Historical Importance
The Apple Lisa was immediately recognized as a significant machine, with Byte for example opining it more important than the IBM PC. Further, though a limited number of Lisas were sold, the Lisa software, in combination with an Apple dot-matrix printer, could produce documents that surpassed other comparably priced options available at the time. This one compelling usage meant that the Lisa was introduced into a number of larger offices, and due to the price, the number of people who had used a Lisa was much larger than the number of Lisas sold.
An often-overlooked feature the Lisa system used is its early harnessing of document-centric computing instead of application-centric computing. On a Macintosh, Windows, or Linux system, a user typically seeks a program. In the Lisa system, users use stationery to begin using an application. Apple implemented stationery documents on System 7 in 1991 and attempted to further advance this approach on the Mac platform later with OpenDoc. Microsoft also later implemented stationery in a limited fashion via the Windows Start menu for Microsoft Office.
Read more about this topic: Apple Lisa
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or importance:
“Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than that something has occurred.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)