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WTB: Working Apple Lisa

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Let's just say I'm disappointed in that NOTHING happened in the past year with the Lisa source release I
spent way too much time and effort on.

Most of the machines showing up are way too expensive given the high probability of battery damage.

The main activity the last couple of years on Macs have been people cloning logic boards to deal with
capacitor and battery leakage.

There is the cloning of the Lisa board set as well. I can't imagine that was less expensive than finding
a board set, given things like the I/O expansion ZIF connectors on the backplane are unobtainium.
 
The Lisa is one of my favourite computers. It is, in virtually every respect, fantastically overdesigned. This makes careful study of the machine quite enjoyable to me.

Note careful addition of "to me" there. Everyone has their own unique taste. You like what you like, and if you need to have a wide range of 3rd-party applications or games, then the Lisa is probably not for you. The price is also prohibitive. Both of these observations have been made very well on this thread. I am glad I bought my Lisas over 25 years ago.

If I won the lottery tomorrow and if perhaps there were two of me, here are some of the things I'd (we'd) do with my Lisas. Yes, you can do many things like these with other computers. That's not the point.
  1. Explore the capabilities of the floppy disk subsystem on the Lisa (especially the Lisa 1). Study the I/O ROM. Make use of the ability to execute arbitrary code on the 6504 I/O processor: perhaps you can read old Twiggy disks more robustly than even low-level tools like BLU can do.
  2. Try to make the most compact possible RAM board for the Lisa. You ought to be able to design something that barely rises out of the slot! (Add pull tabs to make sure you can get the board out!) What if you used a non-volatile RAM like FRAM --- does that even make sense? (I'd like to learn more about FRAM.)
  3. Finally complete my investigation of AppleNet, the network adaptor for Lisa that never saw the light of day. Find a way to establish an AppleNet network between my two machines --- and maybe a RasPi or something.
  4. Write a Lisa device driver that simplifies interfacing with modern storage systems: wouldn't it be nice to have a networked drive? Maybe with some additional custom hardware you could get Lisa on FujiNet.
  5. Hack the Pascal Monitor so it can boot off of a ProFile hard drive. Make a ProFile disk image with Smalltalk installed so that you don't have to run it off of Twiggies.
  6. (the big one) Write a complicated application that makes use of the Lisa ToolKit. We have all the documentation and software we need for this, and I don't think anyone's tried it. The Lisa Office System clearly needs its own PowerPoint :)
  7. Really study the OS and application source code.
  8. Use the system as a subject for really learning electronics in detail.
  9. Expand my lisa_io library to support things like the serial port and the floppy.
The first three items are things you definitely need hardware for. Emulation is still not perfect, so some of the others could require hardware too. I'm not sure that LisaEm can run the compiler and linker in the workshop these days, but it's been ages since I've tried.

I dispute that the Lisa did "little" when it was a contemporary machine. There's the graphical office suite which we know, but there were also two or three flavours of UNIX, it was the initial development host for all Macintosh programming, and there were a variety of custom in-house applications that took advantage of the Lisa's bitmap display to do all sorts of things like make the BBC's weather maps. Xenix shipped with a document processing system among other applications. Speaking of document processing, Compugraphic made a desktop publishing system for the machine, complete with laser printer. We know too that NASA loved the Lisa for project planning, and according to that page NASA was Lisa's largest install base. Finally, you can't really say that MacWorks doesn't count: the whole capability that made the Macintosh XL possible owes to the ambitious (over)design of the system, specifically its MMU. Is this really the story of a "useless" machine?

I think @3lectr1c has some very good reasons why there isn't a lot of development in the Lisa world. Scarcity is another obvious reason, but I'd also add complexity. You need to study if you're going to write Lisa software that runs on the Office System. It's not really a system where you can memorise the memory map and learn a few of the tricks and crank out a cool app in relatively short order. I think this is a factor in recreational Mac development too, as it must be for Windows 2.x. As it probably is for Amiga (dunno, haven't tried it), but there as @3lectr1c notes you do have the graphics and sound payoff. There's a reason my most substantial Lisa applications are assembly programs that run on the bare metal: it's much easier that way. (Update: looks like @werdna beat me to the post button :) !)

But sure, if you're not really interested in the machine itself as an object of study, and if you can do nothing else but wait around for someone to write an application that you personally find interesting, then the Lisa is liable to remain USELESS!!!1!!1 to you for a while to come. I don't plan to retire for a while yet!
 
werdna said:
The source code release might make that easier in the future if people can figure out a way to compile the code on a modern machine
Click to expand...
you really need something like a Priam Datatower (ie more disk space) to build LOS
the tools are all there in the Version 3 Pascal Workshop.
 
Al Kossow said:
Let's just say I'm disappointed in that NOTHING happened in the past year with the Lisa source release I
spent way too much time and effort on.
Click to expand...
There is still time. For me, Lisa projects tend to last half a decade or more, and that's not counting the years they sit rolling round in my head. Even right now I ought to be working on something else instead of posting here --- like, work stuff!
 
stepleton said:
But sure, if you're not really interested in the machine itself as an object of study, and if you can do nothing else but wait around for someone to write an application that you personally find interesting, then the Lisa is liable to remain USELESS!!!1!!1 to you for a while to come. I don't plan to retire for a while yet!
Click to expand...

As I mentioned in the blog post that went out with the sources, when I was inside Apple working on replacements for the original MacOS, I really wanted to understand how the Lisa OS was put together but it was impossible to get access to the source code. It took 30 years before I could do that.
 
stepleton said:
Try to make the most compact possible RAM board for the Lisa. You ought to be able to design something that barely rises out of the slot! (Add pull tabs to make sure you can get the board out!) What if you used a non-volatile RAM like FRAM --- does that even make sense? (I'd like to learn more about FRAM.)
Click to expand...
If I was a hardware designer, this is absolutely what I'd do. I can't for the life of me find a 2MB board for my Lisa right now and I've been kicking myself for not getting one while VintageMicros still had them. I'm just not prepared or skilled enough to literally desoder all the RAM chips off one of my 512K boards to do a Rambo mod! This idea is the kind of SCSI2SD-esque type of product that the Lisa really needs more of. Little tiny boards built with modern parts and techniques which replicate the functionality of an original board.

I know some out there are purists and I'm not bashing that at all, but personally, as long as the machine runs the original software and from a external perspective has the look and feel of an old computer, I don't care if it's running original parts, modern recreations, emulated hardware on an FPGA, adapted alien technology from Area 51, etc... I just want the damn thing to work and not fail on me at an arbitrary time in the future because of some 40 year old part breaking on me! (And yes, I'm aware the RAM boards in particular are designed with protections against a single chip failing!)
 
stepleton said:
But sure, if you're not really interested in the machine itself as an object of study, and if you can do nothing else but wait around for someone to write an application that you personally find interesting, then the Lisa is liable to remain USELESS!!!1!!1 to you for a while to come. I don't plan to retire for a while yet!
Click to expand...
My joy comes from opening up and fixing these beasts. Like I said its well built. But in truth lesser machines, much much lesser machines (zx spectrum for instance) did so much more with so much less and its a machine that appealed to the masses. I feel the LISA (other than being b&W) is far superior in hardware to that system and many other systems), but that doesn't change the fact there is such a limited software bank for it.

I dont know why some of you might take offence by this. Its just my opinion as it is, and I already sang the systems hardware's praises. It is what it is.
 
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Believe me, I wish someone would make some new software. There's just no incentive so the only way that's going to happen is if someone does it out of pure passion.
 
As far as wanting to buy things goes, I might tack on here that personally, I WTB a Lisa mouse shell, button, and bottom piece. I don't care about the condtion of the internal parts, as I have a working early revision M0100 and I plan to just swap out the guts and the cable so it works with my 2/10. I've looked on eBay but I can't seem to ever find one for less than the price of a new iPhone. Frankly, I really only need those individual mouse parts. Or, for that matter, if anyone has a Lisa mouse that spent 40 years in a swamp or flooded basement with trashed internals but cleanable plastics, then hell, I'll take that if you have it.
 
I think we'll see a few tinkering projects, just for personal hobby reasons, but I agree with others, the Lisa is too rare to have enough of a base to make it worthwhile for anything remotely commercial.

Maybe they could come up with a 'MegaLisa' project in the style of the Mega65, but that beastie costs almost $1K, I'd assume to build a retro-Lisa we'd be about the same or more.
 
Even a nice brand new demo is all something really needs. Remember when the NO PETS ALLOWED demo came out for the Commodore PET? IT was a big deal.
 
I think really improved emulation is probably the most useful way to advance some of the app-writing goals here, at least for folks who are capable of it. (For all my talk of "study", I'm not really ready to play in that ballgame at the moment!) This is probably the most active area of Lisa-related software development these days, and it's been impacted (as a variety of efforts have) by Ray Arachelian passing away last year. My impression as someone who's NOT working on LisaEm that the overhead of keeping it working on a range of target systems is taking up a lot of time that might be spent on tracking down emulation bugs.

As I've said, I haven't tried a recent version of the emulator for a while. (I actually still use an ancient 1.2.6.2 build because it works for my assembly language noodling and because I don't want to try compiling a newer version right now.) This old version has trouble running the Pascal Workshop compiler. An emulator free of bugs like that could potentially build the OS from the sources Al prepared for everyone. (It may be that Priam disk emulation is needed to make that practical; alternatively, maybe you can hack the Workshop/Lisa OS to support a non-standard size of ProFile. The sources might offer clues for how to do that.)

Consider a few steps further: a rock-solid emulated Lisa with a novel device driver that allows the emulated Lisa running the Lisa OS to share a directory on the host PC as a drive. You could write software on the modern machine and compile and run it in the emulator, which of course is preposterously overclocked in this workflow. Eliminating the step of shuffling files back and forth would make a world of difference in convenience. Of course there are a lot of details to get that to work: for example, a Lisa text file isn't quite organised like a regular text file is! (There's an RLE scheme for long runs of repeated characters, for a start.)
 
The last Lisa 2/10 I saw sell went about a month ago at an online Idaho university surplus auction. Came with a mismatched Lisa 1 mouse (really, I don't think you'd care at that point!), re-padded keyboard, turned on and booted the widget to LOS. Keyboard info cards were present and both of the rear latches were not broken. It did however have a somewhat tired tube.
Overall though, it was in excellent condition and a lot of people were expecting a frenzy that never ended up happening. I can only assume people wanted a Lisa, but didn't want one badly enough to register for a non-ebay auction site.

Pick-up only, it went for $1000 and there were multiple bidders. Ebay's prices cannot be taken as the going market rate unless you want a Lisa and you are willing to throw money around blindly.

Edited: added listing photo for proof.
listing.png
[click to enlarge]

That was a listing I saw passed around. I had it linked to me personally several times People knew about it, we knew people were willing to pay far more on ebay and that's what it settled on even with the publicity and attention. North of $4000 is delusional. There is no limit on stupidity. If anything you can slap the next moron you meet who wants more than $1000 for an excellent condition 2/10 using the above screenshot.
 
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Al Kossow said:
Let's just say I'm disappointed in that NOTHING happened in the past year with the Lisa source release I
spent way too much time and effort on.
Click to expand...
Me and compu_85 were looking over the code and one of the things we had issues with was the EULA clause regarding code alteration and recompilation for distribution. There wasn't much we could hack up in the code without making people unhappy.

Ultimately I've found that like the Apple I, if you want hands directly on the hardware to make it do more than it's current gimmicks (Lisa 7/7...OOOooOOO spreadsheets and drawings!) the introduction costs are astronomical, while most of the existing aftermarket products such as disk emulators, memory upgrades and even some ROMs are behind people squawking they won't disclose the designs decades later because "It's my income" (Yes, I'm poking at you directly, John.)
 
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Both physically and the connector is different.

1_9afbad88b1909772b3a0c0b01a2e7118.jpg

Any Apple II/Macintosh 9-pin mouse will work but the Lisa 1 had this godawful connector and socket that breaks easily but didn't use thumbscrews. When I refurbished my 2/5 I desoldered and replaced the mouse port with a proper one.
For that $1000 Lisa I mentioned above. the Lisa 1 mice can easily sell for over $500 because ehrmagherd Liza and everyone trying to build Lisa 1's using whatever parts they can scrounge together. I wouldn't even bother trying to find much less build a Lisa 1. Everything about is horribly expensive, fragile and the repro market is shady as hell.
 
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There’s just the original Lisa mouse as pictured, and then there’s the m0100 Macintosh mouse which came in four variations: the original with square connector, the rounded connector version, the platinum version, and the Apple II version, all of which use a regular db-9 port.

Many Lisa 2s were sold with M0100s.
 
That's a Lisa 1 mouse, or at least that's what Apple shipped with the Lisa 1 to match the styling.

3477118_18.jpg
Damn-near every Lisa 2/5 and 2/10 I've ever seen came with your standard Apple mouse. Electronically the work exactly the same.
 
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