In 8th grade (1983), we had an English assignment that the teacher encouraged us to type. I vaguely remember arguing with the teacher that I should be allowed to use a word processor instead of a plain typewriter (an argument which, I guess, I either won or I just was stubborn and did it on one, anyway). I was very proud to be turning in the assignment I'd typed into Wordstar on my dad's Kaypro 2 CPM machine (his work computer). Printed on his work impact printer, I believe. I went to turn in the assignment and discovered a classmate had turned in her assignment and IT contained fancy fonts (and maybe even some graphics?), if I recall correctly. Far more advanced looking than anything I'd even heard of at the time (with my "vast" TS1000, VIC20, C64, and Kaypro experience). I was incredibly impressed. IIRC she had done her assignment on her dad's brand new Apple Lisa.
I was growing up in a tiny backwater town about that same time. Our school had no computer program and I was the only kid I knew of that had one (I saved up and bought it myself by mowing yards the preceding years). I had a friend who was punished by a teacher to write or type 500 repeating lines overnight for talking in class. I knew he wasn't going to do it, so I wrote a BASIC program on the C64 that printed out the lines, and substituted a typo'd letter on 1% of the lines for authenticity. I sold them to him for $5 and the teacher never knew the difference - my first paid programming gig!
I think the Lisa's physical design was inspired by the TRS-80 Model II, including the keyboard nook and removable card cage (and later on it had a 68000 CPU upgrade available, but it never had a GUI or mouse). I believe the only way to externally tell the difference between a Lisa 2 and a Macintosh XL (or a Mac XL that someone converted back to a Lisa) is to check the serial number, as their cases are identical.
A Lisa 2/10 and Macintosh XL are identical from a hardware perspective. The only difference is the software included with the machine. A Mac XL can also have the Square Pixel Kit and CPU accelerators installed. These prevent running Lisa software, but make Mac software run better.
I spent many hours in 1983 using LisaDraw when my dad let me come in to the office on weekends. The manuals that came with the machine were very well designed and easy to learn with. I stored my work on a floppy disk, but Apple upgraded the floppy drives to 3.5 inch versions, so I couldn't open my files. I still have printouts of the pictures I drew. I had hoped to program the Lisa, but I was surprised that the tools were not installed. I had been learning 6502 assembly on my C64 at home.
@@8_Bit times were different ;) Back than you had to pay a lot for the development kits. For the price of the simole c compiler of a Sun you were able to buy an Amiga or ST with good compiler. Now you can get a simple development kits for free, because users will not buy machines without Software.
When he first took the front cover off I was really wondering how they justified the cost, but yeah... that backplane reveal turned out to a lot more complex than I was expecting for the time.
The flip side is "sure, if you move any project straight from prototype to production it *looks* like it costs a million dollars." There's a reason designs get optimized and cost-reduced before going mainstream.
Thanks for doing this video. Back in '83, I tried to play with one of these in a computer store, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The salesmen weren't interested in helping a kid (who was clearly not going to buy a Lisa) out. I remember them claiming they didn't know how to use it either, and that it was usually not working.
At the begining of your video you noted the Xerox Star workstation, but what you did not realize is that Apple basically took most of the software principles fron Xerox, as well as Xerox staff members. Basically what you are looking at is the Xerox Star/8010/6085 desktop. The user does not "open" the applucation program directly and load a file, instead they open the docunent they are working on, or they open a blank document and create new work. Or as the screen said "tear off a blank sheet" and start working on it. The desktop metaphor was about making analogies between real world items and computer stuff. A wastebasket on the screen serves the same function as a real world one, making the system easier to explain. The idea was to let the user concentrate upon their work, and not about managing a computer. A good review.
IIRC, most people who bought Lisas upgraded them to a MacXL when given the chance. I remember our office staff getting these at Hughes Aircraft in 1985, and very quickly they were upgraded in place to MacXLs. This also solved the Y2K issue in System 6.
The loading speed of modules in GEOS was unbearable every time you selected a new tool, no wonder it never became very popular. Folks were a bit more patient back then.... cracks me up when people complain today about the scrolling on their phone having a slight hiccup, if they only lived in the 80's. lol
I don't think he meant it as a shot. Robin doesn't seem to be that kind of guy. Besides, if you wanted to defeat that switch a paper clip would probably be the first thing you'd reach for, I think.
Ha, I really didn't mean it as a burn at David, he's a friend of mine. He'd probably think it's funny anyway :) But yeah, I really don't know how to bypass that switch, but a paperclip is the first thing I thought of. Another commenter just said you should actually shove cardboard in there, to keep it open which makes sense.
What is this referencing? A paperclip accident sounds so familiar but I cannot begin to bring to mind what it could be referring to so I may just be imagining things lol.
@@mayshack David Murray (The 8-bit Guy) was given a chance to figure out an old IBM prototype, which was dead on arrival (and later in the same video found out that the other 4 identical machines that were with it were also dead). As part of his troubleshooting, he used a paperclip, and blew a fuse in the power supply, and the interweb's best computer chair quarterbacks have piled on him about it. Come to find out, IBM had a regular practice of bricking their prototypes, and it was a fluke that those 5 machines weren't in the landfill.
Incredibly efficient device. Stunningly well thought through, from the keyboard to the front panel. Each and every contour has purpose and planning behind it. One could argue that the design philosophies behind this machine are leagues more efficient than what we apply today to our modern rigs.
That thing is UGLY. And considering the price of 10,000 USD at the time, Apple clearly holds the record for the amount of ugliness you could get per dollar if buying a computer. The Macintosh came as a close second though, because while it cost "only" 2.495 USD, it was even uglier.
My dealer/principal made me the company’s Lisa Product Manager in early 1983. I took the Lisa and an Electrohome projector up and down the Mississippi (in my Subaru wagon) to refineries and chemical plants near New Orleans. I managed to sell a bunch of Lisas AT RETAIL! What a fun time to be in the computer business.
Wow! It's really cool to see one of these machines! I've been wanting to get my hands on a Lisa or XL for quite some time but they are really uncommon these days and hard to come by. There aren't really even too many youtube videos showing these machines so I'm really glad you were able to make this one! Keep up the good work!
I really appreciate the tour! These things are incredibly rare, and at tens of thousands of dollars on the used market, it seems less and less likely I'll ever actually get my hands on one. Thanks for taking everything out and showing all the guts inside! It really is incredible how forward-thinking this thing was- the notion it can multi-task is downright insane. I for one would love to see more of this thing. I imagine it has similar "developer" potential to the original Macintosh lineup, though I imagine one could get some of the more fun Mac Plus games to run on it with some tweaks. Rock on!
Insane multitasking ... I found a tool recently that allows the C64 to run BASIC and up to 31 machine programs simultaneously ("Multitask" on a disk that came with the German book "222 Tips, Trick & Tools für den C64" by Nikolaus M. Heusler).
The Lisa operating system was written in Pascal. In order to make it take less memory and be faster, it was all rewritten in assembly language for the Mac.
Ah the memories. Had one of these in our office. Used it for our database segment layouts and the data folks for their datagrams showing the fields and keys of the data. We were able to retire our green charting templates and pencils. With Lisa Calc, we could retire Visicalc and the Apple //e and /// it ran on. But the Apple ]['s were put to good use as VT-52 screen emulators to front-end them to the mainframe using ASCII to EBCIDIC for 3270 terminals.
Steve Jobs: "Here's your $375 half from what Atari payed us for BreakOut, Woz." *10 years later* Steve Wozniak reading Jobs' biography: "Wait... they actually payed us $5750 for Breakout, because I got it down to so few chips?"
Steve Jobs: “The Macintosh doesn’t fit my vision for the future of computing, it’s a toy compared to the Lisa, I’m going to try to sabotage it” 10 years later Steve Jobs: “The Macintosh is the most innovative thing I’ve ever lead the development of”
16:00 Planned obsolescence gone extreme. I can imagine they had no intention of the machine itself lasting until 1995 but did they really think the OS itself was going to die before then?
I'm guessing the OS is full of hacks tied to the hardware to get acceptable speed so they naturally expected to rewrite/recompile it before then. I'd love to know for sure, but while Apple announced they were going to release the source code for Lisa OS in 2018 to all kinds of good will from the open source community... they apparently never did. :(
i think it's not planned obsolescence, I think they well knew by 1995 the lisa would be waaaaaay too slow to be considered a ligitimately useful machine... unlike a cellphone where the actual computer part of the phone is plenty good enough to keep being used as a phone or even a computer, but the battery can't be changed out...
@@AKATenn Well, okay, by "planned obsolescence" in this case I just meant "planned for being obsolete" which isn't what's normally meant by the phrase. :)
The Xerox Alto was the first comouter with a gui in the 70's. It had a mouse first. I highly recommend watching the restoration of one on CuriousMarc's channel.
The Alto was a research machine and had *some* GUI applications. (The entire idea of PARC was to invest huge amounts of money to buy researches into the future by reversing Moore's Law.) The PERQ was originally more like a commercial version of the Alto (they switched from PARC software, however), and this cost a ton!
Just to emphasise Norbert's reply, the Alto was not itself commercial, but it did form the basis for the STAR line of machines, and was famously shown to Steve Jobs when he toured PARC.
@@ravegirlcyan To extend a bit on this: The Alto wasn't just a system, it was a hardware platform for various systems that could be loaded on the fly. The "classic" Alto persona, which featured some groundbreaking software, like the Gipsy editor (pioneering copy & paste) had no real GUI of its own, but some applications had one. However, there was no consitency in those programs, nor a consitent GUI provided by the OS. Another persona was Smalltalk, which was a quite impressive OS and programming language in a single suite, featuring a GUI and object oriented programming. However, Smalltalk was actually a software designed for experimental work with kids (approx 12-year old) and not a business oriented real-world application, which was more what the Lisa aimed at. Regarding the Xerox Star, this was actually deviced by Xerox SDD (Systems Development Department) in El Segundo. Building a consistent operating system and GUI language, office mail, shared servers, etc, from the various bits of experimental PARC software was not a small feat. And, I guess, those involved do net get the recognition, they deserve. That said, *some* Altos were actually sold to persons outside PARC, but this was no official business and you probably had to know someone there, in order to get one. (If these came at a realistic business price or more at some internal, more imaginary compensation, and what this might have been, I have no idea. But, I guess, this being a research facility, there wouldn't have been even an idea of covering research and development costs, etc.)
I used / supported an Apple Lisa at work in the mid to late 1980s. It used the 5-megabyte ProFile external hard drive, but we had to run it sitting upside down because the drive bearings were shot. I remember bringing in catalogs from a company called Sun Remarketing that made and sold upgrades for the Lisa, including a dot-pitch conversion for the display so it would match the Macintosh (square vs. rectangular pixels). They didn't want to spend the money to upgrade it; not surprising, since we had a Mac Plus and several IBM PC/XT on the project. I think we finally got a PC/AT not too long after that... ☺
Thank you very much for this brilliant in-depth review. I absolutely love that you're taking time to explain the various parts of the internals and the OS. One thing that struck me compared to Apple today is how easy it is/was to service the machine.
20:25 On the Mac OS 8 Desktop (and probably earlier) when you dragged something to the Desktop, it didn't copy or move it, it just made it available for easy access. There was a "Put Away" option the removed it from the Desktop. Perhaps the Lisa was similar.
This is really cool Robin! I've never seen a Lisa in real life, let alone the guts and glory of it! Awesome, thank you so much for another great video!
This teardown :D is much more visually pleasing than those of Apple products from the last decade or so. Some thought and solid engineering went into most of Apple's computers, but also some very strange decisions. Also, traveling back in time every 16 years would be very nifty IRL. :)
Yeah, I bought one of those back in 1983 to use to develop Mac software. It was the only way. I did install the office system, but the apps were far too slow to be usable. Every click took seconds to register. The spreadsheet took a long time to move from cell to cell and recalculate. Even the calculator would take like six seconds to come up with an answer. The terminal emulator was really slow, it could barely do 1200 baud on a good day. The screen pixels were not square so drawing was wonky. I ended up drilling a hole in the case and installing a switch to down-adjust the height to get square pixels. Not fun times. Even with the deveolper's discount it all came to like $9,500. I soon abandoned the office system and just used the UCSD-like OS and compiler and linker to make Mac apps.
I remember those! I had a summer job when I was in High School that mainly involved working on a terminal connected to a DEC VAX minicomputer (back when minicomputer meant the size of a large fridge), but they also had a Lisa with a 10 meg (I think) hard drive that had the same footprint as the computer and stood on top of it. Unlike MacOS, each window had its own drop down menus and someone managed to render the machine useless by dragging all the windows off the screen, at which point you couldn’t get them back, so it had to be totally reinstalled.
It's funny how full tower PCs are still technically "microcomputers". Where's my nanocomputer? The idea of making a computer unusable by dragging all the windows off the screen is hilarious. I guess reinstalling was faster than figuring out how to reset them.
I can't get over how packed the case is with boards and chips compared with many other machines: you can really start to understand why it cost so much when new. All that hardware would have been damned expensive back in 1983. Fascinating video - thank you.
The way it keeps saying “Just a moment” makes me highly suspicious of it. Almost like it’s going to tell you the AE-35 unit is going to fail in 72 hours ;-)
Considering what a colossal (and expensive) flop the first Apple Lisa was I'm surprised they made a second one. It did, luckily, lead to the much more sensible and sensibly priced (compared to the Lisa...) Macintosh which was hugely influential in the evolution of computers and operating systems.
I worked on this Lisa in Swedish Ericsson company Rifa AB. It came with an AGFA Typesetter and a very buggy AGFA software. We typeset an Electronics book on it, but it was finally returned (buggy sw) and we got a Macintosh. This video gave me some nice memories Thanks. 🖥️
There’s so many concepts and features in this that we totally take for granted today. I can see why this cost so much, back when it came out we were still fussing about with ZX Spectrums and Lego style graphics on fuzzy RF TVs. Usually old versions of a computer are impossibly primitive but this was obviously supposed to be a professional piece of gear.
Interesting to look at functionality/capabilities differences across the huge price spread of a ZX Spectrum vs. Lisa II circa 1983 (call it 50x price difference), and like-for-like comparisons today. You make a great point: those two devices could be from different planets. As I write this, the cheapest cash-and-carry Android phone from Walmart is $30 and the most expensive is $1400--about a 50x price difference. Yet they're recognizably different experiences around the same concept, not worlds apart.
Today's Apple could learn from looking at how easy it was to disassemble, upgrade and repair their early computers. But I guess there is more money in selling people a new machine instead.
That's just how the entire industry has gone. Laptops from all manufacturers are increasingly less upgradable, to the point where a user being expected to easily disassemble a laptop is the exception rather than the rule. Their Mac Pro tower and Server are actually in the opposite direction, and are completely tool-less. I even think the processor replacement is tool-less (the heat pipe is held down with a clamp rather than screws).
Apple is responsible for the ugliest computers, the most overpriced computers, the worst excesses of planned obsolescence, the most awful exploitation of workers in Asia.
Nice overview of the Lisa,. I remember seeing one at a computer store in Madison, WI when I was in middle school and thinking that it cost more than most new cars or a quarter of what a house cost at that time.
We are all so lucky... Seeing this on TH-cam... It is all so accessible... An Apple Lisa... That is a treasure. Thanks for sharing. Good luck talking care of that piece of History.
You can backup and restore X/ProFile cards using a USB CF card reader and dd on macOS or Linux. Basic Lisa Utility offers an img download to write directly to a CF card.
Old Apple machines were incredibly accessible to service. I had an LC-475 in a similar case as the LCII, and you could click the top off, and install extra ram without a single tool.
Apple, at one time, thought that cursor keys are outdated because modern computers have a mouse. Yeah, right. Btw, one thing I still sometimes miss nowadays is a feature the Amiga had: you could move the mouse pointer and emulate the mouse buttons with keyboard combinations. Because there is always this one piece of ~sh~ software which is only controllable by mouse. Like, when the tab key will always skip the "OK" button due to shoddy programming.
@@klausstock8020 Computing history is absolutely littered with terrible ideas about cursor keys (almost all of them, in fact) while the inverted T just continues to rule. And, agreed on the Amiga keyboard control over the pointer! Unintuitive to the uninitiated, but very valuable in a pinch.
@@jpcompton I had a honeywell bull XT compatible keyboard with a plus sign configuration for the cursor keys, with a blank centre key. Also the CTRL was where caps lock is now, and the caps lock was a physically locking key that stayed down (like on a typewriter). It was clear to me this was a WordStar Keyboard.
A little detective work on why some chips are all scratched up: You can see that only the chips in sockets are scratched, all the soldered chips still look new. I am guessing that a service engineer was called to fix this (or they sent it to apple), and he just swapped out the replaceable chips till it worked. Obviously the service engineer was a slob, and kept all his spare chips jumbled together in a bag where they got all scratched up!
It'ss simpler than that. Socketed ICs stand up higher, so when someone stacks boards on top of each other, that's what gets scratched by the board above.
@@mal2ksc Well, that’s possible, but I considered it too, and studied the way the scratches were placed on adjacent chips. They don’t match. And especially on the left 6522A chip, the distance between the parallel scratches is about the same as the pin spacing, suggesting that a naked chip had been dragged across it. Maybe you are right, but I think the weight of evidence is for the sloppy service engineer idea.
@@martinstent5339 The pin spacing of socket legs sticking out the back side of a board is exactly the same as the pin spacing of the naked IC. The spacing between the scratches is consistent with _both_ our ideas.
The socketed chips sit higher, protecting the ones on the board. The scratches appear when you stack the boards on top of each other outside of the computer.
@@stargazer7644 Neither of us can be 100% sure, but take a look at the apple ROMs, they are 2 EPROMS which actually stand up higher than the surrounding chips, but are completely unscratched. Also, as I said, the scratches on adjacent chips never line up in direction or intensity. As an (almost) lifelong service engineer, I think either reason would be poor practice. I always used to keep my spare boards in anti-static bags, as well as my spare chips, for which I had anti-static foam to protect their legs. Either way: Throwing the chips all in one bag or stacking the naked boards on top of each other, both were not very good practice 😊
Great piece of history. I always wonder why they went away from the easy access and serviceability, but I guess times change. We should go back to that kind of thing though. Even though I understand that the warranty would be void, it is great to do things with your Computer. That is why I always stayed with Microsoft compatible PCs. At least you can move around your own components, upgrade. Still, what a fantastic video, the prices back then always fascinated me. EEVE blog had that hard drive 3.78 gb or something and back in the 1980 it cost like 250 000 !
Apple's actually went back and forth many times on the repairability of machines. On my Macbook Pro from 2013 the bottom panel simply screws off, and the RAM and hard drive can be easily swapped out/upgraded. Every decade since the '80s they've made some machines that are terribly inaccessible, and some that are at least pretty good if not great.
I would absolutely expect top notch building when you consider just how much money this machine was! This was TEN GRAND in 1983 dollars. That's buying a Model 3 Tesla today. The 20 year anniversary Mac, and possibly the first Mac portable is, I think, the only other desktop machine Apple made to be so ridiculously expensive. Even those machines were in the neighborhood of HALF of the cost as this, despite coming much later and with a lot of inflation.
Mind that more than $2,500 was just the cost of memory. This was pricey tech then. (You really have to consider this as a business oriented workstation, something we don't have anymore, since - probably starting with i386 - even a modest PC can handle complex business software. But this was a market segment, then.)
Wow, the Lisa OS was really advanced for the time. I remember going to a computer show in 1983 and first seeing a Lisa. It was amazing to me, considering I had only seen the Apple II before that.
It would be interesting to see what the development software/environment for such a thing was. Everything tries so hard to be an office/desk analogy (except it's someone else you don't know's desk so nothing is where you think it is), so it would be interesting to see how that sort of thing may have affected its development environment.
I'm probably one of the few people outside of Apple who wrote Lisa Office software. The software environment was a version of UCSD (Apple) Pascal, called the Lisa Programmer's Workshop. It had no graphical UI of its own, and you had to set aside space for it and install it. You would then use the boot menu to boot from it, and be presented with the traditional UCSD Filer menu. The applications that could be written ranged from traditional text-only applications, to what Apple called "QuickPort" applications where you would be given a single LisaGraf context and you could do basic graphic operations within it, to being able to write Lisa Office applications in a special object-oriented variant of Pascal called Clascal, which was very much influenced by Mesa. You had to know who to ask at Apple to get the necessary support software for the Clascal compiler and libraries, and they were publicly released after the Lisa had been discontinued and the remaining stock converted into Macintosh XL systems (basically sold by Apple as Macintosh development systems due to the hard drive and 512K of RAM, before native Macintosh dev tools were available.)
@@tschak909 neato. Lots of information. Kinda sounded like a bit of a shitshow though. I'm not super familiar with apple or Mac development at the time or even today but it is neat to know what the tools were like at different times. Development on PC didn't differ a whole lot from development on Linux today. Just writing code in C or something and having a build system of some sort, possibly even gnu make and compiling and linking through shell commands. Some of the early stuff that tried to change things up or do its own thing is neat though.
I wasn't thinking of THAT paperclip trick :) I just meant it as a generic hack, but apparently I have it backwards; the switch instead should be held open with cardboard to bypass it. I've been friends with David for over 15 years now, I wouldn't take a shot like that at him.
@@8_Bit When I was watching that (David Murray) video, as he started with the paperclip I was almost shouting "NO!" at the screen. Then he did it. What baffles me is why he posted the video TBH. I would have quietly just moved onto something else.
I got to use an original Mac when Apple sent one to my High School. This was like the same week they were put on sale to the public for the first time. The keyboard was a cut-down design from the Lisa, so it had no separate numpad. That meant it had no arrow keys at all! It didn't have a CTRL key either. Later edition keyboards added a CTRL key, as it was needed for the Terminal program!
The computers I worked on in the 80s had RAM cabinets the size of refrigerators. Each held a whopping 16 MB made up of individual 2k ram chips. We ran a memory diagnostic program each week and pulled the failed cards and swapped out the chips.
@@stargazer7644 We've come a long way, for sure. Look at the 128 gigabyte micro sd card in your phone (that you bought for less than $20) and compare that to the 256k module on your Amiga 1000 that cost $300. Crazy. Pretty soon memory cards will be free inside boxes of cereal!
Like the attention to detail that the card hinges are color-coded so that you both install the cards in the correct slot and so that you don't try to install them backwards
That computer changed the graphic arts industry. Especially the print industry. I worked for a company that was among the first to adopt them to use in our publication. Our typesetters insisted they weren't worried nothing would replace them. In a few years, type houses were dropping like flies. I've been a Mac user ever since.
My school sill had about 8 apple LISA computers in use when I was in middle school (1992-1994). They had IIgs's and the original mackintosh also but I remember having to use them when I was in the metal shop. Yeah I think that rather than get rid of them when they upgraded, they just moved them into the metal shop.
OS/2 which came out much later, also had a document-centered interface where you could "tear off" new documents from corresponding template icons. But OS/2 also allowed the user to open a program directly to create a new document. I love the short Tommy Wiseau clip. Very funny and unexpected.
For that funky video format, would it be possible to capture the signal with a sufficiently-fast audio interface and then decode it into a video signal?
Interesting idea! I imagine the signal is too fast for that - the 22kHz is the horizontal frequency, and then there's 720 pixels per line, plus a retrace period, so the total bandwidth of the signal is about 20MHz. ... which makes me wonder how good the video quality on that output was, or if there were even any displays that used it. Regular composite video has a bandwidth of about 6MHz, so that 20MHz seems like a lot to pump down an RCA cable!
@@rjhelms Ah, yeah, I was feeling too out of it to do the math. A 20MHz signal would be pretty difficult to capture without highly specialized hardware. The best audio interfaces I know of only go up to 192KHz so that'd be able to get a horizontal resolution of around 8 pixels... I wonder if there's any digital oscilloscope things that would be capable of this task, or maybe something weird one could do with a software-defined radio or something. Or even some random weird video capture ASIC which allows much more flexibility in its signaling.
maybe build a circuit to split the signal to RGB+sync and use a VGA or component PCIe/PCI capture card. Alternatively modify the video output circuitry of the Lisa 2 to output a standard composite signal.
@@simontay4851 Why would it have RGB+sync? It's a monochrome display. And the actual plug is only a single conductor pair so there's no way for it to have a separate luma+sync signal.
I actually had the pleasure of playing around with a $10,000 Apple Lisa in 1983 when I was 13 at the time. It was at my mom's work and they had one in one of their offices so they let me play around with Draw which was impressive. I was like "Wow, this is amazing and I only have the Commodore Vic-20 at home!" Little I knew at the time this is a $10k machine vs $200 Commodore Vic-20. lol. Obviously we couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on Lisa but it did gave me an insight of what the future may bring.
First Mac I used was a Mac SE. System 6.0.3 I believe. 68000 at 8mhz. In a way the early Mac had less sophisticated software - no multitasking until 6.0.4. The SE was faster than this, but no multitasking. I guess they modded the software to help speed things up. Despite not having multitasking 6.0.3 was a lot more mature than Lisa....most of that odd ball stuff had been worked out.
Great tour of a great machine and a futuristic OS! Had you presented this to someone with a C64 or PC in 1983 it would have been as if you showed a stone age person a metal knife. Not a very sharp one... but shiny nevertheless.
I didn't get the hype about the first cumbersome and slow GUIs. When I got (I think a cracked version of) GEOS for the C64, I looked at it, played with it, thought about possible use cases, then formatted the disk to put it to better use.
@@NuntiusLegis Same here. I was a kid back then and more interested in games. But GEOS came quite a while after the Lisa... and there was nothing like it at that point in time. Nothing that people could see and buy .. I guess.
Having seen both (literally side by side) as a child (age 12) very into computers in 1983, I wasn’t all that impressed when I saw the Lisa at a tradeshow in either Ft. Lauderdale or Miami. I thought the GUI was an interesting idea but also a very inefficient one as things ran rather slowly and it was only capable of black and white with a few gray scales (if I recall) for “colors”. It was certainly plenty adequate for basic business use and the WYSIWYG aspect would be very useful for those who needed help visualizing layout and typesetting in real time (versus inputting the same parameters into a text-only application like WordPerfect or Word Star and evaluating the result at print time), but you would never be able to do anything in color and you could forget any real sound capabilities unless you invested even more in external hardware…so forget using it as a presentation kiosk and one certainly would not play many graphic or sound oriented games on a Lisa and both its software library and user base were rather small by comparison to the non-GUI competition. The Lisa was most remarkable in the sense that they were among the first to introduce the business community to the concept of a graphical operating system, but it was with good reason that such OS’s did not become especially mainstream until the time of Windows 3/1990 and that was because it took awhile longer for the hardware capabilities to catch up to make such practical and without costing a huge premium. Much of the Lisa’s cost was tied up just in RAM alone as well as in the early hard drive needed to make it a practical and usable system. But I believe that what most held the Lisa back from any wider adoption was the cost and complexity of developing applications for it if one wanted to expand its capabilities much beyond the basic office functionality it shipped with as it is was primarily the huge software bases, including freeware, shareware, and commercial, that made the Apple II’s, Atari’s, Commodore C64 and the IBM PC XT & AT so widely popular throughout the 80s. That said, the C-64 did gain GEOS just 3 years later and the earliest iterations of Windows first released around that same time, though Windows was mostly just a curiosity until 3.0 was released in 1990 along with Windows versions of Word and Excel (and soon after the third-party app we know today as PowerPoint).
I use to repair these in a store in 1984-85. Seeing those modular pieces takes me back. Sadly, the Lisa had reliability issues. We had one running Xenix with a few serial port cards (for terminals) that Dominion Textiles used in their accounting department. Then the Compaq Deskpro 386 came out which ran Xenix even better.
The scene in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where the Apple folks steal Xerox:s IP is one of the best. Where Steve Jobs looks at the Xerox engineers and says "Don't worry, this wont hurt a bit" :) Masterpiece.
I remember vividly the first time i used one of these, i realized it was a revolution full of possibilities. So i asked excited to the sales representative, the told me it was an evolution of visicalc!
I think the document based workflow is much more intuitive. Nobody has a “program” on their desk, but we all have paper, drawings, diaries etc on our desks. You want to work on the document you got yesterday? Just pick up the document and read / write on it! Only computer people think in terms of using programs.
And you can see that mindset reflected in tools like MacOS Preview, which from the name and from the initial experience seems to simply be a document viewer but actually turns out to be a multifaceted editor as well. But then--just like these early 80s interfaces--you say "okay cool how about you help me make something new?" and it says "nope, can't make a NEW document, that would be crazy!" and then you go okay well thanks anyway that's dumb.
In 8th grade (1983), we had an English assignment that the teacher encouraged us to type. I vaguely remember arguing with the teacher that I should be allowed to use a word processor instead of a plain typewriter (an argument which, I guess, I either won or I just was stubborn and did it on one, anyway). I was very proud to be turning in the assignment I'd typed into Wordstar on my dad's Kaypro 2 CPM machine (his work computer). Printed on his work impact printer, I believe. I went to turn in the assignment and discovered a classmate had turned in her assignment and IT contained fancy fonts (and maybe even some graphics?), if I recall correctly. Far more advanced looking than anything I'd even heard of at the time (with my "vast" TS1000, VIC20, C64, and Kaypro experience). I was incredibly impressed. IIRC she had done her assignment on her dad's brand new Apple Lisa.
That was a cool story
I was growing up in a tiny backwater town about that same time. Our school had no computer program and I was the only kid I knew of that had one (I saved up and bought it myself by mowing yards the preceding years). I had a friend who was punished by a teacher to write or type 500 repeating lines overnight for talking in class. I knew he wasn't going to do it, so I wrote a BASIC program on the C64 that printed out the lines, and substituted a typo'd letter on 1% of the lines for authenticity. I sold them to him for $5 and the teacher never knew the difference - my first paid programming gig!
@@3vi1J Love it!
@@3vi1J That's awesome
Patrick Bates moment...
I think the Lisa's physical design was inspired by the TRS-80 Model II, including the keyboard nook and removable card cage (and later on it had a 68000 CPU upgrade available, but it never had a GUI or mouse). I believe the only way to externally tell the difference between a Lisa 2 and a Macintosh XL (or a Mac XL that someone converted back to a Lisa) is to check the serial number, as their cases are identical.
A Lisa 2/10 and Macintosh XL are identical from a hardware perspective. The only difference is the software included with the machine.
A Mac XL can also have the Square Pixel Kit and CPU accelerators installed. These prevent running Lisa software, but make Mac software run better.
There were a number of communication terminals that used this design in the early 80s.
Funny.. The front panel comes off in a similar way to how an old Macintosh is shown coming apart in Futurama.
holy shit it's the 8-bit guy! well now i know this must be a good channel :D
@@wojiaobill your a fool, drool somewhere else
@@jimsterling2065 *you're
Hi
Of course 8BG has to come around and defend himself from the paper clip jokes 🤣
I spent many hours in 1983 using LisaDraw when my dad let me come in to the office on weekends. The manuals that came with the machine were very well designed and easy to learn with. I stored my work on a floppy disk, but Apple upgraded the floppy drives to 3.5 inch versions, so I couldn't open my files. I still have printouts of the pictures I drew. I had hoped to program the Lisa, but I was surprised that the tools were not installed. I had been learning 6502 assembly on my C64 at home.
I was also surprised (and disappointed) that there were no development tools included.
@@8_Bit times were different ;) Back than you had to pay a lot for the development kits. For the price of the simole c compiler of a Sun you were able to buy an Amiga or ST with good compiler.
Now you can get a simple development kits for free, because users will not buy machines without Software.
Simply from a build perspective, I now finally get why it was a $10k computer.
When he first took the front cover off I was really wondering how they justified the cost, but yeah... that backplane reveal turned out to a lot more complex than I was expecting for the time.
This thing is a battlecruiser. Having that many chips will also increase the likelihood of failure quite a bit.
Back when Apple was making computers designed to be easily serviceable and built to last. Not overpriced disposable garbage they are making now.
The flip side is "sure, if you move any project straight from prototype to production it *looks* like it costs a million dollars." There's a reason designs get optimized and cost-reduced before going mainstream.
@@shadowflash705 disposable garbage
3:25 "It's a non standard signal" Oh, I am not surprised by that...
Thanks for doing this video. Back in '83, I tried to play with one of these in a computer store, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The salesmen weren't interested in helping a kid (who was clearly not going to buy a Lisa) out. I remember them claiming they didn't know how to use it either, and that it was usually not working.
At the begining of your video you noted the Xerox Star workstation, but what you did not realize is that Apple basically took most of the software principles fron Xerox, as well as Xerox staff members. Basically what you are looking at is the Xerox Star/8010/6085 desktop. The user does not "open" the applucation program directly and load a file, instead they open the docunent they are working on, or they open a blank document and create new work. Or as the screen said "tear off a blank sheet" and start working on it. The desktop metaphor was about making analogies between real world items and computer stuff. A wastebasket on the screen serves the same function as a real world one, making the system easier to explain. The idea was to let the user concentrate upon their work, and not about managing a computer. A good review.
I’m sure he knows that.
I'm so glad you made this video, it was fascinating to get an in depth tour of a machine I had only ever heard the name of but never seen in action.
IIRC, most people who bought Lisas upgraded them to a MacXL when given the chance. I remember our office staff getting these at Hughes Aircraft in 1985, and very quickly they were upgraded in place to MacXLs. This also solved the Y2K issue in System 6.
Holy heck, and I thought GEOS for the C64 was a slow desktop environment...
🤣🤣🤣
And you didn't pay ten grand for that computer.
Life was at a slower pace back then 😉
The loading speed of modules in GEOS was unbearable every time you selected a new tool, no wonder it never became very popular.
Folks were a bit more patient back then.... cracks me up when people complain today about the scrolling on their phone having a slight hiccup, if they only lived in the 80's. lol
Xerox Alto from 1973 had a GUI
Getting a Thumbs Up just for the Room reference.
It had to be done!
I noticed that as well kind of an obscure movie now especially and when I saw it on adult swim i know i had to buy a copy and still have it on dvd
Omg that got a loud chuckle from me, well done
"I'm not about to do any *paperclip* tricks with that" . lol, shots fired!
I don't think he meant it as a shot. Robin doesn't seem to be that kind of guy. Besides, if you wanted to defeat that switch a paper clip would probably be the first thing you'd reach for, I think.
@@marred2277 either way I've had to laugh about it as well.... =D
Ha, I really didn't mean it as a burn at David, he's a friend of mine. He'd probably think it's funny anyway :) But yeah, I really don't know how to bypass that switch, but a paperclip is the first thing I thought of. Another commenter just said you should actually shove cardboard in there, to keep it open which makes sense.
What is this referencing? A paperclip accident sounds so familiar but I cannot begin to bring to mind what it could be referring to so I may just be imagining things lol.
@@mayshack David Murray (The 8-bit Guy) was given a chance to figure out an old IBM prototype, which was dead on arrival (and later in the same video found out that the other 4 identical machines that were with it were also dead). As part of his troubleshooting, he used a paperclip, and blew a fuse in the power supply, and the interweb's best computer chair quarterbacks have piled on him about it. Come to find out, IBM had a regular practice of bricking their prototypes, and it was a fluke that those 5 machines weren't in the landfill.
I was never a mac fan way back when but you have to appreciate the engineering that went into this... very nice! Thanks for the video!
I wonder if year 0 is how the OS knows the clock is wrong. (No power would reset the value to 0.)
Apple has built in early obsolescence even back then through today. xD
Wow. Thanks for sharing such rare hardware with everyone. I would probably never have seen one of these in person, let alone a teardown.
The serviceability just seems outstanding on this, curiously enough, Apple product. Seems like the silk screen is labeled, even!
"You're tearing me apart, Lisa!"
I have to admit I might laugh way too much than I should at that edit.
1:30 It was a standard placement of Enter key in IBM 360/370 terminals. Maybe Woz wanted professionals to feel at home sitting in front of Lisa.
Wiz was no longer involved by then. A plane crash caused brain damage had already sidelined him.
"The clock uses a 4-bit counter and only has 16 options for the year"
I mean, to be fair, 1981 to 1995 were 16 of the best years ever anyway :D
LOL good one! ;D Apple has built in early obsolescence even back then through today. xD
Clearly Apple had high expectations of the Lisa models. That must be the least usable clock ever put in a computer.
My childhood 1:1. So happy.
The Space Shuttle and the Chernobyl disaster happened in the middle of that period; happy times!
I was surprised how well that CRT showed up off the camera.
Probably low refresh rate shot with a high refresh rate camera.
Man that giant CPU has me wondering how physically big dip chips got. You could practically see that thing from orbit!
That was it. They didn't get any bigger than the 64-pin package the 68k used. There were shrink-DIPs with more pins, but they were smaller.
This is a very aesthetically pleasing machine!
No.
Incredibly efficient device. Stunningly well thought through, from the keyboard to the front panel. Each and every contour has purpose and planning behind it. One could argue that the design philosophies behind this machine are leagues more efficient than what we apply today to our modern rigs.
4:05 I wish modern Apple products were this easy to tear down for fixing!
I only saw one of these in person. I was shocked when i saw that thing in the wild, such a freaking beauty!
That thing is UGLY. And considering the price of 10,000 USD at the time, Apple clearly holds the record for the amount of ugliness you could get per dollar if buying a computer. The Macintosh came as a close second though, because while it cost "only" 2.495 USD, it was even uglier.
@@NuntiusLegis Okay then, thanks but i don't really care.
The Mac is so ugly, I even can't look at it for longer than a few seconds. It is the Medusa amongst computers. But maybe I am too sensitive.
@@NuntiusLegis Good on you, I still don't care.
@@HoboVibingToMusic I don't care if you care, I just practise my right to free speech as you did.
This is great! Best Lisa tour I’ve seen!
My dealer/principal made me the company’s Lisa Product Manager in early 1983. I took the Lisa and an Electrohome projector up and down the Mississippi (in my Subaru wagon) to refineries and chemical plants near New Orleans. I managed to sell a bunch of Lisas AT RETAIL! What a fun time to be in the computer business.
Wow! It's really cool to see one of these machines! I've been wanting to get my hands on a Lisa or XL for quite some time but they are really uncommon these days and hard to come by. There aren't really even too many youtube videos showing these machines so I'm really glad you were able to make this one! Keep up the good work!
I really appreciate the tour! These things are incredibly rare, and at tens of thousands of dollars on the used market, it seems less and less likely I'll ever actually get my hands on one. Thanks for taking everything out and showing all the guts inside! It really is incredible how forward-thinking this thing was- the notion it can multi-task is downright insane.
I for one would love to see more of this thing. I imagine it has similar "developer" potential to the original Macintosh lineup, though I imagine one could get some of the more fun Mac Plus games to run on it with some tweaks. Rock on!
Insane multitasking ... I found a tool recently that allows the C64 to run BASIC and up to 31 machine programs simultaneously ("Multitask" on a disk that came with the German book "222 Tips, Trick & Tools für den C64" by Nikolaus M. Heusler).
The Lisa operating system was written in Pascal. In order to make it take less memory and be faster, it was all rewritten in assembly language for the Mac.
Proof?
Ah the memories. Had one of these in our office. Used it for our database segment layouts and the data folks for their datagrams showing the fields and keys of the data. We were able to retire our green charting templates and pencils. With Lisa Calc, we could retire Visicalc and the Apple //e and /// it ran on. But the Apple ]['s were put to good use as VT-52 screen emulators to front-end them to the mainframe using ASCII to EBCIDIC for 3270 terminals.
Steve Jobs: "I know, let's name it after my daughter!"
**10 years later**
Steve Jobs: "I didn't name it after my daughter."
Steve Jobs: "Here's your $375 half from what Atari payed us for BreakOut, Woz."
*10 years later*
Steve Wozniak reading Jobs' biography: "Wait... they actually payed us $5750 for Breakout, because I got it down to so few chips?"
Steve Jobs: “The Macintosh doesn’t fit my vision for the future of computing, it’s a toy compared to the Lisa, I’m going to try to sabotage it”
10 years later
Steve Jobs: “The Macintosh is the most innovative thing I’ve ever lead the development of”
@@fluffycritter to be fair, if you saw the Macintosh prototype machine, it really was. That was before looking anything like the Macintosh
@@computeraidedworld1148 True, the pre-Lisa-reckoning prototype UI was incredibly janky.
16:00 Planned obsolescence gone extreme. I can imagine they had no intention of the machine itself lasting until 1995 but did they really think the OS itself was going to die before then?
I'm guessing the OS is full of hacks tied to the hardware to get acceptable speed so they naturally expected to rewrite/recompile it before then. I'd love to know for sure, but while Apple announced they were going to release the source code for Lisa OS in 2018 to all kinds of good will from the open source community... they apparently never did. :(
i think it's not planned obsolescence, I think they well knew by 1995 the lisa would be waaaaaay too slow to be considered a ligitimately useful machine... unlike a cellphone where the actual computer part of the phone is plenty good enough to keep being used as a phone or even a computer, but the battery can't be changed out...
@@AKATenn Well, okay, by "planned obsolescence" in this case I just meant "planned for being obsolete" which isn't what's normally meant by the phrase. :)
The Xerox Alto was the first comouter with a gui in the 70's. It had a mouse first. I highly recommend watching the restoration of one on CuriousMarc's channel.
The Alto was a research machine and had *some* GUI applications. (The entire idea of PARC was to invest huge amounts of money to buy researches into the future by reversing Moore's Law.) The PERQ was originally more like a commercial version of the Alto (they switched from PARC software, however), and this cost a ton!
Just to emphasise Norbert's reply, the Alto was not itself commercial, but it did form the basis for the STAR line of machines, and was famously shown to Steve Jobs when he toured PARC.
@@ravegirlcyan To extend a bit on this: The Alto wasn't just a system, it was a hardware platform for various systems that could be loaded on the fly. The "classic" Alto persona, which featured some groundbreaking software, like the Gipsy editor (pioneering copy & paste) had no real GUI of its own, but some applications had one. However, there was no consitency in those programs, nor a consitent GUI provided by the OS. Another persona was Smalltalk, which was a quite impressive OS and programming language in a single suite, featuring a GUI and object oriented programming. However, Smalltalk was actually a software designed for experimental work with kids (approx 12-year old) and not a business oriented real-world application, which was more what the Lisa aimed at.
Regarding the Xerox Star, this was actually deviced by Xerox SDD (Systems Development Department) in El Segundo. Building a consistent operating system and GUI language, office mail, shared servers, etc, from the various bits of experimental PARC software was not a small feat. And, I guess, those involved do net get the recognition, they deserve.
That said, *some* Altos were actually sold to persons outside PARC, but this was no official business and you probably had to know someone there, in order to get one. (If these came at a realistic business price or more at some internal, more imaginary compensation, and what this might have been, I have no idea. But, I guess, this being a research facility, there wouldn't have been even an idea of covering research and development costs, etc.)
I used / supported an Apple Lisa at work in the mid to late 1980s. It used the 5-megabyte ProFile external hard drive, but we had to run it sitting upside down because the drive bearings were shot. I remember bringing in catalogs from a company called Sun Remarketing that made and sold upgrades for the Lisa, including a dot-pitch conversion for the display so it would match the Macintosh (square vs. rectangular pixels). They didn't want to spend the money to upgrade it; not surprising, since we had a Mac Plus and several IBM PC/XT on the project. I think we finally got a PC/AT not too long after that... ☺
Needs a re-edited scene from "The Room" Where Tommy/Johnny says "You are.. tearing.. my.. Lisa.. apart"..
Thank you very much for this brilliant in-depth review. I absolutely love that you're taking time to explain the various parts of the internals and the OS.
One thing that struck me compared to Apple today is how easy it is/was to service the machine.
20:25 On the Mac OS 8 Desktop (and probably earlier) when you dragged something to the Desktop, it didn't copy or move it, it just made it available for easy access. There was a "Put Away" option the removed it from the Desktop. Perhaps the Lisa was similar.
Another great video! Yep, I'd certainly like to see you code on one of those!
This is really cool Robin! I've never seen a Lisa in real life, let alone the guts and glory of it! Awesome, thank you so much for another great video!
This teardown :D is much more visually pleasing than those of Apple products from the last decade or so. Some thought and solid engineering went into most of Apple's computers, but also some very strange decisions.
Also, traveling back in time every 16 years would be very nifty IRL. :)
Yeah, I bought one of those back in 1983 to use to develop Mac software. It was the only way. I did install the office system, but the apps were far too slow to be usable. Every click took seconds to register. The spreadsheet took a long time to move from cell to cell and recalculate.
Even the calculator would take like six seconds to come up with an answer. The terminal emulator was really slow, it could barely do 1200 baud on a good day. The screen pixels were not square so drawing was wonky. I ended up drilling a hole in the case and installing a switch to down-adjust the height to get square pixels. Not fun times. Even with the deveolper's discount it all came to like $9,500.
I soon abandoned the office system and just used the UCSD-like OS and compiler and linker to make Mac apps.
According to this computer I'll never be older than 26 years old.
16 years. 1980-1995. Remember, is a 4 bit register. 0-15.
@@0311Mushroom I think he means he won’t age beyond 1996... when he was 26... I was 27 then... and would HAPPILY go back...
I remember those! I had a summer job when I was in High School that mainly involved working on a terminal connected to a DEC VAX minicomputer (back when minicomputer meant the size of a large fridge), but they also had a Lisa with a 10 meg (I think) hard drive that had the same footprint as the computer and stood on top of it. Unlike MacOS, each window had its own drop down menus and someone managed to render the machine useless by dragging all the windows off the screen, at which point you couldn’t get them back, so it had to be totally reinstalled.
It's funny how full tower PCs are still technically "microcomputers". Where's my nanocomputer?
The idea of making a computer unusable by dragging all the windows off the screen is hilarious. I guess reinstalling was faster than figuring out how to reset them.
I can't get over how packed the case is with boards and chips compared with many other machines: you can really start to understand why it cost so much when new. All that hardware would have been damned expensive back in 1983. Fascinating video - thank you.
You keep forgetting that $7500 of that price was for the apple logo.
The way it keeps saying “Just a moment” makes me highly suspicious of it. Almost like it’s going to tell you the AE-35 unit is going to fail in 72 hours ;-)
Considering what a colossal (and expensive) flop the first Apple Lisa was I'm surprised they made a second one. It did, luckily, lead to the much more sensible and sensibly priced (compared to the Lisa...) Macintosh which was hugely influential in the evolution of computers and operating systems.
I worked on this Lisa in Swedish Ericsson company Rifa AB. It came with an AGFA Typesetter and a very buggy AGFA software. We typeset an Electronics book on it, but it was finally returned (buggy sw) and we got a Macintosh. This video gave me some nice memories Thanks. 🖥️
There’s so many concepts and features in this that we totally take for granted today. I can see why this cost so much, back when it came out we were still fussing about with ZX Spectrums and Lego style graphics on fuzzy RF TVs. Usually old versions of a computer are impossibly primitive but this was obviously supposed to be a professional piece of gear.
Interesting to look at functionality/capabilities differences across the huge price spread of a ZX Spectrum vs. Lisa II circa 1983 (call it 50x price difference), and like-for-like comparisons today. You make a great point: those two devices could be from different planets. As I write this, the cheapest cash-and-carry Android phone from Walmart is $30 and the most expensive is $1400--about a 50x price difference. Yet they're recognizably different experiences around the same concept, not worlds apart.
Today's Apple could learn from looking at how easy it was to disassemble, upgrade and repair their early computers. But I guess there is more money in selling people a new machine instead.
Apple has gone too far in the thin and light direction. Every connector and every screw adds weight and thickness.
That's just how the entire industry has gone. Laptops from all manufacturers are increasingly less upgradable, to the point where a user being expected to easily disassemble a laptop is the exception rather than the rule.
Their Mac Pro tower and Server are actually in the opposite direction, and are completely tool-less. I even think the processor replacement is tool-less (the heat pipe is held down with a clamp rather than screws).
Apple is responsible for the ugliest computers, the most overpriced computers, the worst excesses of planned obsolescence, the most awful exploitation of workers in Asia.
@@NuntiusLegis You don't get out much, do you? So much hate.
@@timsmith2525 That is an interesting comment, so I checked it out: I went outside, but love for Apple did not come flowing to me.
Nice overview of the Lisa,. I remember seeing one at a computer store in Madison, WI when I was in middle school and thinking that it cost more than most new cars or a quarter of what a house cost at that time.
And still they saved paying a designer to have anything other then a beige block.
We are all so lucky... Seeing this on TH-cam... It is all so accessible... An Apple Lisa... That is a treasure. Thanks for sharing. Good luck talking care of that piece of History.
You can backup and restore X/ProFile cards using a USB CF card reader and dd on macOS or Linux. Basic Lisa Utility offers an img download to write directly to a CF card.
As a former computer repair technician... I have always liked looking at the inside of a computer.
Old Apple machines were incredibly accessible to service. I had an LC-475 in a similar case as the LCII, and you could click the top off, and install extra ram without a single tool.
Slightly disappointed you did not provide a spot rating of the Lisa cursor key layout in the "Worst Cursor Key Designs Of the 70s and 80s" contest.
Apple, at one time, thought that cursor keys are outdated because modern computers have a mouse. Yeah, right.
Btw, one thing I still sometimes miss nowadays is a feature the Amiga had: you could move the mouse pointer and emulate the mouse buttons with keyboard combinations. Because there is always this one piece of ~sh~ software which is only controllable by mouse. Like, when the tab key will always skip the "OK" button due to shoddy programming.
@@klausstock8020 Computing history is absolutely littered with terrible ideas about cursor keys (almost all of them, in fact) while the inverted T just continues to rule. And, agreed on the Amiga keyboard control over the pointer! Unintuitive to the uninitiated, but very valuable in a pinch.
@@jpcompton I had a honeywell bull XT compatible keyboard with a plus sign configuration for the cursor keys, with a blank centre key. Also the CTRL was where caps lock is now, and the caps lock was a physically locking key that stayed down (like on a typewriter). It was clear to me this was a WordStar Keyboard.
A little detective work on why some chips are all scratched up: You can see that only the chips in sockets are scratched, all the soldered chips still look new. I am guessing that a service engineer was called to fix this (or they sent it to apple), and he just swapped out the replaceable chips till it worked. Obviously the service engineer was a slob, and kept all his spare chips jumbled together in a bag where they got all scratched up!
It'ss simpler than that. Socketed ICs stand up higher, so when someone stacks boards on top of each other, that's what gets scratched by the board above.
@@mal2ksc Well, that’s possible, but I considered it too, and studied the way the scratches were placed on adjacent chips. They don’t match. And especially on the left 6522A chip, the distance between the parallel scratches is about the same as the pin spacing, suggesting that a naked chip had been dragged across it. Maybe you are right, but I think the weight of evidence is for the sloppy service engineer idea.
@@martinstent5339 The pin spacing of socket legs sticking out the back side of a board is exactly the same as the pin spacing of the naked IC. The spacing between the scratches is consistent with _both_ our ideas.
The socketed chips sit higher, protecting the ones on the board. The scratches appear when you stack the boards on top of each other outside of the computer.
@@stargazer7644 Neither of us can be 100% sure, but take a look at the apple ROMs, they are 2 EPROMS which actually stand up higher than the surrounding chips, but are completely unscratched. Also, as I said, the scratches on adjacent chips never line up in direction or intensity. As an (almost) lifelong service engineer, I think either reason would be poor practice. I always used to keep my spare boards in anti-static bags, as well as my spare chips, for which I had anti-static foam to protect their legs. Either way: Throwing the chips all in one bag or stacking the naked boards on top of each other, both were not very good practice 😊
Great video!
It held that value of 61 in it's calculator for who knows how many years until you cavalierly cleared it! :)
At least it wasn’t 42.
Great piece of history. I always wonder why they went away from the easy access and serviceability, but I guess times change. We should go back to that kind of thing though. Even though I understand that the warranty would be void, it is great to do things with your Computer. That is why I always stayed with Microsoft compatible PCs. At least you can move around your own components, upgrade. Still, what a fantastic video, the prices back then always fascinated me. EEVE blog had that hard drive 3.78 gb or something and back in the 1980 it cost like 250 000 !
Apple's actually went back and forth many times on the repairability of machines. On my Macbook Pro from 2013 the bottom panel simply screws off, and the RAM and hard drive can be easily swapped out/upgraded. Every decade since the '80s they've made some machines that are terribly inaccessible, and some that are at least pretty good if not great.
I would absolutely expect top notch building when you consider just how much money this machine was! This was TEN GRAND in 1983 dollars. That's buying a Model 3 Tesla today. The 20 year anniversary Mac, and possibly the first Mac portable is, I think, the only other desktop machine Apple made to be so ridiculously expensive. Even those machines were in the neighborhood of HALF of the cost as this, despite coming much later and with a lot of inflation.
Mind that more than $2,500 was just the cost of memory. This was pricey tech then.
(You really have to consider this as a business oriented workstation, something we don't have anymore, since - probably starting with i386 - even a modest PC can handle complex business software. But this was a market segment, then.)
Wow, the Lisa OS was really advanced for the time. I remember going to a computer show in 1983 and first seeing a Lisa. It was amazing to me, considering I had only seen the Apple II before that.
When I saw my first GUI computer, I thought, ok, but now I want to start computing, where is BASIC?
I would love to see a programming video for the Lisa! Please do that.
It would be interesting to see what the development software/environment for such a thing was. Everything tries so hard to be an office/desk analogy (except it's someone else you don't know's desk so nothing is where you think it is), so it would be interesting to see how that sort of thing may have affected its development environment.
I'm probably one of the few people outside of Apple who wrote Lisa Office software.
The software environment was a version of UCSD (Apple) Pascal, called the Lisa Programmer's Workshop. It had no graphical UI of its own, and you had to set aside space for it and install it. You would then use the boot menu to boot from it, and be presented with the traditional UCSD Filer menu.
The applications that could be written ranged from traditional text-only applications, to what Apple called "QuickPort" applications where you would be given a single LisaGraf context and you could do basic graphic operations within it, to being able to write Lisa Office applications in a special object-oriented variant of Pascal called Clascal, which was very much influenced by Mesa. You had to know who to ask at Apple to get the necessary support software for the Clascal compiler and libraries, and they were publicly released after the Lisa had been discontinued and the remaining stock converted into Macintosh XL systems (basically sold by Apple as Macintosh development systems due to the hard drive and 512K of RAM, before native Macintosh dev tools were available.)
@@tschak909 neato. Lots of information. Kinda sounded like a bit of a shitshow though. I'm not super familiar with apple or Mac development at the time or even today but it is neat to know what the tools were like at different times. Development on PC didn't differ a whole lot from development on Linux today. Just writing code in C or something and having a build system of some sort, possibly even gnu make and compiling and linking through shell commands. Some of the early stuff that tried to change things up or do its own thing is neat though.
"I'm not about to do any paperclip tricks with that" Wow! Shots Fired!
I wasn't thinking of THAT paperclip trick :) I just meant it as a generic hack, but apparently I have it backwards; the switch instead should be held open with cardboard to bypass it. I've been friends with David for over 15 years now, I wouldn't take a shot like that at him.
@@8_Bit Sorry if I offended you.
No offense taken, I can see how what I said could be taken that way. I just wanted to clear that up.
@@8_Bit When I was watching that (David Murray) video, as he started with the paperclip I was almost shouting "NO!" at the screen. Then he did it. What baffles me is why he posted the video TBH. I would have quietly just moved onto something else.
I got to use an original Mac when Apple sent one to my High School. This was like the same week they were put on sale to the public for the first time.
The keyboard was a cut-down design from the Lisa, so it had no separate numpad. That meant it had no arrow keys at all! It didn't have a CTRL key either.
Later edition keyboards added a CTRL key, as it was needed for the Terminal program!
Wow, look at the *SIZE* of those RAM cards! Man, have we come a long way or what?
The computers I worked on in the 80s had RAM cabinets the size of refrigerators. Each held a whopping 16 MB made up of individual 2k ram chips. We ran a memory diagnostic program each week and pulled the failed cards and swapped out the chips.
@@stargazer7644 We've come a long way, for sure. Look at the 128 gigabyte micro sd card in your phone (that you bought for less than $20) and compare that to the 256k module on your Amiga 1000 that cost $300. Crazy. Pretty soon memory cards will be free inside boxes of cereal!
@@JustWasted3HoursHere They're already giveaways - go to an electronics show and they're giving out material on thumb drives.
I LOLed at the video clip of “The Room”... Nicely done, Robin
#MARCHintosh! Thanks Robin!
Like the attention to detail that the card hinges are color-coded so that you both install the cards in the correct slot and so that you don't try to install them backwards
That computer changed the graphic arts industry. Especially the print industry. I worked for a company that was among the first to adopt them to use in our publication. Our typesetters insisted they weren't worried nothing would replace them. In a few years, type houses were dropping like flies. I've been a Mac user ever since.
My school sill had about 8 apple LISA computers in use when I was in middle school (1992-1994). They had IIgs's and the original mackintosh also but I remember having to use them when I was in the metal shop. Yeah I think that rather than get rid of them when they upgraded, they just moved them into the metal shop.
Awesome video !!! Best Lisa video on TH-cam !!
I always thought these were the best looking computer of the 80s. I always loved early “all in one” systems like these and the luggables of the day.
OS/2 which came out much later, also had a document-centered interface where you could "tear off" new documents from corresponding template icons. But OS/2 also allowed the user to open a program directly to create a new document. I love the short Tommy Wiseau clip. Very funny and unexpected.
It’s insane how the classic fanless Macs were dead silent without HDD’S.
I love that UI. I wish I had one of these or an old Mac.
Oh Hi Mark.
For that funky video format, would it be possible to capture the signal with a sufficiently-fast audio interface and then decode it into a video signal?
Interesting idea! I imagine the signal is too fast for that - the 22kHz is the horizontal frequency, and then there's 720 pixels per line, plus a retrace period, so the total bandwidth of the signal is about 20MHz.
... which makes me wonder how good the video quality on that output was, or if there were even any displays that used it. Regular composite video has a bandwidth of about 6MHz, so that 20MHz seems like a lot to pump down an RCA cable!
@@rjhelms Ah, yeah, I was feeling too out of it to do the math. A 20MHz signal would be pretty difficult to capture without highly specialized hardware. The best audio interfaces I know of only go up to 192KHz so that'd be able to get a horizontal resolution of around 8 pixels...
I wonder if there's any digital oscilloscope things that would be capable of this task, or maybe something weird one could do with a software-defined radio or something. Or even some random weird video capture ASIC which allows much more flexibility in its signaling.
maybe build a circuit to split the signal to RGB+sync and use a VGA or component PCIe/PCI capture card. Alternatively modify the video output circuitry of the Lisa 2 to output a standard composite signal.
VGA can go upto higher resolutions (including HD) than this with a good quality cable.
@@simontay4851 Why would it have RGB+sync? It's a monochrome display. And the actual plug is only a single conductor pair so there's no way for it to have a separate luma+sync signal.
I actually had the pleasure of playing around with a $10,000 Apple Lisa in 1983 when I was 13 at the time. It was at my mom's work and they had one in one of their offices so they let me play around with Draw which was impressive. I was like "Wow, this is amazing and I only have the Commodore Vic-20 at home!" Little I knew at the time this is a $10k machine vs $200 Commodore Vic-20. lol. Obviously we couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on Lisa but it did gave me an insight of what the future may bring.
16:00 - Apple. Bringing you planned obsolescence since 1983.
Thank you, disembodied hand that speaks to me!
Only Amigaaa no problem clock 🕒 😎👍
Yeah, I think it's good until 2038 or more.
Great video, nice to see all the parts and how it operates
First Mac I used was a Mac SE.
System 6.0.3 I believe.
68000 at 8mhz.
In a way the early Mac had less sophisticated software - no multitasking until 6.0.4.
The SE was faster than this, but no multitasking. I guess they modded the software to help speed things up. Despite not having multitasking 6.0.3 was a lot more mature than Lisa....most of that odd ball stuff had been worked out.
I really like this, I've never seen inside a Lisa or any of the 68k Macintoshes. I'd love more 68k content!
Great tour of a great machine and a futuristic OS! Had you presented this to someone with a C64 or PC in 1983 it would have been as if you showed a stone age person a metal knife. Not a very sharp one... but shiny nevertheless.
I didn't get the hype about the first cumbersome and slow GUIs. When I got (I think a cracked version of) GEOS for the C64, I looked at it, played with it, thought about possible use cases, then formatted the disk to put it to better use.
@@NuntiusLegis Same here. I was a kid back then and more interested in games. But GEOS came quite a while after the Lisa... and there was nothing like it at that point in time. Nothing that people could see and buy .. I guess.
Having seen both (literally side by side) as a child (age 12) very into computers in 1983, I wasn’t all that impressed when I saw the Lisa at a tradeshow in either Ft. Lauderdale or Miami. I thought the GUI was an interesting idea but also a very inefficient one as things ran rather slowly and it was only capable of black and white with a few gray scales (if I recall) for “colors”. It was certainly plenty adequate for basic business use and the WYSIWYG aspect would be very useful for those who needed help visualizing layout and typesetting in real time (versus inputting the same parameters into a text-only application like WordPerfect or Word Star and evaluating the result at print time), but you would never be able to do anything in color and you could forget any real sound capabilities unless you invested even more in external hardware…so forget using it as a presentation kiosk and one certainly would not play many graphic or sound oriented games on a Lisa and both its software library and user base were rather small by comparison to the non-GUI competition. The Lisa was most remarkable in the sense that they were among the first to introduce the business community to the concept of a graphical operating system, but it was with good reason that such OS’s did not become especially mainstream until the time of Windows 3/1990 and that was because it took awhile longer for the hardware capabilities to catch up to make such practical and without costing a huge premium. Much of the Lisa’s cost was tied up just in RAM alone as well as in the early hard drive needed to make it a practical and usable system. But I believe that what most held the Lisa back from any wider adoption was the cost and complexity of developing applications for it if one wanted to expand its capabilities much beyond the basic office functionality it shipped with as it is was primarily the huge software bases, including freeware, shareware, and commercial, that made the Apple II’s, Atari’s, Commodore C64 and the IBM PC XT & AT so widely popular throughout the 80s. That said, the C-64 did gain GEOS just 3 years later and the earliest iterations of Windows first released around that same time, though Windows was mostly just a curiosity until 3.0 was released in 1990 along with Windows versions of Word and Excel (and soon after the third-party app we know today as PowerPoint).
I use to repair these in a store in 1984-85. Seeing those modular pieces takes me back. Sadly, the Lisa had reliability issues. We had one running Xenix with a few serial port cards (for terminals) that Dominion Textiles used in their accounting department. Then the Compaq Deskpro 386 came out which ran Xenix even better.
Wow, I just had to look that up, and indeed, Microsoft and SCO ported Xenix to the Lisa 2. I cannot possibly imagine what they were thinking!
Thats right! Youre supposed to use the mouse. Dont you forget it!
the 6504 was used also in some CBM IEEE-488 dual disk drives.
Such a great video! Thank you for the tour!
The scene in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where the Apple folks steal Xerox:s IP is one of the best. Where Steve Jobs looks at the Xerox engineers and says "Don't worry, this wont hurt a bit" :) Masterpiece.
I remember vividly the first time i used one of these, i realized it was a revolution full of possibilities. So i asked excited to the sales representative, the told me it was an evolution of visicalc!
That clock icon: look closely and you'll see an Apple Watch!
Yet another excellent video!
I think the document based workflow is much more intuitive. Nobody has a “program” on their desk, but we all have paper, drawings, diaries etc on our desks. You want to work on the document you got yesterday? Just pick up the document and read / write on it! Only computer people think in terms of using programs.
And you can see that mindset reflected in tools like MacOS Preview, which from the name and from the initial experience seems to simply be a document viewer but actually turns out to be a multifaceted editor as well. But then--just like these early 80s interfaces--you say "okay cool how about you help me make something new?" and it says "nope, can't make a NEW document, that would be crazy!" and then you go okay well thanks anyway that's dumb.
The Mac had a successor chip called the SWIM - The Super Wozniak Integrated Machine.
Would definitely love to see some Lisa coding videos!