The Lisa team decided to optimize their display for horizontal resolution, in order to be able to display 80 columns of text in an attractive font. The vertical resolution wasn't as important, because vertical scrolling works much better for text than horizontal scrolling. The designers decided to endow Lisa with twice as much horizontal resolution as vertical, using a 720 by 360 pixel display, with pixels that were twice as high as they were wide. This was great for text oriented applications like the word processor, but it made things somewhat awkward for the more graphical applications.
