2nd/External Disk Drive On Lisa?

[Mac128]

I read Apple hinted that they intended to introduce an expansion card for adding an external 400K drive following the release of the Lisa 2, which only had one 400K drive. From what I can tell this never came to pass. I also cannot find any evidence that a third party offered an expansion card for this purpose either.

This seems odd considering that hard drives were so expensive and a basic Lisa 2 system with one 400K drive and 512K RAM would be no different than a 512K Mac, meaning an external disk drive was a necessity. I suppose upgrading to 1MB RAM would make a huge difference in making disk copies, or loading applications into a RAM disk, and would be a better investment than an external drive.

I was informed that the Lisa's 400K disk controller card supports 2 drives and a second drive could be hacked onto the card. Is anyone aware of this particular hack? Considering the Mac ROM supported two drives, MacWorks should support the hack.

Since the Lisa software required a hard drive, a second 400K disk was probably deemed unnecessary. Although, I can think of a number of times I have needed two floppy drives when I had a hard drive – especially in those days when many applications would not work properly from a hard drive and key disks were needed to authorize copies of an application.

 

[gilles]

Disk controler for lisa was designed for 2x Twiggy drives.

When controler was adapted to 3.5inch, the ROM was written only for 1 drive so, even if hardwork should work with 2 drives. The software in ROM will probably not (In fact, it's exacly the bug that has broken lisa emulation in MESS emulator).

Maybe some version of rom will work (you can test with 800kb roms...)

 

[Anonymous Freak]

To my understanding, *EVERY* Lisa 2 (and Macintosh XL) shipped with an internal hard drive. That was pretty much the big selling point over a 'real' Macintosh.

The original dual-Twiggy Lisa didn't come with a hard drive; but also from what I recall, nearly every one was sold with an external hard drive.

 

[gilles]

To my understanding, *EVERY* Lisa 2 (and Macintosh XL) shipped with an internal hard drive. That was pretty much the big selling point over a 'real' Macintosh.
The original dual-Twiggy Lisa didn't come with a hard drive; but also from what I recall, nearly every one was sold with an external hard drive.

Every lisa 2/10 shipped with a hard drive.

Some lisa 2 were sold without, some were even sold with only 512kb ram... probably... you cannot know exactly how many lisa were sold

 

[Scott Baret]

It was very common to see Lisa 2s sold with an external 5MB ProFile instead of an internal drive. As I recall Apple marketed the Lisa 2 in three configurations: base, 5MB external, 10MB internal. I'm not sure which model came with which amount of RAM, but I'm guessing all 10MB hard drive computers came with 1MB; I'm thinking it was an option on the lower-end ones.

On a 512K Lisa, are there two 256K boards or one 512K? I've got a 2/10 and it's got two huge 512K boards (the RAM boards are about as big as the screen for those who have never had to replace one; I still have the dead one I pulled somewhere and used to have it on display next to a modern RAM chip to show how far we've come).