Film maker [David Greelish] wrote in to let us know about his recent documentary: Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa.The documentary covers the life of the Apple Lisa. It starts with the genesis of the Lisa Project at Apple, covering its creation, then its marketing, and finally its cancellation. It then discusses the Apple Lisa after Apple, when it became a collectible. Finally the film examines the legacy of the Apple Lisa, today.The Apple Lisa was an important step on the journey to graphical user interfaces which was a paradigm that was shifting in the early 1980s, contemporary with the Macintosh and the work at Palo Alto. The mouse. Bitmapped graphics. Friendly error messages. These were the innovations of the day.Apple began work on the Lisa Project in October 1978 but most of its design goals changed after Steve Jobs and his team visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in November 1979. On January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa computer was released by Apple. Two years later it was re-branded as the “Macintosh XL” and was converted to run the Mac system software. Ultimately, on August 1, 1986, the Macintosh XL (Apple Lisa) was cancelled, so as to not interfere with Macintosh sales.But the Apple Lisa is not forgotten. These days they are collectibles which you can acquire for a few thousand dollars. They are considered a symbol and harbinger of the very significant shift to the graphical user interface which today is commonplace and perhaps even taken for granted.There is a fun anecdote in the film about what we know today as OK/Cancel. In fact with the Apple Lisa that was originally Do it/Cancel, but it turned out many people read “do it” as “doit”, so during usability testing the users were asking “what’s a doit?”If you’re interested in the old Apple Lisa be sure to check out LisaGUI which is a browser-based emulator you can use to see what it used to be like.