The following tour of Lisa Office System 1.0 was created by Tom Stepleton , is published here with permission, and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

	A scene from the Lisa’s startup procedure. The Lisa tests its hardware similar to the POST of modern PCs. From left to right, the icons represent the CPU board, the two 512k memory boards, the I/O board, and any expansion cards in the three expansion slots.
	Hitting a key during the power on tests causes the Lisa to present the boot device menu. Here the user can choose from either of the two Twiggy drives, the ProFile external hard drive, or a drive attached to either of the two ports on this Lisa’s parallel port expansion card.
	The Lisa complains after I told it to boot from the second Twiggy drive when it contained no media.
	A rare sight: the Lisa Office System 1.0 splash screen. The cursive Lisa logo is composed of four characters in the Lisa bitmap system font. Note lower-case “apple computer inc.” from 1983.
	The Lisa Office System 1.0 desktop on my Lisa 1. Unfortunately, all of my Lisa 1 photos are poorly centered. No especially important information is missing, though. So, until otherwise noted, all screenshots come from version 1.0 of the Office System. Close observers will note how the Lisa’s pixels are not square: the aspect ratio is actually 3:2, allowing the screen bitmap to be smaller. The strange screen made Macintosh applications on the Macintosh XL look strange, and some XLs had a modification that enforced a square pixel ratio. This modification prevented the XL from running original Lisa software.
	The clipboard contains things you cut and copied from documents; on the Lisa, it was a desktop item.
	Opening up Preferences, we see these checkboxes at top. These checkboxes actually behave like radio buttons, which had a distinct look in the 1984 Macintosh GUI. In modern GUIs, they would be tabs in a tabbed pane.
	The Convenience Settings features more checkboxes that behave like radio buttons. In modern GUIs, they would be replaced by sliders, which were indeed present in the Macintosh in 1984.
	The Startup section features more checkboxes that behave like radio buttons.
	In Device Connections, we see that checkboxes that behave like radio buttons are general to the Preferences dialog. The second set of checkboxes, the one listing the various connectors on the system, would be replaced today by any number of modern widgets – perhaps a drop down menu or a scrolling list with selectable items would be the best choice. It’s curious that the Lisa thinks nothing’s connected to the parallel port – that’s where the ProFile hard drive is connected!
	The Lisa clock. All Lisas except the 2/10 had a pack of rechargeable NiCd batteries on the I/O board that ran the clock for a day or two when the Lisa was unplugged. Often these batteries leaked, ruining the I/O board and the motherboard as well. The batteries in this Lisa have long been removed for safety’s sake, so the clock must be set manually whenever the Lisa boots after losing power. Interestingly, the Lisa has a Y1.996K problem: it won’t accept dates beyond 31 December 1995. Was this a prescient, fatalistic design choice on the part of the Lisa engineers? Doubtful, but who knows? Note the rounded window with black title bar common to Lisa and Macintosh desk accessories.
	All Office System apps have the File/Print menu with these options. “Set Aside” is analogous to “minimize” (an icon appears on the desktop), while “Save and Put Away” is akin to quitting. There’s no way to quit without saving, although you can revert to an older version of the document first. Note how there are no “Open” or “Save As” menu items here: all file manipulations took place in the Desktop Manager, the Lisa equivalent of the Macintosh Finder or Windows Explorer. It’s doubtful that the clock ever really saved anything when you quit.
	Double-clicking on the icon at the top left of any application window made version 1.0 of the Office System ask you exactly how you wanted the window to go away. This alert box is one of two styles of dialog box seen in the Office System: note the question-mark-diamond icon indicating that it’s asking a question.
	A Twiggy disk is inserted in drive 1. Note the icon at bottom with the drive number – the two vertical slits about the spindle hole hint at how Twiggy diskettes differ from common 5.25” diskettes.
	The disk is opened and its contents are presented in list view. The Office System places very few restrictions on the names you can give to files: they can contain any character, be up to 255 (or was it 127?) characters long, and can even be the same as other filenames in the directory. The Office System used its own database for the filenames seen by the user and gave them more cryptic names in the actual filesystem, a method similar to UMSDOS from Linux’s early days, or Apple’s technique for long file names on MS-DOS filesystems circa System 7.x. As it happened, directories were a relatively late addition to the Lisa filesystem, turning up around the time of version 3 of the Office System.
	The Twiggy diskette eject button on the front bezel of the Lisa is similar to the eject button on a modern CD- or DVD-ROM drive. Instead of forcing out the disk, it alerts the Office System, which closes all open documents on the diskette and ejects it. If the diskette were inserted again, the once-opened documents would automatically open back up. Note the alert box with “Wait” triangle – it took a while for the Lisa to close everything up.
	An extra desktop picture, with a Twiggy diskette in Drive 2.
	Opening a LisaDraw document. It took a while for LisaDraw to load and present itself and the document, hence the blank window with the anthropomorphic message. Note the hourglass cursor, which differs from the Macintosh watch – it reappeared in Windows, albeit in perhaps in a more aesthetically pleasing form.
	LisaDraw is ready to go. There aren’t many drawings in this image, unfortunately, mostly text.
	LisaDraw had rulers. This dialog box let you customize them. Notice how unlike the alert boxes, it drops down from menu bar and occupies the entire screen width. It’s populated with checkboxes that behave like radio buttons. In a strange design choice, clicking outside of any Lisa dialog will result in a default button being pushed magically and the dialog disappearing. Usually the default button is clearly indicated, but here it is not.
	This dialog let you set the size of the drawing by dragging out the darkened area of the grid.
	The standard “Format for Printer...” dialog for Office System apps, comparable to the “Page Setup...” dialogs of today. Note how the radio button boxes change to reflect paper dimensions.
	The standard “Print...” dialog for Office System apps. Note how the Office System supported background printing, albeit at a noticeable performance penalty.
	This menu shows the fonts available to Office System apps. There were 11 in all, and each was of a fixed size. PS stands for “proportional spacing” – the rest were all fixed pitch. PS Modern and PS Executive are similar to 12pt Helvetica and 12pt Times.
	Line styles in Lisa Office System v1.0 LisaDraw.
	Textures in Lisa Office System v1.0 LisaDraw.
	After instructing LisaDraw to “Save and Put Away” this document, the Lisa puts up this dialog and saves for a while, then closes the application window.
	Here is a LisaDraw drawing with more graphical content.
	LisaWrite with a document containing notes for my 12th grade English class.
	The Find/Change to dialog, a drop-down dialog with scroll bars and a sizing button. All told, a clumsy-looking interface for search and replace, which was controlled by multiple menu commands in the Search menu.
	Plotting data in LisaGraph. This bar chart is one of several data views.
	A dialog for setting the Y-axis range in LisaGraph.
	A line graph data view in LisaGraph.
	A scatterplot data view in LisaGraph.
	A pie chart data view in LisaGraph.
	Creating a new LisaProject document. Since all file manipulation in the Office System is meant to happen in the Desktop Manager, none of the Lisa application (or, more properly, tool) menus have “New” entries for creating new files. Instead, you tore new documents off of stationery pads (here, the icons with names ending in “Paper”) by double-clicking on their icons. The blank document stationery pads here were supplied with the tools, and it was possible to delete them. Any document can be turned into a stationery pad by selecting an option in the File/Print menu. Note how the free disk space has decreased during this session – the Lisa is using the ProFile for virtual memory. Apple engineers were able to design an ad-hoc but successful MMU for the Motorola 68000, which worked as long as the software didn’t use certain 68000 instructions.
	The new LisaProject document. Our job is to fill in the tasks we have to do to get from start to finish (represented by boxes we draw), then detail what timeframes and resources are required by these tasks. LisaProject was developed as an internal utility for scheduling Lisa development at Apple. It was found to be so useful that Apple polished it and included it in the Lisa tools.
	We typed something into LisaProject without selecting anything to change. The Lisa reprimands us. Note the octagonal “Stop” icon.
	This LisaProject dialog allows us to set the timeframe for a task.
	This LisaProject dialog lets us specify the overall project calendar, along with several holidays. Specifying the same holidays again and again for a multi-year project must have been pretty tedious.
	This rather unclear LisaProject dialog turns on the display of important dates around the tasks.
	Here we specify how long certain resources are needed by the three LisaProject tasks.
	The LisaProject Resource Chart indicates when tasks have access to resources, indexed by resource.
	The LisaProject Task Chart indicates when tasks have access to resources, indexed by task.
	This LisaProject dialog lets us change the timescale of the Resource and Task Charts.
	Here we’ve zoomed the LisaProject Task Chart to fit entirely within the window.
	Just after I moved the LisaProject document from prior photos to the Wastebasket, the Lisa popped up a dialog box saying that it was deleting everything already lying around in the Wastebasket. In early versions of the Office System, the Wastebasket only held the last thing you threw into it – everything else was expunged automatically. Unfortunately, the dialog disappeared before I could get a photo of it. See two photos below for a clearer version of this image.
	In the Office System, new folders are generated the same way as new documents: the user rips them off of a folder stationery pad named “Empty Folders.” It may be possible to delete this stationery pad – I’ve been too wary about not getting it back to try. The dialog box went away before the exposure was completed.
	This is a clearer version of the action described two photos above – this time we’re putting a new folder into the Wastebasket. The LisaProject document from a while ago is now automatically deleted.
	A new, empty LisaCalc spreadsheet, ready for input.
	LisaCalc comes with a help dialog which is the largest dialog in the Office System. The entire screen is obscured, making the reference a bit cumbersome.
	LisaCalc works like most people would expect a simple spreadsheet to work. Formulae must be entered in a separate dialog box from cell values.
	This dialog box allows the user to specify fixed-point decimal numbers of a certain size in LisaCalc.
	This dialog box allows the user to specify a LisaCalc column width.
	Though it may not look like it, we’re now in a completely different application: LisaList, a simple database application. The first thing to do in a new document is specify the format of the database.
	The LisaList user can choose these data types for their database columns.
	LisaList now sets to work generating a new database to the user’s formatting specifications.
	LisaList presents the new database after finishing the formatting, ready for data entry.
	If you want to change the format of the columns in your LisaList database after you’ve made it, it’s possible to do so.
	LisaList warns the user that database format modifications could cause your database to change or lose data (though not overtly), advises backing up, and asks the user if they really want to go through with the change.
	Another way to modify your LisaList database is to add or remove columns. The interface for this is similar to the one seen during the initial database configuration.
	LisaList admonishes the user for invalid input.
	Our LisaList database now has some records.
	This interface is used to construct queries for extracting records from the LisaList database.
	A completed search of our LisaList database turns up a record. I apparently forgot to include more images of how queries are constructed, unfortunately.
	LisaList encourages the user to wait while it saves a document.
	Starting up the Calculator desk accessory – an unfortunately time-consuming task for even a small program like this one.
	The Calculator ready for user input at last. The Lisa Calculator was more fully featured than its Macintosh analog. Here it appears in reverse Polish (a.k.a. postfix) mode.
	It’s possible to customize numerical formatting in the Lisa Calculator.
	This menu shows several more ways to customize the Calculator, including different calculator styles and a virtual paper tape.
	Here the Calculator operates in traditional four function mode.
	Here the Calculator operates in adding machine mode.
	Here the Calculator appears with the registers and paper tape visible.
	The Lisa prepares to eject the Twiggy diskette.
	The Lisa puts everything away before turning itself off. The Lisa allows the user to arrest shutdown for a while – eventually, though, it proceeds past the point of no return. Lisa documentation advised users to leave the external ProFile hard drive on even when the Lisa was off. The noise would make this intolerable in my room, and in any case the manufacturer’s projected lifespan for the drive (MTBF) makes this seem like an unwise idea.
	It’s no longer possible to stop the Lisa from shutting down now, as this dialog box attests. Soon the Lisa switches itself off. Tom Stepleton