Apple Lisa: Still More to Uncover

As a software curator at the Computer History Museum, it is my job to be a content specialist in an insanely large knowledge space that I will never fully understand and to know at some high level what we have and don't have in the archives.

This work allows me to make intelligent decisions about what is being offered as historical donations and to proactively collect, filling in the gaps in the collection so that researchers have what they need to interpret the past. In this role, I was able to play a key part in collecting the Lisa source code and making it available to the public.

Software Curator Al Kossow with the Lisa. Kossow is the Robert N. Miner Software Curator and is responsible for collecting historical software and developing tools for reading and preserving CHM’s software artifacts.

The source code is a snapshot of an entire product, in its final form, first proposed in 1978 and shipped in 1983. The Lisa didn’t follow the usual path of Apple products. It was envisioned as a turnkey solution for business, something Apple had little experience in doing, and it was developed by management trained in the “HP Way.”

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