The Lisa Emulator Project

Ray Arachelian has developed a wonderful working Lisa Emulator that runs on PowerPC & Intel Macs as well as Windows and Linux systems. The Lisa was the original GUI workstation from Apple, predating the Macintosh by several years and utilizing many of the famous ideas developed at Xerox PARC. LisaEm runs very nicely on a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.7GHz tower (above) and gives a valuable glimpse into the early development of modern computing concepts. The Lisa was much more sophisticated than the early Mac, it's younger and more successful sibling; the Lisa Office System included LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaList, LisaProject, LisaTerminal and LisaWrite, along with hard drive support, stationary pad documents and preemptive multitasking. The Macintosh didn't get the latter capability until MacOSX, twenty years later! Click on the screenshots for larger versions.