In 2018 the Computer History Museum will release the Apple Lisa operating system for free, as open source, reports Business Insider.
The Apple Lisa — one of the very first commercial computers with a graphical user interface — was a flop, selling only 100,000 units on a $150 million R&D investment on its release in January 1983. The Lisa, with its 5MB hard drive, sold for $9,995 —and remember, this was almost 35 years ago!
Though it flopped, the Lisa introduced a number of advanced features that would later appear in the Mac. Those features included the inclusion of protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2MB of RAM, expansion slots, and a larger higher resolution display.
