Apple Lisa, the prototype of Macintosh in 1983, was priced 9,995 USD, converted into today's currency it worth 21,745 USD.
In around 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, so he joined Macintosh project instead. Contrary to popular belief, the Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities betweeb the systens and the final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.
The Lisa was a more advanced (and far more expensive) system than the Macintosh of that time in many respects, such as its inclusion of protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2 MB of RAM, expansion slots, a numeric keypad, date corruption protection schemes such as block sparing, non-physical file names, and a larger high resolution display. It would be many years before many of those features were implemented on the Macintosh platform. Protected memory, for instance, did not arrive until the Mac OS X was released in 2001. The Macintosh, however, featured a faster 68000 processor (7.89 MHz) and sound. The complexity of the Lisa operating system and its programs taxed the 5 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor so that the system felt sluggish, particulary when scrolling in documents.
Just for fun, I found a picture from www.bytecellar.com comparing keyboard of today's iMac and a Lisa 2 keyboard.
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