive improvements in two major building blocks of computing – hardware and software. The evolution of computer hardware processing power is often linked to Moore’s Law: the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years while the cost is halved over the same time period. Computing hardware advances have resulted in powerful devices, with huge storage capacity and fast network access. Indeed, the ultimate expression of this computing hardware is the Internet itself, fulfilling the prophesy of John Gage of Sun Microsystems, who declared in 1984 that “the network is the computer”.
Hardware provides the physical platform upon which software (the instructions that tell computers what to do) performs its magic. Software is written using computer languages that contain instructions for the computer’s hardware in the form of a program. Until the 1950’s computer programs were written in ‘Machine Language’ – complex low-level hardware instructions that a computer would execute directly. In 1954 IBM developed FORTRAN, one of the first ‘high-level’ programming languages used for scientific computing. This was followed by the COBOL programming language in the early 1960s. Both of these languages used natural language elements that made computer programs easier to write, maintain and document.
In 1970, Niklaus Wirth (1934-2024) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology released the Pascal programming language. Pascal is a high-level, structured programming language that had a profound impact on computing, as it was used for much of the programming involved in the development of the Lisa and early Macintosh computers. Pascal also became the default programming language for teaching university computer science in the 1980s.
In 1976 Kenneth Bowles, a professor at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) developed a version of Pascal (UCSD Pascal) that could run on personal computers. In 1979 Apple released a version of UCSD Pascal for the Apple II computer, called Apple Pascal. The creation of Apple Pascal was heavily influenced by two Apple employees: Jef Raskin, who had taught computer science at UCSD and Bill Atkinson, who was a UCSD computer science graduate. In 1979 Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple (later taken over by Steve Jobs). Atkinson was a key member of the Macintosh development team and the author of QuickDraw, the core computer graphics code used to create the Lisa and Macintosh GUI.
Apple later developed Lisa Pascal, which was used to write much of the software powering the Lisa and Macintosh computers between 1979 and 1984. Apple’s Pascal was arguably one of the most powerful software development tools available for personal computers in the late 1970’s and early 1980s. Without Pascal it is unlikely either the Lisa or Macintosh could have been developed. Without the Macintosh, Apple would likely have slowly declined, as its Apple II-based products were overtaken by more powerful personal computers, such as the IBM PC. Without the Macintosh, there would likely have been no iPhone. Nor would Apple have become the first publicly traded U.S. company to be valued at over $2 trillion in 2023.
Henry Lowe 
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