The first image is small and private: a farmhouse in Oregon, a young mother in labour, a man who comes and leaves. On May 17, 1978, Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a baby girl. The father, Steve Jobs, was not at the bedside. He flew in a few days later, helped choose the name from a baby book in a field, and left.
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The Apple computer that would later carry the same name was already being sketched in a garage at the edge of Silicon Valley.
The echo between the two Lisas — one flesh, one circuit — would not quiet for decades. It would ripple into boardrooms, brochures and courtrooms, and become a strange, public echo of something deeply private.
A MACHINE CALLED LISA
Around the same time, inside Apple, engineers were building something ambitious: a personal computer with a graphical desktop, icons, a mouse and software that felt like a small, friendly universe – it was the feel of the future. The project took the name Lisa.
While Chrisann and Lisa scraped by — welfare, cleaning houses, neighbours who helped out — the Lisa computer developed into the precursor of the ground-breaking Macintosh.
Publicly it stood for Local Integrated System Architecture. But everyone who knew the family’s history also knew the other name behind the project.
Jobs fed the project
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