I had the rare experience of being one of the few people who ever got to use an Apple 'Lisa' computer back in the early 80's. I made one of the first sales calls that our company (McDonnell Douglas) made at Apple to sell them our CAD/CAE/CAM software system. This was when their main product was the Apple II. I remember visiting their offices, which at the time was in a series of 'spec-built' one-story industrial buildings in Silicon Valley. It's also when you could look at an employees ID badge and by reading the number on it you would know in what order they had been hired and so if you were dealing with someone with only a single or double digit number, you knew that you were dealing one of the real Apple pioneers.
Anyway, while they were looking at our software they loaned us an Apple 'Lisa' so that we could give them some feedback and we had it our San Jose office for a couple of months and several times I was up there and got to 'play' with it. It was the first computer with a true 'graphical' interface and was so unique that most of us sort of missed the notion that what we were seeing was truly a paradigm shift in the making. Of course the 'Lisa' was never a success, but it did let the world see what was coming.
Here is what the 'Lisa' looked like:
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