Lisa was not the beginning of this graphical revolution. Many of the ideas in the Lisa were inspired by previous work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

PARC's innovations

• The Ethernet
• The laser printer
• The personal computer with a mouse and bit-mapped (pixel-based) graphics
• WYSIWYG editing of memos, email, illustrations, and animations
• Menu commands named Cut, Copy, and Paste
• Overlapped windows with scroll bars
• Multi-frame browsing windows

Some of the PARC work was first commercialized in the Xerox Star, a 1981 client-server system that anticipated the Sun workstation. Star workstations featured a two-button mouse. The user interface introduced many innovations, including desktop icons and property dialogs.

The Star directly influenced Microsoft Windows. As in Windows 1.0, windows on the Star were tiled instead of overlapped. Although the Star appeared too late to have much influence on the Lisa, its use of desktop icons put pressure on Apple to adopt an iconic desktop. The Lisa team had prototyped this desktop but had not planned to ship it.

Much of PARC's work was in turn inspired by prior research, especially that of Doug Engelbart, whose group at SRI developed the mouse, hypertext linking, shared teleconferencing, outline editors, and much more.