The Lisa, Apple’s first machine for business professionals, released in 1983. Photo: Wikipedia. The Lisa, at an Apple convention in Boston, 1983. Tweed is still in. Photo: Wikipedia. A screenshot of the Lisa desktop. Image: Wikipedia. The Lisa 2, a later version of the machine. Photo: Rama & Musée Bolo/Wikipedia.

You think the brand new cylindrical Mac Pro is a leap into the future? It's got nothing on the Lisa, Apple's very first graphics-oriented machine for business professionals, released three decades before its Mac Pro descendent.

So many people remember the original Mac, which made its Super Bowl-hyped debut in 1984. But it's so easy to forget that the Mac was preceded by another machine with a graphical user interface, an earlier outgrowth of the now mythical work done at the Xerox PARC research lab Steve Jobs visited in 1979.

Packed with a suite of custom-made Apple software, the Lisa was designed to help office drones cut through the monotony and tediousness of building graphs and presentations, writing memos, crunching data, and balancing budgets. And it succeeded – at least according to the bushy-haired, mustachioed character who showed off the machine in Apple's promotional video (see below).

As the video begins, this early-'80s Tom Selleck doppelganger – meant to be your average business manager – has just finished a corporate presentation, and a colleague is praising him for a job well done. He stops, quickly looks around, and closes in on her, set to reveal his secret sauce for success. Did he rely on a slew of workers to get the project done for him? Pshaw. He owes his success to the Lisa. He got the whole thing done "just this morning."

"A personal computer did all of that?" says his colleague. "Incredible!"

>'Oh, I've had other computers. But my Lisa is different'

As she walks away, wishing she had a Lisa of her own, some sort of 1980s techno-beat begins to play in the background, and Mr. Mustache parades through the office, reciting a laundry list of tasks Lisa helped him finish in record time. "What's so special about Lisa?" he asks, pausing to pour himself a cup of joe. "Oh, I've had other computers. But my Lisa is different." How so? He'll show you – in due time. This wouldn't be an Apple promotion without a little suspense.

Our nameless manager takes you to his office, where Lisa is finally unveiled. He sits down, points at the machine's "special" screen and says, in a soft, soothing tone: "You see what I mean about the screen? It's very graphical."

Dubbed the desktop manager, the screen was designed to resemble a physical work environment, complete with folders to store documents and a wastebasket for chucking files, just like you'd find in a real office. But the trick is that it's all digital, and you can control it with a "unique item" called a mouse.

Want to transform an ugly line graph into a beautiful pie chart? Fix your deficit by cutting down on employee expenses? Move text from one file to another using a digital clipboard? Presto! “The transformation occurs almost instantly,” he says. “Amazing how much can be done so quickly.”

To be sure, Lisa's desktop manager was one of Apple's great innovations. In a 1983 BYTE magazine article about the Lisa, writer Gregg Williams said the machine's "data-as-concrete-object [metaphor] demystifies the computer by transforming data into physical objects that behave in a predictable and reasonable way." But let's not give the company too much credit. The mouse and the graphical user interface had been in use at PARC for years, and they date all the way to the late-'60s, when a team of computer scientists at the Stanford Research Institute, led by a man named Douglas Engelbart, developed something called NLS, short for oNLine System.

What we can say is that Apple took these ideas to the next level. All six of Lisa's software tools – LisaWrite, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaCalc, LisaProject, LisaList – were integrated together, so you only had to learn one set of skills that translated from one program to the next. That made Lisa much easier to use than previous systems. One of its signature functions was "Undo Last Change," which BYTE called a "tremendous security blanket that enables you to experiment and work without worrying about making an irrevocable mistake."

Lisa could also connect to other computers via a networking tool called AppleNet – drawing on yet more work done at Xerox PARC. But for all its technological savvy, it flopped. In a big way. At $10,000 – $23,500 in today's money – Lisa was too expensive for the average business.

That said, Lisa's legacy extends well beyond an incredibly cheesy promotional video. Her influence is apparent in the original Mac – a cheaper, smaller machine with a mouse and a graphical user interface – not to mention other future Apple products.

Lisa – officially short for local integrated systems architecture – was also named after Steve Jobs' illegitimate daughter. Internally, Apple employees mocked the reverse engineered name, dubbing it "Lisa: invented stupid acronym." Thirty years layer, it's easy to mock the rest of it – especially after watching this video. But it was indeed a leap into the future.