During the 1970s the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was an amazingly productive think-tank which conceptualized and created much of the technology that we are familiar with today. Things like the laser printer, for instance, originated at PARC. The Graphical User Interface was also first developed there.

In the early 1980s both Apple and Microsoft toured PARC and were inspired by the GUI technology they saw there. Xerox had produced the Alto and later the Star GUI based computers with little market success. Microsoft borrowed heavily from PARC to create the first version of Windows which was released to the general public late in 1983. Apple entered the GUI marketplace early in the same year with the original Apple Lisa.

Richard Harrington kindly donated these two Apple Lisa machines to my collection. Both are Lisa 2s with 3.5" floppy drives instead of the original Lisa "twiggy" 5.25" drives.

As you can see from the picture they are a little dirty. The one on the left boots to the screen looking for a disk but the screen image is distorted. The one on the right appears to be completely dead but it may just be having trouble with the case interlocks (the machines won't power with the cases open).

I'll be thoroughly cleaning and hopefully restoring at least one of these machines to full operation in the near future.