Despite the Lisa’s failure in the marketplace, it holds a key place
in the history of the GUI and PCs more generally as the first
GUI-based computer to be released by a personal computer company.
Though the Xerox Star 8010 beat the Lisa to market in 1981, the Star
was competing with other workstations from Apollo and Sun. Perhaps
more importantly, without the Lisa and its incorporation of the
PARC-inspired GUI, the Macintosh itself would not have been based on
the GUI. Both computers shared key technologies, such as the mouse
and the QuickDraw graphics library. The Lisa was a key steppingstone
to the Macintosh, and an important milestone in the history of
graphical user interfaces and personal computers more generally.