The following tour of Lisa Office System 3.1 was created by Tom Stepleton , is published here with permission, and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

	Now version 3.1 of the Office System on the Lisa 2. Unless otherwise mentioned, the following screenshots come from version 3.1 of the Office System. Comparable to a boot-up menu on a modern computer that lets you choose which operating system you want, the Environments window actually comes after the underlying Lisa OS is loaded and lets the user choose which “shell” in modern parlance to run on top of it. The Office System is one shell, but the Workshop development suites were shells also. Users could create their own shells with the Workshops far more easily than they could create software that integrated with the Office System.
	Starting version 3.1 of the Office System from the Environments Window.
	The Lisa Office System 3.1 splash screen. Note incorrect version number 3.0, the 1984 copyright date, and the cryptic 7/7 name as well.
	Here is the desktop. Noticeable are changes in the spacing of the Lisa system font, the addition of the LisaTerminal terminal application, the updated Preferences icon, and changed menus.
	The Office System now has a “Get Info...” like function for files. There isn’t much to say about the Wastebasket, though.
	The information window for the internal Widget disk is a little more informative. Information windows for files allow passwords to be specified for individual files, though it is doubtful that any encryption is used for file protection.
	This dialog allows you to monitor printing activity.
	Starting the Calculator on Office System 3.1. Note that the anthropomorphic wait message has been made less so, and less specific.
	Otherwise, the Calculator hasn’t changed much. Here it is with all the options turned on.
	The Preferences window in Office System 3.1. We now have two extra options that let us manage device drivers.
	“Set Conveniences” (nee “Convenience Settings”) looks essentially the same as ever.
	“Select Defaults” extends the options available in “Startup” from the 1.0 preference panels, presenting a default printer choice in addition to the startup disk. We also now have the option of specifying the rigor of the power on memory test.
	“Connect Devices” is the new name for “Device Connections.” We have a few more device options in 3.1, including the rare external 80 MB Priam Disk.
	When we try to add a new device driver with “Install Device Software,” we learn that a driver disk has to be in the floppy drive. Note the square “NOTE” symbol in this alert box – sometimes the symbols have all-caps text, sometimes not.
	In “Remove Device Software” we can remove device drivers. The Preferences panel tastefully notes which device software is presently being used. I haven’t been bold enough to try removing one of these device drivers yet.
	A screenshot from LisaTerminal. The text in this terminal session comes from a summer evening over five years ago, when I connected the Lisa to my Linux box over a null modem cable. There never was an aphelion.wustl.edu, but the PC did connect to the Internet through a Washington University dialup. Browsing through this file and seeing my silly issue and MOTD banners (already years old in 1997) was a real blast from the past!
	Another LisaTerminal screenshot, scrolling through the remnants of an ancient (August 1997) login. Here I began a telnet session (remember when that was OK?) from my home computer to galena.tjs.org, the erstwhile host of the Apple Lisa Web Page. In 1997, galena was a relic itself, a 25 MHz 386DX with 8 MB of RAM.
	LisaTerminal with the tab ruler enabled. I believe setting the proper tabs allowed the Office System to take tabular data from LisaTerminal and insert it into LisaList and LisaProject. This interoperability was not nearly so present in the original Office System, and the “7/7” name for the 3.1 Office System reflects this improvement (after all, 7/7 = 1).
	LisaTerminal with the column ruler enabled.
	LisaTerminal communications settings dialog box. Once again we have dozens of radio buttons – the drop-down menu didn’t exist on the Lisa.
	Another LisaTerminal dialog box allowed configuration of common terminal options.
	I’m afraid I don’t recall what this LisaTerminal dialog box was for – it may have had something to do with the four keyboard LEDs on VT100 terminals.
	This LisaTerminal dialog box allowed the user to specify which two character sets were accessible for use in the current session. There were many more to choose from, but only two could be used in any session.
	This LisaTerminal dialog box allowed the user to specify the answerback message, which (I believe) would be relayed back to the host whenever the host sent it a certain escape sequence.
	LisaWrite in Office System 3.1, and notes I took on a book I read in 1998 for calculus extra credit.
	Somewhere between Office System 1.0 and 3.1, LisaWrite got a spellchecker – a useful addition! Despite the Houghton Mifflin name, there are many words that the spellchecker just doesn’t know – fortunately, it can be taught new vocabulary.
	The LisaWrite spellchecker correctly identifies the goofed word “aritmatic.” Unfortunately, it isn’t very good at guessing what you meant to say. Note the alert box with the square “Note” symbol, now with lower-case letters.
	The LisaWrite spellchecker has guesses about what I mean by “Plato,” but I really do mean Plato. This interface is pretty standard for most spellcheckers, but in 1984 lots of word processing software had them. In fact, it was a bit surprising in 1983 that the $10,000 Lisa 1 didn’t have one.
	The font choices changed from Office System 1.0 to 3.1. Now, instead of a menu showing a collection of faces with fixed sizes, there are the Modern and Classic faces and a choice of eight sizes. Those with Pitch values are fixed-width. Despite this new schema, fonts with the same name and different sizes in 3.1 still seem to be different fonts: 24 point Modern looks a lot like Helvetica (note c and R letterforms) while 12 point Modern looks similar (but not identical) to Eurostyle. This difference is more pronounced on printed documents.
	The search functionality in 3.1 LisaWrite isn’t much different from 1.0.
	The Desk menu in Office System 3.1 makes switching between windows a lot faster and easier than the only way to do it in 1.0: iconifying your window (“Set Aside” in Lisa parlance) and selecting your new item of interest. This menu is more similar to the taskbar in Windows than it is to the applications menu in classic Mac OS.
	LisaDraw in 3.1 has a few more features, including the ability to attribute colors to shapes. You can’t see them on the Lisa’s display, but the underlying QuickDraw graphics system did support them (16 of them!), and you could print them out exclusively on an expensive Canon inkjet printer.
	LisaDraw in 3.1 has rulers, and you can (unsurprisingly) configure them.
	You can also change the size of the LisaDraw document, as you could in the first version.
	This LisaDraw dialog box lets you change how rounded your rounded rectangles are. I seem to recall that Quickdraw is more configurable than the choices here let on – once again, the lack of sophisticated widgets in the Office System constrain functionality.
	LisaGraph has more graphing options in Office System 3.1.
	A 3.1 LisaGraph chart.
	A 3.1 LisaGraph chart.
	A 3.1 LisaGraph chart.
	This alert box is shown if you choose “Revert to Previous Version” from the File/Print menu. Usually the triangle “Caution” symbol appears only in informative alerts (i.e. only an “OK” button) but here we see it along with a choice for the user (instead of the diamond question mark symbol).
	LisaGraph reverts to a saved version of this document.
	The LisaCalc spreadsheet at work on a precalculus assignment from 1997.
	This LisaCalc dialog lets the user find cells with certain attributes.
	Here is the Office System 3.1 version of the LisaCalc help dialog. Now with expanded information, it requires a scrollbar, and is happily resizeable.
	The LisaCalc find dialog. This one more closely resembles find dialogs in modern applications than the LisaWrite find dialog.
	3.1 LisaCalc has a handy “For your information...” dialog box that conveys information about the size of the document.
	In addition to the standard “Format for Printer...” dialog, LisaCalc also has this dialog which permits further configuration.
	LisaList in Office System 3.1. This document is an example document that comes with the software.
	A LisaList “database query” consisting of a search for “Central” in the “Sales Region” field.
	Apple example documents came as stationery pads. Here we tear off a copy of the LisaProject example document.
	LisaProject in Office System 3.1., looking at the example document that came with the software. This is the Schedule chart for this document.
	The 3.1 LisaProject Calendar dialog now has support for more holidays.
	The Resource chart for this LisaProject document.
	The Task chart for this LisaProject document.
	This LisaProject table allows you to specify costs for listed resources.
	This LisaProject table allows you to specify costs for listed tasks.
	This LisaProject table allows you to monitor cash flow, I think.
	This LisaProject table seems to present all the data in the document in a textual form.
	This LisaProject dialog box lets you indicate how many days are remaining in a task.
	Holding down Apple and pressing the power button shut down the Office System and took the user to the Environments window (see top of the page).
	Since this Lisa has an internal hard drive, it doesn’t have to warn us about shutting down an external hard drive prematurely while it prepares to turn itself off. Note the zooming boxes from the hard drive contents window closing itself.
	The Lisa is just about to turn itself off. Unfortunately, in this series of screenshots, I wasn’t able to capture the startling screen flash, POP! and vertical white line generated by the CRT as the computer powers down. Tastefully, before these fireworks, the Lisa smoothly fades the screen to black. Tom Stepleton