LisaProject

LisaProject is the first GUI-based project management software, conceived and programmed by Debra Willrett of SoloSoft for Apple's Lisa workstation.

In 1981, Willrett realized that project management was a universal problem and that a GUI-based application would be a useful tool. She proposed what became LisaProject to Trip Hawkins at Apple. At the time, Apple was developing the Apple Lisa computer which had limited software.

LisaProject is the first project management system to simplify the project management process by allowing the user to interactively draw their project on the computer in the form of a PERT chart. Constraints can be entered for each task, and the relationships between tasks show which ones must be completed before a task could begin. Given the task constraints and relationships, a critical path, schedule, and budget can be calculated dynamically using heuristic methods. The resulting schedule data can be viewed as a Gantt chart.

Although the Lisa ultimately failed in the marketplace, the largest installed base was NASA, which had used LisaProject. In response to the demand for LisaProject from NASA and other customers, a new version called MacProject was released with the first Macintosh in 1984.