Although Lisa came and went almost in the blink of an eye, many of its features are still found in today's Windows PCs and Macintosh computers.

Lisa's Pioneering Features

• A menu bar with pull-down menus and identified keyboard shortcuts
• File menu commands named New, Open, Close, Save, Save as, and Print
• Windows and icons moved by pointing, clicking, and dragging
• Dialog boxes with radio buttons, check boxes, and OK/Cancel buttons
• Alert boxes to provide warnings and explain errors

Lisa innovations incorporated into the 1984 Macintosh included those listed above, plus:

Hardware

• The one-button mouse
• The ImageWriter WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") printer

User interface

• A menu bar spanning the top of the screen
• Windows that visually zoom when they open and close
• The appearance and layout of scroll bars and the window resize corner
• Rounded-corner buttons in dialogs

Application software

• LisaProject, the first such application that allowed the user to drag task boxes to change the schedule (became MacProject)
• LisaDraw (became MacDraw)
• LisaWrite (word-processing)
• LisaCalc (a spreadsheet)
• LisaGraph (a charting program)
• LisaTerminal (a Telnet-like program)
• LisaList (a simple data base program)
• The Lisa Desktop Manager influenced the design of the Macintosh Finder.
• Lisa's printing software heavily influenced the original Mac equivalent.