EEVblog

Dave tears down the 1983 vintage Apple Lisa, the first graphical user interface machine that pre-dates the Macintosh.
Teardown photos: www.eevblog.com/2014/12/25/eev...
Datasheets:
Apple Lisa repair guide: ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/applelisa/Lisa_Do-It-Yourself_Guide.pdf
R6500 processor: www.datasheet4u.com/datasheet-...
AM2148 static RAM www.usbid.com/assets/datasheet...
AMD AM9512 floating point math co-processor: bitsavers.informatik.uni-stutt...
MOSTEK MK4564 www.minuszerodegrees.net/memor...
Switching regulator: www.ic72.com/pdf_file/r/66494.pdf
Apple Macintosh Teardown: • EEVblog #414 - Apple M...
Apple Newton Teardown: • EEVblog #418 - Mailbag...
Sanmina PCB's are still around! www.sanmina.com/components/pri...
Teardown Photos: www.eevblog.com/2014/12/25/eev...
Forum: www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eev...
EEVblog Main Web Site: www.eevblog.com
The 2nd EEVblog Channel: / eevblog2
Support the EEVblog through Patreon!
/ eevblog
EEVblog Amazon Store (Dave gets a cut):
astore.amazon.com/eevblogstore-20
Donations:
www.eevblog.com/donations/
Projects:
www.eevblog.com/projects/
Electronics Info Wiki:
www.eevblog.com/wiki/

[@DangitBobby1990]

I'm tearing you apart, Lisa!

[@christiangrey3645]

Dangit_Bobby Nice The Room reference play on words

[@Dreamagine1]

I have some information about Sanmina, one of the board manufacturers/assemblers. Sanmina is still very much alive and has many locations around the world. The company I work for sends all of our custom boards for our products to Sanmina's PCB assembly plant in Ottawa Canada to get populated as well as for any re-work that we cannot do in-house on RMA boards. Really neat to see that they helped make some of the memory boards in vintage Apple computers!

[@TheGooseproductions]

Really late to the party here but I work for an OEM in the medical field, and we contract out to Sanmina as well. One of our customers contracts a lot of their work out to them. It seems at least from my narrow view in the medical field that Sanmina does a significant amount of systems integration work as well.

[@bartmaster1234]

3325 is a Gregorian date code. The first number is the last number of the year, and the last three is the day. In this case, it would translate to the 325 day of 1983.

[@wangruochuan]

just imagine, 30 years later, theres a guy open your gtx1080, E5 rig and says OH MA GAWD, look at all this vantage stuff......

[@goose300183]

Yeah, I was thinking about that when I watched this. It's hard to imagine that the stuff we have now will be laughably basic in a few decades. Probably going to happen though!

[@vwestlife]

This could be a MacWorks XL machine. That was Sun Remarketing's custom ROM and software package which enabled the Lisa to run the Macintosh operating system and applications. It was popular enough that in 1985, Apple rebranded the Lisa as the "Macintosh XL" and bundled it with the MacWorks software. By that time, the price had been reduced to US$3995.

[@_lun4r_]

VWestlife why u here?

[@narayanansundararajan5112]

Interesting! Source?

[@brendanfarthing]

You could be right. I had forgotten about that until you mentioned it.

[@mgabrysSF]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa

[@LaurentLaSalle]

This *is* a Macintosh XL. Model number A6S0300, as shown at 7:02 and according to this : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Macintosh.

[@ChristophTrautwein]

I bought my Apple Lisa from Sun Remarketing in the old days and imported it to Germany. My uncle had to drive me to the Airport to pick up the machine an bring it through custom. Later I wrote my diploma using Ragtime on the Lisa. It still works but it does not boot from hard drive any more. I have to boot from 3,5" floppy. I would be very interested to have a second one and would be happy to get one through custom again.

[@Corristo89]

Remember when opening an Apple product didn't require special screwdrivers or voided the warranty? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[@looking_33]

Remember when there was no warranty?

[@nicbrownable]

+Corristo89 That would be the original Macintosh, released in early 1984. It used torx bits, which were not really available outside of specialist engineering stores at that time. The case screws were also recessed down a channel so narrow that a bitdriver wouldn't fit, and so long that a regular length screwdriver wouldn't reach. Even in the early 90s, the official driver tools were so expensive that I had to make my own by welding a bit to the end of a steel rod. To get the right size bit, I put my Mac Plus in a hiking backpack and rode my BMX to the engineering store.

[@JohnDoe-gm5qr]

+Nic Brown That may be the reason my Uncle doesn't like any bits that are not slotted and philips. He must still think that they are hard to get. Now these days you can get all of those things if you look in the right places even the 5 lobe security Torx bits. I know a place not too far from me that has a few odd specialty bits and these are hard to find ones that would be used on a Volkswagen. Just try looking for a 14 mm triple square bit. Some people even in hardware stores aren't even aware they exist in that size. It gets worse, some people don't know what they are and assume (make an ass out of u and me) that they are Torx when in fact triple square bits have 12 square points that are more like splines on an axle. They get the name triple square because if you overlayed three squares correctly you would see the shape of that bit. I have heard of people trying to use a Torx bit in a bolt made for a triple square but it is a bad idea unless you like broken bolts that are even harder yet to remove!! If you have a car that uses triple square bolts, make sure your mechanic knows what they are and has them. Some people hate triple squares because if the bolts or bits break it can be difficult to remove them. If you ever remove a bolt that uses a triple square bit to remove it, look to make sure that it is not cracked or rusted badly or you may be in for an unpleasant surprise next time you have to get it out.

[@lesliefranklin1870]

I still have the tool to open the original Macintosh. It has a torx on one end and a thing to fit in the crevice around the computer to pry the two case halves apart.

[@dwayne_dibley]

@@lesliefranklin1870 mine is branded as a “Mac cracker”. As you say, it’s just a torx but with a very long shaft

[@shaneybrainy13]

Nice to see AMD is still using the same logo to this day. Noticed a few AM chips on the board.

[@cyrex686]

I had a laptop with some corrosion issues that I was able to fix using brutal methods. Since I was about to toss it, I thought "why bother to be gentle?" So, I poured lacuqer thinner on the motherboard then went at with a toothbrush and high pressure shop air. After doing this a few times and taking extra care to get the solvent out form under the BGAs, it actually worked. I really didn't expect it to, but it did.

[@TheCentreforComputingHistory]

Cool. One of our Lisa machines has really bad corrosion like yours. Fortunately we've also got one that works well. Great video :)

[@L1701]

Hi! I discovered this video thanks to the recommendation KZbin made while I was watching one of 8-Bit Guy's videos, and I have to say, I really enjoyed this video. It was really neat to see the inside of such an old computer and show how much things had changed since the 80s when it come to computing. Real shame the computer was beyond repair, though. It would've been really awesome to see it restored to its full glory.

[@Landrew0]

I think this unit may have been built in 1983 as a Lisa 1, but didn't sell, therefore it was re-manufactured into a Lisa 2 in 1984.

[@BruceNitroxpro]

Landrew0, I think you are right about the remanufacturing of that computer.

[@Jeffkoertzen]

According to the serial number plate, it was manufactured on November 21, 1983. I believe the IO board was likely an upgrade as was one of the RAM boards since it shows dates of 1984 or 1985. It also has the parallel port which my Lisa (manufactured in August 1983) does not have. This Lisa was the 337th Lisa built by Apple. You are likely correct that it was probably originally intended as a Lisa 1 but was refitted and sold as a Lisa 2, especially due to the date it rolled off the assembly line prior to the Lisa 2 availability in January 1984. (I believe my Lisa was sold as a Lisa 1 and upgraded with the 3.5 inch floppy kit when it was offered by Apple to replace the Twiggy drives.) To break down the details I have provided, it’s based primarily on the serial number, A3325337. A = Manufactured in USA 3 = Manufactured in 1983 325 = 325th day of the year, Nov 21 337 = 337th Lisa

[@compu85]

As you mentioned at the end of the video this is a Lisa 2 or 2/5 - it didn't have an internal hard drive. That's what the parallel port on the back is for. The cable tucked into the expansion port area was an aftermarket hard drive add on - it would have looped out the back to plug into the rear parallel port. The 2/10 model had the port routed inside and connected to a massive 10mb hard disk. The expansion cards are actually ZIF sockets - turn the little metal rod and it spreads the pins, then you can simply slide the card into the back of the machine without taking the card cage out. Too bad about the batteries leaking on at one - it's a common problem. The Sun rom lets the Lisa use an 800k floppy drive. That power supply is from a later 2/10 model and is higher power. It also has a jumper inside for 240v operation. I have some videos of my 2/10 on my channel if you want to see one of these beasties in operation. It has an aftermarket (AST) memory board bringing it to 2mb, which helps the OS run a bit faster - the OS actually uses a swap file on the disk! The interlock switches don't do a soft power off - they cut power right away. The copy protection isn't too hard to get around, you simply use a hex editor to zero out a few bits at the start of the "master" diskettes. If you do decide to part it out I'd love to get the CRT board and power supply :)

[@t0nito]

I noticed the power supply had a jumper wire to select between 110V and 230V, and I can see that it's already set to 230V. Pretty cool that such an old SMPS had that feature!

[@JohnDoe-qx3zs]

I seem to recall the 1981 or 1982 IBM PC had it as an external switch, just like many older products without SMPS.

[@Calbrea]

I worked for Apple in 81-82 in their Stanton California facilities, 1st putting keyboards together and later testing them. Most if not all machines were still assembled and made in the US then but Apple decided to out source production so all parts made after 82 were made and assembled in Singapore and will have those stamps. I can see by some of the boards solder work the assembly was not as good and that is a surprise as Apple had pretty high standards. This is original work I see not reworked parts so our teams still were better trained the those that replaced us.

[@DanaTheInsane]

To be fair, Xerox was paid a big block of stock for that. It would be worth a staggering amount if they had actually KEPT it.

[@mojoblues66]

Dave stating that Apple "stole" PARCs IP is a wide-spread misconception. IP was licensed to Apple in exchange for stock. Also Dave saying that the PARC machines were nothing more than prototypes is not correct, they sold for 30k, which puts the Lisa and it's failure in perspective, because Apple basically tried to offer the same product for 20k less using stock hardware parts.

[@petegaslondon]

Poor ol' Xerox , just cant win can they? ;) All their brightest research geeks would show this unique cutting edge tech to the management, and theyre like "great kid - now how does this help us sell photocopiers?" Shot 'emsevles in the foot - again!

[@magalengo]

I’m sure that a lot of people that had held Apple stock back then are in the same boat.

[@BruceNitroxpro]

I write this since I bought a Lisa 2 back in April of 1984 for $8266.67, a figure which shall live in infamy. Things I noted about this retro review... my processor was touted as "the fast Motorola 68000, running at 3 Mc." (not 5). My original system package was a STANDARD 512 K RAM model with a $1000 (approx.) 512 K RAM upgrade board installed, composed of double sided 16K chips... wall to wall. The two RAM boards were identical to the darker version of the boards you found on this clunker. My system board had very FEW wire jumpers. Not sure what kind of board you found on this model. My EXTRA cost hard disk was an 8", 5 Megabyte hard drive which was attached with that parallel port and cable to a case which covered the top and matched the beige case (light beige, too... NO yellow!). It made a sound which had to be heard to be believed. I learned, you DON'T put a machine called a Lisa in your bedroom. (arrrrgh!) Your comment about the damned software serial number kluge was spot on. A killer. The software was called the Lisa 7/7 package and cost another $500. The package was the figure quoted for all hardware + software. It was not sluggish, in its day. It delivered amazing results, but NOT standardized for data comparison or sharing. The 7 pin printer could go all day (often did) and was a tank. That was part of the package, too. All in all, I was TOLD at the time that it would be upgraded and remain the flagship machine of Apple. They lied. I still use Apple gear because of the operating system design. I'm more prone to UNIX than Windows. Thank you for remembering this machine. There are 5000 more of them in their original boxes buried in the desert outside of Denver, Colorado, where Apple put them to rest rather than let anyone touch them. de KQ2E

[@3DSage]

There is something oddly interesting about seeing the guts and architect of old computers.

[@asdfasdf4345artsdfg]

Couldn't watch the whole video, but I hope you guys put that back together in the end and preserve it... this thing is rare and worth thousands of dollars, given the condition its in. Even if it's non-functional, it's still a big deal by itself.

[@RogerGarrett]

I had the opportunity to work with the Apple Lisa when it first came out and was expected to be "the next big thing". I was working in the R&D department of Compugraphic Corporation (they made huge, expensive typesetters) and they apparently were interested in new computers with at least some graphics capabilities. I actually got it to do some simple animation graphics. But basically we just played with it.

[@x689thanatos]

Thank you, it was a great teardown. This is sad that this old computer is passed away mainly due to battery acid.

[@FaSMaN]

Darn Suicide batteries, if only the original owners knew how much these machines will be worth today, they would take the 15minutes to remove them :( RIP Apple Lisa II

[@ReggieArford]

Those expansion board sockets are actually Zero Insertion Force sockets. Open the back panel, twist the handle to open the socket's contacts, and you can slide an expansion board from the back! (I had a Printer Card, with parallel ports.) Twist back to close the contacts, of course. Then take the appropriate cover plate from the back panel, put the panel on, and you're done. ZIF card slots - nice!

[@ahbushnell1]

We had a Lisa back in the day. I loved it.

[@drhoads08]

Just found your channel, love these teardowns!! Thanks!

[@dlbattle100]

I remember seeing an add for it when I was in high school. Showed it to my dad, he looked at the price and went into a rage lol.

[@fluidicice]

Awesome vids, glad I found your channel and love the 50fps much smoother from your previous ones.

[@eigenl]

This video is such a treat for Christmas. Thanks, Dave! :)

[@MarlosZappa]

Dave, your channel is AWESOME. Keep up the good work!

[@mphRagnarok]

FYI, Dave refers to PARC. which means Palo Alto Research Center . *sniff*, the legendary Xerox R&D lab.

[@arcadeuk]

It's a shame that Apple went from making cool, modular, repairable/up-gradable systems like this, to their current generation of ultra low build cost, non-up-gradable, disposable, 2 generations behind the times technology stuff that you see today

[@tubical71]

Today´s apple isn´t apple anymore, since Steve backtrack´ed hisself before he passed away (R.I.P.!)....It´s becoming just another phone/computer company only selling Steve´s ideas, as they running out of gas by now, anyway....

[@kalhana1]

arcadeuk If you want to optimise things at any cost in terms of having the largest possible battery size, thinest/lightest form factor possible, then you can do that by getting rid of DIMM slots and soldering the RAM to the main board, going for PCIe SSD sticks (mainly for speed) rather than 2.5"SATA format etc. Not everyone will like that due to the difficulty in upgrading of course. But most people want the highest performance possible packed into the smallest volume and weight with the highest battery life possible.

[@TheStevenWhiting]

arcadeuk Blame Steve Jobs, Wozniak always wanted his machine to be upgradeable.

[@kalhana1]

Steven Whiting I don't find this an issue anyway. Buy the top end macbook, sell it on eBay after ~2-3 years, repeat... All major manufacturers will slowly follow suit eventually in the next 5-10 years I expect. Just like everyone complained about mini-SIM, then micro-SIM. Having non-removable batteries, having no SD card slots, having no DVD drives in laptops etc. But in the end some of the other manufacturers have also followed suit with similar tradeoffs in their phones/laptops in order to improve form factor and battery size.

[@kalhana1]

arcadeuk I don't agree that they are 2 generations behind. While they usually take their time to perfect existing technologies rather than saying "We were 1st!" (touch ID for instance), they do have 1st to market features from time to time such as implementing the 1st 64bit architecture CPU on a phone. (Of course people can argue about the 4GB RAM thing and other people can argue that going 64bit sooner rather than later will prevent fragmentation similar to how windows have 32/64 bit issues and OS X doesn't) And if you've used a mac, you'd know that their notebooks are certainly no slouch and use top spec parts.

[@cmhenator]

This was probably an original Lisa that was upgraded to a Lisa 2/5 when Apple offered the upgrade (for free) in 1984. The main "tells" are the battery pack on the I/O board, the Lite Adapter, and the very different looking RAM cards. As far as I understand, Apple never actually sold the 2/5, it was only an upgrade from the original Lisa, which not only didn't have a built-in hard drive, but also only had 512KB RAM. The upgrade consisted of replacing the Twiggy floppies with the Sony microfloppy (and Lite adapter), replacing the faceplate, and adding an additional RAM card. Every original Lisa was sold with an external ProFile hard disk, hence there was no need for the internal one. You should definitely check out either the MAME/MESS Lisa emulation or LisaEm, the Lisa OS had a number of features that weren't present in the Mac OS until System 7, including virtual memory. (The 55ns AMD 1Kx4 RAMs and 74F logic by the CPU are its custom MMU.) It also didn't have open & save dialog boxes, because it could run the Desktop at the same time as applications, and thus didn't need them: They were invented by the Macintosh team to work around the fact they couldn't run Finder alongside an application. I'd also suggest checking out the programming details on Bitsavers: The low-level OS itself was very Unix-like and even had pipes and shared libraries. The high-level Application ToolKit (as it was called then) was a shared library written in Clascal, was a direct ancestor of MacApp, and an indirect ancestor of the NeXT frameworks in use on the Mac today. The overall class hierarchy is surprisingly modern. One place Lisa was entrenched for a while was NASA: They used a whole lot of Lisa systems running LisaProject to do Space Shuttle maintenance and launch scheduling, and I think Apple had to do a lot of work to help them bring over the documents to MacProject later in the 1980s.

[@RosePhoto1]

Best video for a lazy New Years Day! Brilliant as always! Thank you.

[@goyabee3200]

You can do it Dave! with all your years of electronics repair experience, YOU CAN REBUILD THIS!!!! If not, give me a list of all the anomalies and I will send repair kits all the way to Ausland (I live in east coast U.S.) just to get this this baby running... You don't know how much it means to me to get an original Apple Lisa running again.... This machine was pretty much the holy grail in terms of early 80's consumer electronics to me! PLEASE message me Dave!!!! I will not disappoint you! I promise!!!

[@goyabee3200]

John Hindrance That is my main email....

[@goyabee3200]

On second thought, will pay good money including shipping just to get this sent to me...

[@jabelsjabels]

Awesome! Would love to see just what it would take to repair that kind of corrosion, too. From an artistic standpoint, restoration of vintage hardware is going to be more and more important as museums look to restore / preserve works created with such hardware.

[@RogelioPerea]

Nice teardown! Thanks for posting.

[@pablopicaro7649]

2021 jan - happy new year. I remember the Lisa, was extrelmy expensive when new. Very rare to see even back when new.

[@greenpogo]

Merry Christmas Dave... Thanks for another year of great videos. :)

[@CharlieTechie]

I have 5 complete Apple Lisa computer in various states of disrepair. Hope to restore a few with the original 7/7 OS when I have the time and money. Good overview of the units.

[@PilotPlater]

that card edge connector... I don't think I've ever seen a board age that bad.

[@hairypaulmm7wab195]

brings back fun memories. Liked the Lisa (Had a modified V2) but still preferred The IIe Europlus for railway signalling educational projects as it was easier for students to get their heads around. There were Matsushita drives that were an easy retrofit for much more reliable operation :-)

[@-DeScruff]

I think I recall a fair bit of the Mac software was actually designed on Lisa machines. If you want even more weirdness the Lisa couldn't write it's own software, and needed a separate OS to do so. I think the Mac had the same problem which was why the software was developed on the Lisa till a few years later when a proper dev system was made.

[@goyabee3200]

I love the PCI/ISA expansion ports on the back!!!

[@app0the]

Oh, sad to see boards rot away like that. I missed the moment when my Mac Classic lost it's sound and when I opened it up to recap it... aww shit It got all new caps and now boots but sound and debugger buttons are now long gone, also possibly the floppy drive, can't test it, major bummer :(

[@stevenjensen8520]

Our family purchased a few Macs from Sun Remarking locally here in Logan Utah, the first was an 840AV. One was an Macintosh TV. It was a black LC or Performa IIRC. It had a TV tuner built in. I don't remember when Sun shut down but last I looked there was a CNC plasma cutting business in the building. I remember the roof had "SUN" written in white shingles. You could see it from miles away. Fond memories.

[@E-Box]

Repairing the traces and finding/replacing failed components on that Lisa would be pretty damn enjoyable. Yeah, late comment but I somehow stopped watching Dave's videos in 2011/2012 and have been trying to catch up on some of the uploads I missed.

[@iddqds]

I am sure this been asked many times before but what do you do to the things after you tear them down?

[@kendrickkelly2336]

The capacitor/pcb rot is not unexpected, but still heartbreaking to see. I hope you re-assembled the poor girl. As Indiana Jones once said: "It belongs in a museum!"

[@magces]

Yeah, Sanmina is still around. I used to work in one of their plants in Mexico debugging failures in satellite TV receivers assembled there.

[@nomadic_rider42]

Merry Christmas, Dave.

[@TheSageDad]

Did you find signatures of the build team inside the main cover, like the other mac?

[@f0cusNa0]

Thanks as always Dave! Very interesting!

[@guspaz]

I'm sure somebody else has posted the explanation of the date, but that's likely a Julian date code, typically used for food. The format is YDDD, where Y is the last digit of the year, and DDD is the number of days into the year. 3325 would then represent the 325th day of the 3rd year of the decade, likely 1983, giving us November 21st, 1983, I believe.

[@marklaffan]

wow, I remember setting one of these up at the department of stats in Canberra. A highlight of my work experience when I was at school :)

[@TrojanRabbit]

One of your luser files?

[@marklaffan]

Ha, could have been, but nothing went wrong :)

[@rcsandell]

What sort of design process/program would the apple engineers have used to design their PCBs? I see they have custom silkscreens etc

[@justinklrjms]

A friend and I tried to get a Lisa we found in his dad's garage working(his dad worked at apple in the beginning) were having no luck so we emailed Steve Jobs and he wrote us back at 1am. He asked us to tell my friends dad hello and wished us luck getting the lisa running, and that he wouldn't bother trying to fix it. Never did get it running that summer... ..... Memories.....

[@AlisonCassidy]

The 4K worth of 2148s are basically the Parameter RAM (PRAM), used to store clock time, boot volume, etc, etc. This model was used right up until the PPC came out.

[@tubical71]

Cool what a nice X-mas video gift for every EEVBlog viewer!! Thanx a lot, Dave!!!

[@xanokothe]

Handmade route board with that size? The guy had balls

[@tubical71]

Even best autorouters those old days had been cost a fortune and had been *veeeery* slooooow and produce non working boards may some 3 out of 5. So manual routing was the way to go and very common. I used to layout the boards all myself when working in that PCB design job. We used protel DXP and still had these unix based specctra autorouter. My boss bought it, some years ago and never get it to run. So i spent ample spare time to set it up and runnning finally on a "spare" HP-unix machine. Just to see how that specctra was all about....My boss went: "...i´m not gonna paying you for doing that..." I went, hey it´s all pure spare time....As i want to see this up and running. Those had been days....;)

[@xanokothe]

TubiCal Damn you bosses!

[@EEVblog]

Xano Trevisan Kothe Yeah, not overly hard to do a board that size by hand for a good PCB designer, just tedious.

[@xanokothe]

EEVblog thanks for the info. But I'm pretty sure I could not do that

[@AndreDing11]

the physical size is big, but the amount of traces is that many compare to today's boards.

[@ldchappell1]

$10,000 in 1983 is the same as $23,784.00 in 2015.

[@JerryEricsson]

Having been sent to rehab back in '93, I came out of college with a paralegal degree and no job prospect. Then a local lady called me, she ran some chain restaurants and needed a computer guy to do the book work for her stores. Well I took on the job, she had a nice PC for me to use, and she ran an early Macintosh. That was my first encounter with a decent mac, I liked it a bit, but found more joy with the PC and Windows 95

[@james1234168]

Wow ... That's pretty damn old :D love tear down Tuesday ... Best way to spend Christmas eve

[@swood440]

Yeah, about the memory boards, I haven't heard of Astro but Sanmina is definately in business, still stuffing boards and building chasses after all these years. Still based in San Jose, I believe

[@TopherBlairMusic]

Like watching the Crocodile Hunter wrangle PC's...

[@Everfrost1000]

I'd love to see that thing working again, even if it wasn't with the original parts.

[@w0mblemania]

It's amazing just how many engineers, hobbyists and assorted nerds just don't understand basic computer history, or choose to ignore it. SIMPLE VERSION: Apple didn't "steal" the idea of a GUI. They did a deal with Xerox, and then went on to develop their OWN system. But, people want to hate, and they don't care if they have to make up bullcrap to justify their hate.

[@unaliveeveryonenow]

Does not help that they brag they invented it.

[@unaliveeveryonenow]

Levi Dettwyler In their ad in Wall Street Journal titled "Welcome, IBM. Seriously" it is said "When we invented the first personal computer system...". The ad for Apple Lisa said "Apple invents the personal computer. Again." During iphone's announcement a mouse was put in the same picture with multi-touch display titled "revolutionary interfaces". It's not much of a statement but rather fuel for the annoying fanboys.

[@w0mblemania]

cyberconsumer Wait a minute. These things WERE revolutionary. Apple did indeed make the mouse a mainstream device. And they also made touch-devices mainstream. And desktop publishing. And the GUI mainstream. Of course marketing departments are going to boast and engage in hyperbole. But, so what? Apple have been a tremendous force for innovation throughout their history. Anyone denying that needs to read their history.

[@unaliveeveryonenow]

Technically IBM outsold Apple from the get go until Windows became mainstream. But the result of such marketing is fanboys going "How dare you bring up Apple didn't actually invent the mouse!?" Uh...

[@w0mblemania]

cyberconsumer Settle down. Nobody is saying Apple invented the mouse. But they successfully brought the GUI and mouse to mainstream computing. Read your history and stop trying to make arguments out of nothing.

[@PsoriasisChannel]

Shared watching in Milwaukee, Thanks.

[@louisvillaescusa]

According to the Los Angeles Times, Datapower fell on hard times soon after they had made this power supply. In Nov. of 1985 they posted a quarterly loss of $231,000 (citing cancelled orders) and went out of business in Nov. 1988. I'll bet that the failure of Lisa was a major factor in their demise.

[@texmanro]

I really enjoyed this video. Very good work!

[@richardcommins4926]

I designed and built 68000 CPU computer boards like this. Our company also bought an Apple Lisa 1. That was the computer where I first used a mouse. You are right that the price was $10,000 and ridiculous. Your video brought back lots of memories of computer development. Back then 2 MB of memory was great running at 5 MHz. Today's computers has 32 GB of memory running a 3 GHz. Boy have we come a long ways.

[@numbers9to0]

Ah the good old time, when the CPU didn't need a fan, nor a heat sink.

[@krnlg]

Oh wow, I didn't know that thing was so big! Nice machine.

[@JohnWoodell]

Sun Remarketing modified and sold refurbished Lisa machines that had a Macintosh ROM. My dad purchased one of these back in the day. There were some weird hacks to get it working because the Lisa's pixels were not square.

[@crazyboy2006cashier]

Happy Christmas Dave

[@NightWolfx03]

Alot of apple machines where killed by their batteries going bad, especially the ones that had the Maxell lithium batteries that would vent at some point after they died. I had an Mac IIci that the battery did this, not only did it wreck the board, but it damaged the floppy drive and the caustic fumes / vapor from the battery actually got inside the hard drive as well via the vent holes.

[@tubical71]

Not only computers, some great synthesisers gone that way as well.....all beond repair, NiCads are even worse and not uncommon as well.....it´s so sad.....

[@ziginox]

SMT Capacitors like to vent on some other Macs, like the SE/30. I've an LED signboard that I repaired with battery leakage damage, too. ):

[@THEtechknight]

I have repaired a few battery damaged boards. Not fun. But its doable.

[@mglmouser]

This was a Lisa 2/5 with built-in parallel port for the included Profile external 5 meg drive. The Lisa 2/10 came with build-in Widget 10meg hard drive and thus didn't have the parallel port-it was optional. Mine is a Lisa 2/10 WITH the optional parallel card for it's Profile 5meg drive (for a whopping 15megs of storage!).

[@cemx86]

Working at Motorola back in the 80's we bought a Lisa. It was GREAT except that every once in a while it would crash and all the folders we had created would be lost and all the individual files would litter the desktop. What a pain. I finally hit upon the idea of just creating a new "lost and found" folder each time it happened.

[@petersage5157]

That Lisa case would probably be great for the Piowulf cluster you talked about a few years later.

[@colinpye1430]

The NCR Tower32 did the same sort of thing, writing the machine serial number to the software distribution tapes on installation… Another neat thing about the Lisa system, it’s the only operating system I know of that lets you have more than one file with exactly the same file name.

[@Lapocabo]

You're the best Dude to look for the oldier's rig and all staff for ages lol

[@Jeffrey314159]

0:25 I learned about Apple Lisa over twenty years ago in an issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE OF INVENTION AND TECHNOLOGY magazine

[@JonathanSchattke]

I used a Xerox VersaCAD system in '84... VERY sweet CAD system using their Star GUI.

[@mglmouser]

There's a parallel port on the back, indicating this is a Lisa 2/5 which came with an external 5Meg Profile hard drive. It had no internal hard drive. So you didn't get screwed. The Lisa 2/10 came with an internal 10Meg hard drive and no parallel port on the motherboard. Adding one required the Parallel Interface expansion card.

[@karu6111]

Shieet, your hand gestures... so smooth.

[@tiitsaul9036]

what an elegant design!

[@thenaimis]

This video and comments prompted me to go remove batteries from some idle electronics. In one, corrosion had already started :-( What's a good way to put a stop to the corrosion (besides yanking the battery compartment itself, which I'm not above doing, I'd just rather do something less destructive)?

[@Mosfet510]

That's a classic! I remember this when it came out, and I believe it had a $10k price tag as well. I used this in a store, it was fun, played Transylvania. I believe it was either Computerland or Eatons department store (Yes, when department stores were big on selling systems) And was supposedly named after Steve Jobs daughter. Quite a piece of history there!

[@steveallen8800]

Apple rebranded the Lisa a few years later as the Mac XL with ROMs the run Mac software. I sold a few then I worked as a salesman in an Apple dealer.

[@b4ux1t3-tech]

The fact that they provided a parity bit in what amounts to a hobbyist or secretarial computer all the way back then is pretty cool. People give Apple a lot of crap for a lot of reasons. The fact of the matter is, they have always focused on security, stability, and user experience. Even at the expense of other aspects of their designs! EDIT; Also, I love how Dave keeps pointing out that several of he components were made in the USA! While I know that (nowadays) relative build quality is based more on amount paid rather than where it is manufactured, back in the day, the fact that a component was built in the USA basically meant that the design for the component went from the designers in Silicon Valley to the fabricators somewhere else in California (or, sometimes, elsewhere in the US!). That meant quicker revisions and better overall quality of the brand compared to the "cheap" stuff you could get overseas back then. Basically: Local manufacturing ftw! Go go gadget cheap development cycles!

[@vehasmaa]

Surprisingly advanced computer on that early... I was still playing with 8 bit computer with 16/64KB of memory :P

[@ScootsMcGirk]

I hope you get to see one of these in action, because they're very unusual computers. The Lisa was aimed pretty squarely at the desktop publishing industry, so its OS tried to replicate the feel of a graphic artist's desktop or whatever. As such, you didn't launch an application to start working on a new document; you "tore" a blank sheet of paper off a virtual pad, and assigned it a type (text, spreadsheet, drawing, etc.) The Lisa OS would then launch the appropriate application for you. The on-screen pixels were rectangular instead of square, presumably to better fit a portrait-style document on screen. Unlike the earliest versions of the Mac OS, the Lisa allowed overlapping windows and supported rudimentary multitasking. Its CRT used this weird long-persistence phosphor, which changed color slightly as it dimmed, and some even had a green CRT. They looked like something out of Colossus: The Forbin Project.

[@tookitogo]

Sorry to say, but this is wrong. The Lisa wasn't designed for desktop publishing (DTP); DTP hadn't been conceived yet. DTP was born on the Mac with the release of PageMaker, paired with Adobe PostScript on the LaserWriter printer.

[@sbreheny]

Sanmina is still around and they do full turnkey manufacturing, supposedly scalable from protos to full production.

[@gobblox38]

lol, look at all of those chips! It's amazing how far computer technology has come in just thirty years.

[@theblacksheep1000]

I SWEAR I FREAKING LOVE TAKING THINGS COMPLETELY APART just to see whats inside! Is that some kind of weird disorder I have??

[@qwertyasdf66]

Would it be possible to turn that into an oscilloscope? I've seen people tap audio directly into the X and Y of CRTs successfully, but i'm wondering about using a microcontroller to add some triggering or something.

[@petegaslondon]

Good thinking! Sometiems the horizontal defl coil is part and parcel of the tube EHT Flyback Transformer circuit, but thats ok - just cut the wires to the vertical coils and connect a speaker level signal - I'd do that to old TV's

[@MicedVolvo]

This years best Christmas present.

[@capth00k]

Sanmina is in San Jose -- they did something related to the PCB ; probably manufactured the first ones for apple before they found a better bulk rate :)

[@PCReboot]

Merry Christmas everyone!

[@stefanscholz2509]

That's how we built these things at the time. At the company I worked, these things were hand routed on grid parer. Yes, there was auto-routing, but it took more time and was rather limited in it's capabilities compared to a well trained engineer.

[@MrStuff414]

>6:63 AM >still watching EEVblog videos >no regrets