Inspired by Xerox's new idea, the GUI, the Apple Lisa was, in 1982-83, Apple's attempt at making a revolution in computers. High price doomed it to the fate of other early GUI-based machines like the Xerox Star, and the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 was its death knell.

This Lisa is, according to the Owner's guide, a Lisa 2/10. Underneath the hood is one megabyte of RAM, a 10mb hard drive (hence the 10 in 2/10), an 800k 3.5' floppy drive (replacing the original 400k), and a Motorola 68000 chip. The innards are of a modular construction: the motherboard and daughterboards come out from the cavity in a plastic "cage", turning a knob and pulling will take out the storage media devices and their controller (known as the "Lisa Widget Controller") in a metal rack, and another knob will pull out the power supply. All this is accomplished with little or no removal of wires.

Currently, this Lisa runs a special version of the Macintosh Operating System distributed by Sun Remarketing which makes it, except for sounds and the unorthodox keyboard, a fine (albeit slow) Mac. Plans are underway to restore the original operating system, the Lisa Office System 7/7.

The Lisa has a program in ROM known as Service Mode. For interested Lisa users out there, this is accessed by hitting any key during the power-on test, then in the Startup-From menu telling the Lisa to mount from a non-existent volume (like a floppy that isn't there). When you see the error-message, type Apple-S, and there you are. From there you can access a test pattern to adjust video, loop on any of the power-on tests, power-cycle, even read and write directly to RAM, then call memory addresses! The GUI and the front panel switches of lore meet here.