1983 Apple Lisa Computer with Twiggy Drives Booting Lisa OS 1.2
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มิ.ย. 2024
- In which I boot a rare surviving Apple Lisa-1 computer and demonstrate Lisa OS 1.2 and it’s tools. Also features a demonstration of the “Twiggy” disk drive. This computer can be viewed and demonstrated in person at The BYTE Shop computer museum in Boston, MA: 48 South St in Jamaica Plain 02130.
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Thanks for sharing this; I've never actually seen a twiggy drive operate, nor a demo of the Lisa OS.... man... those wait times are horrid...
Very cool! I saw this Lisa a few weeks ago in person, and here it is in my feed on TH-cam!
something beautiful about the color logo with the black and white graphics.
A coworker of mine recently revealed to me that he was one of the few third-party developers who developed software for the Mac before it was released. They had to use the Lisa as a development machine. His Lisa was originally a Twiggy unit, but Apple shipped them the 3.5" upgrade and he installed it himself.
Does he still have the machine?
I was at Apple at the time of "Twiggy" development and was on the development team in the Peripherals division, as it was called at the time. I wrote test code for Twiggy drives, exercising the drives, reading, writing, logging errors, etc. I wrote and rewrote the code several times over in an effort to improve the test results. It seems management couldn't believe the high error rate and was sure the test code was incorrectly reporting a high failure rate. It wasn't.
Twiggy did indeed have two read/write heads as you say, one on top (forward of the spindle) and one underneath (behind the spindle). The heads were mounted to a single fixture and so did not move independently. Wikipedia has a nice writeup if you want all the details.
Macintosh was in development at the time of course and the prototypes we had were equipped with Twiggy. The Mac almost went to market with Twiggy, but Sony came along with the 400k drive just in time for us to use it instead.
Wow! Thanks for your comment. What an honor to hear from someone who was involved in development. Do you still have any twiggy related equipment or disks? I've been doing some historical preservation work, archiving twiggy based software and whatnot, and I'm always excited to find previously unknown of software on this media. If you happen to have anything please feel free to reach out to me via email at info@byteshop.io
@@timothycolegrove4365 No, I don't have anything. Sorry. At the time it was just a (mostly) failed attempt at a new type of floppy and had no historical significance. Wouldn't have been allowed to take anything anyway.
Funny you should use the word "honor". It sure wasn't at the time. If asked, I would admit to working on it, but I never volunteered to talk about it. Folks familiar with Twiggy would give you a look.
hello sir. would you know how a hobbyist could come across some of these drive tests codes or anything similar ? also would it be possible now days to enhance the twiggy drives or make them more reliable?
@@solodobo Everything is long gone of course. The test code was written in Apple /// Pascal and run on Apple ///s with special Twiggy test cards. I don't believe there is anything that could be done to make Twiggy drives more reliable as we would have done so at the time. The design was just inherently error prone.
@vmhanlon - Always love hearing from Apple engineers who worked on the original systems (Apple II, III, Lisa, early Mac). On a side note, did you know anyone in the engineering teams who worked on the Apple IIx, Cortland/Gumby projects? Always wondered about any developments on the Apple II side that never made it past the prototype phase, so little is known about the Apple IIsi, Apple IIp or the Mark Twain (other than the few prototypes that leaked several years ago).
That is mint! I still have my G4 Graphite from 2000 in mint cond.
Very cool. Funny how you're waiting for the "calculator" to start for a good while with it, from a modern perspective especially.
I'd never seen an actual working Lisa until now. I was working at an Apple dealership in Amarillo when the Lisa project was announced, but my store (or any other stores that I was in contact with) ever got a demo model. All we had were flyers. It's great to see the origin of what would become the Mac interface. I bought one of the first Macs (the Fat Mac 512K) and loved it.
I saw a Lisa in operation in '83, in the home of a college professor of art & industrial design who hired me on for his personal sideline (an exhibition display system). He pretty much defined what would later become the core Apple Computer constituency -- artistic people with more money than good sense.
Wow 😲 That incredible apple 🍏.. Love that PC with the lotus 123 and joy stick too 😎👍
The best Apple Lisa Video on TH-cam :D
Thanks!
Wow, this makes me feel old. I think I'll lie down and take a nap.
Congratulations on your restoration work! In 1983 the Lisa was nothing short of magic, despite the "majestic" speed. My first job at Apple was working the tech support phone line for Lisa customers. There weren't very many customers (partly because the system cost $10,000), so I had plenty of time to learn a lot about the Lisa. I loved it and got to play with the Lisa Development System too. IIRC one of the cool features was that you could take the Lisa completely apart with no tools. Maybe you could do that for a future video?
Good idea.
@@timothycolegrove4365 I’ve got an apple work group server there first one from 93 something is wrong it makes the bong then the crash failure sound
Thanks for showing this. Always daydreamed about these as a kid. Then I got an Atari ST and once you see color on your monitor you never want to go back to greyscale. This is really neat to see. My first hard drive was 10MB.
It’s true about color! I never understood how the compact Macintosh line went without color for so long.
My first hard drive was 10 GB
Amazing! A complete graphical user interface in 1983, when PCs had only a command line...
PS, hello from the CCU group 😀
And three visits to Xerox PARC to see its technology...
It's awesome to see a twiggy Lisa running, one of my holy grail machines that I know I'll never own. However, I do have a Lisa 2/5 (upgraded from a twiggy) and a Mac XL so get to play with and demonstrate them whenever I get the chance. When I first saw the Lisa in Apr 83 in the UK I said 'I want one!' Took me 17 years and by pure chance got my first one on holiday in Boston MA. Getting it back to the UK was a chalenge :) Thanks for the demo!
My brother has two Lisas in disrepair that we’ve been meaning to repair for over a decade. I keep hoping to run into Lisa material on TH-cam but there is so little! So, I really appreciate this demo! I’ve never seen past halfway through the boot process 😅
Do your brothers Lisa’s have two 5.25” drives like this one? If you’re anywhere near Boston I might be able to help you restore them.
@@timothycolegrove4365 No, they have internal harddrives and single 3.5" floppy drives. Stockholm, Sweden is unfortunately really far from Boston 😅
Awesome episode!
I worked at Bethlehem Steel at the time. Beth. Steel was actually quite progressive on the "IT" front (hard to believe, but true). There was a computer lab where you could work on all kinds of equipment including a Lisa. I guess I spent too much time using it, because when the Mac was announced in 1984, I ended up buying one those early 128K Macs. Yes, they were slow, but the user interface was absolutely revolutionary at the time.
Do you recall if the one you worked on had one or two floppy drives?
@@timothycolegrove4365 Sorry, I don't remember.
It is a beautiful machine
Thanks!
Love this! I really wish Apple would have continued this form-factor beyond the Macintosh XL, but I understand the classic Mac design was more versatile in its compactness and cheaper to produce. I've never witnessed a functional Lisa in person so must live vicariously through TH-cam videos lol Cheers!
If you’re ever in the Boston area you’re welcome to visit!
@@timothycolegrove4365 awesome!! Last time I was in the area, and it was a very short amount of time, was back in 2005. Well overdue for a trip.
So advanced for the time.
I just glanced at Wikipedia: A 5 Mhz processor and 1 Meg of RAM. I thought that was a printer sitting on the top at first glance. Jef Raskin might've made something work as he was shooting for under $1,000 but Jobs completely derailed anything that might be viable.
Looks like your machine is in great shape!
It's amazing how much faster LOS 3.0 is. The rewrite of QuickDraw to 68k assembly really helped.
It’s in pretty good shape. A few weird quirks but otherwise solid. Too bad LOS 3.0 was never released on twiggy!
I like this form-factor PC, I would want the shell and modern hardware inside.
If you find one of these don’t gut it! They’re exceptionally hard to find.
Wow, Steve Jobs had his brilliant way of showing how powerful the mouse is: BY REMOVING ANY CURSOR KEYS from the keyboard. I would have hated that. Glad to have switched to the PC-compatible world then. Never looked back. The MAIN kicker for me was that developing Mac software would have required a Lisa 2. What a strange idea.
It would be funny to make your modern pc look like this
Thank you for sharing ❤
Pretty cool Tim!
Thanks!
Nice demonstration. The wait times for doing anything would have gotten on my nerves if I had to use that machine. The first Apple product that I worked with was a Mac LC in 1991. Thankfully, that was a lot peppier.
Agreed!
The Lisa OS was, by far, a better design than the original Macintosh system. That's kind of tragic since the template/document metaphor was both innovative and useful. We'd be in a vastly better place had that metaphor taken hold.
It was certainly a more familiar metaphor, fitting for the time it was released.
How isn't anyone talking about his mouse pad that is a small rug
job's hey I want to make a drive that is HD that will hold more data but I want to have the read opening where people are going to grab the disk.
i bet they where Called unreliable because people where removing the disk and touching the disk surface.
why did the Lisa and Mac use the built-in monitor design? Seems very limiting.
Some points: it was a popular form factor for office computers of the time in general. Even when systems used separate monitors they often had the keyboard integrated. For the original Macintosh they wanted it to be compact and even portable. There was an official Mac backpack you could buy to lug your Mac around in.
Wow ssssssssloooooooowwwwww
dir/w
Is that the same computer see in the movie the thing ? In witch Kurt Russell calls a cheating bitch then he pause is drink into it witch causes it to explode !! 💥 Is it the same one ???????