July 31, 1982: Lisa Works for the First Time

The Mac's roots are often traced to Xerox PARC. The deepest roots undoubtably tap into the desktop metaphor Apple employees first saw on at the PARC demonstration but the biggest influence on the Mac was the Lisa.

The Lisa had a lot of problems, everything from the price to originally having Steve Jobs as a project manager. One of the larger issues with Lisa is that third party developers saw no need to program for the machine. Not only was the process tedious but the lisa shipped with a suite of programs that, many felt, were all the software a user would ever need.

The programs, which featured such modern givens as cutting and pasting between applications, first started working together on July 30, 1982.