Apple Lisa

The Apple Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple.

Why it Flopped

 * 1) Incredibly high price even for the time, at an initial price of US$9,995.
 * 2) Awful performance. Its slow CPU and resource heavy OS, called the Lisa Office System, causes it to run very slow.
 * 3) The operating system is prone to crash then restart under heavy load from large, complex spreadsheets, or graphs produced from them.
 * 4) Poor reliability for the Apple FileWare floppy disks, code named "Twiggy" after the English model of the same nickname.
 * 5) The external hard drive component takes a while to initialize before you can turn on the computer.
 * 6) Extremely limited program availability. Due to the fact that the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself, and thus a separate development OS, called Lisa Workshop, was required to develop programs, third party program availability did not go past a Unix offering for $495.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) It was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users.
 * 2) The operating system included with the Apple Lisa featured protected memory and a more document-oriented workflow. It also had cooperative multitasking, a feature that would not be added to the Macintosh System operating system until the MultiFinder extension was introduced on August 11, 1987.