Apple Lisa Office System 3.x

The Lisa Office System was the operating system, graphical desktop, and office suite designed for and shipped with the Apple Lisa computer. It was Apple's first attempt at creating a fully graphical operating environment. This included a graphical desktop, drop down menus, common input controls, multiple windowed applications and data sharing between applications.

Applications included the LisaCalc spreadsheet, LisaDraw shape-based drawing, LisaGraph business graphing, LisaList database, LisaProject project planning, LisaWrite word processor, and LisaTerminal (In version 3) terminal emulator programs.

The Lisa heavily served a development platform. The office system was developed using a Pascal system using Apple's Lisa Pascal Workshop.

The Lisa was developed and sold prior to the Macintosh, but was a much more powerful and expensive system. Later, a compatibility layer called MacWorks enabled the Lisa to run the Macintosh MacOS. Lisa computers also could run a port of Microsoft Xenix.

This first version of the Lisa Office system shipped on Apple's proprietary Twiggy 5.25" floppy disks. Later versions were shipped on 3.5" disks similar to those used in the Macintosh.

Source code for the Lisa operating system has been made avaialble at the Computer History Museum

Screenshots

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Release notes

Screen shots courtesy of Toastytech.com