Introduced in January 1983, Lisa was Apple's first mouse-driven personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). It was a predecessor to the Macintosh line of computers that Apple subsequently released starting in 1984. Lisa was reportedly named after Jobs' first daughter who was born out of wedlock and whose existence he refused to publicly acknowledge at the time.

Designed to target individual business users, Apple began the Lisa project in 1978. At the time, Lisa featured such advanced capabilities as protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a sophisticated hard disk based OS, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM, expansion slots, a numeric keypad, data corruption protection schemes, support of multiple documents with the same name, and a larger higher-resolution display.

The subsequent Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are similarities between the two systems. The final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL. The Lisa was never commercially successful partly due to its high list price of $9,995.