Apple ][ europlus, Lisa software, IIsi, Outbound

[Cosmo]

Kind of long story, i'm trying to make it short… a friend of mine (JuhaniL) told about a guy who used to have an company close by where our company used to be located (1993-2010) and who had an Apple Lisa. So i investigated and find the guy, by really a good luck with using some google-search. Found out that he had given the Lisa away for some Apple retailer about 10-15 years ago but said he had some other old things in his garage were all these came from. So, got these today:

(they were in a cold car for almost an half a day, so i keep them in normal temp. for an 24 hours before booting them up. Just in case).

- Apple ][ europlus (with Disk ][ interface card), works, all keys are there, not much yellowing (different plastics?) dates 01/83. It has an another card on it, but it doesn't look PAL-encoder card to me, unless it's an some kind of local hack..

- Apple Disk ][ -drive

- Lisa MacWorks (boxed with manual but missing the MacWrite and MacPaint manuals)

- Lisa Office System (Release 3) (boxed)

- Apple Lisa keyboard (Finnish) quite yellowed but all keys are there and they work, missing shortcuts paper under the keyboard.

- MacGolf (Game, 1985, with all inserts and paper works)

- Apple Works (disks set, 3x 5.25" and 2x3.5")

- Macintosh IIsi (not yet booted, but looks stock to me with the card riser)

- Outbound Laptop 125 (Macintosh clone - this is really neat!)

- Apple PC 5.25" drive - A9M0110 (never used? sealed cables)

- Apple extended keyboard (no yellowing)

- Apple Keyboard II (no yellowing)

- Geopot telecom adapter II

- Apple desktop bus mouse

- Graphics tablet (non Apple)

+ bunch of misc. cables

 

[Cosmo]

Some Lisa software.

 

[olePigeon]

That Outbound laptop is pretty cool.

 

[markyb86]

The Lisa used a large headphone type connector for the keyboard!?

 

[LCGuy]

Indeed it did. In fact ADB almost did as well, however in the end they found MiniDIN-4 to be a much more reliable connector.

 

[mcdermd]

That Europlus is great and the Outbound is about the best "bonus" you could wish for!

With a copy of MacWorks and a Finnish keyboard for the Lisa, you're destined to find one in the future.

 

[Cosmo]

Let's see if i can have the Outbound to boot up, need power adapter for it. Got two power adapters but either one looks original, need to check what it needs. No floppy drive. Would be cool to look inside. This baby needs original ROM from Macintosh Plus.

The ][ europlus do not have an PAL -encoder card, the other card looks like an 16k memory expansion. I'll hook it up on Monitor II tomorrow and see what happens. First these all need some cleaning.

All those disks look really clean, wonder if only used once. Naturally the labels are bit coming off due the old glue on them.

This guy used to sell Macintosh'es as well since 1985. I asked just over email, if he's kept any sales materials or, basicly anything from 80's.

Oh yes, i hope this is an sign for me to find an Apple Lisa 2 in 2013

 

[Cosmo]

How can i forget, the Apple ][ europlus did output PAL from internal connector but monocrome only. For color, the PAL-encoder card was needed. For time being, i might not get color output from the Philips monitor, wich i got for IIgs (cable hack on the way) as the IIe did not either.

 

[highlandcattle]

Super cool finds! Especially that outbound laptop thing! You should do a complete photo series of that. Hopefully it works and hopefully you can find your Apple 2

 

[trag]

If you ever talk to the guy again, would you mind asking him if he ever had the Docking Card for the 125? The Docking Card installed inside a Mac Plus or SE, and allowed you to connect the 125 to the Plus or SE by a cable and then you could use all the ports and drives on the Plus or SE and the second display, as well as the components on the 125.

The Outbound uses a 19VAC, 1.mumble (really close to 2) amp adapter. The rectifier to DC is built into the base of the 125. It's in that little metal can in the base. I have the specs for the plug somewhere. Radio Shack used to sell a compatible plug in their universal plug kit.

The 15 connector on the side of the 125 is *not* a VGA port. Do not plug in a monitor. You will blow the power supply.

Some photos: http://www.prismnet.com/~trag/Outbound/

Do you have the internal floppy drive or the internal hard drive? The 125 came with one or the other. If you have the internal hard drive, it can be inconvenient if you don't have an external floppy drive for it. That's an Outbound external floppy. There's no way to connect an Apple external floppy. On the bright side, the 125 uses a 1.44MB/800K/400K floppy even if the ROMs are from a Plus.

To turn the Outbound on, you hold down all four keys in the little picture on the keyboard simultaneously. Also, there is a battery compartment in the keyboard. The machine won't start if the keyboard has a flat battery. The battery is some kind of oddball lithium thing, but you can substitute two 'N' size batteries. They fit and the voltage is right. From the photo you provided, it looks like the battery compartment cover for the keyboard battery may be missing.

The main battery in the 125 is still available. It was a standard and common Panasonic camcorder battery. It's lead/acid and I think they're about $30 these days. Do not drain it all the way. Lead/acid does not recover from complete discharge very well. This is the opposite of NiCd which liked to go all the way down to zero.

Next to the main battery compartment, under a little metal plate is a 6V camera battery. This will preserve the Silicon Disk contents while you change the main battery. However, if you let the main battery go flat, this little camera battery will also go flat within a smallish number of hours, and it's a $6 - $8 disposable. So, either don't install it, or don't let the machine sit with a flat battery.

The silicon disk is a RAM disk composed of whatever memory you install in four SIMM sockets in the machine which are dedicated to that purpose. It can go up to at least 16MB of silicon disk. Back in the day, a 16MB hard drive was pretty respectable all by itself, and as long as the battery isn't flat, the disk is persistent. Shut the machine down, the silicon disk keeps its contents. I use the silicon disk as the main boot volume and the hard drive is really just there as back up and off-line storage.

On the back of the keyboard, you'll find a port for a mouse. That's for an old Microsoft Bus Mouse. Not PS2. Not serial. Not ADB. The pointing device is great, so you don't really need a mouse, but to prevent you plugging in other odd ball stuff. There is also a telephone cable type connector, which allows you to operate the keyboard in detached/cabled mode. Otherwise it communicates by IR, either with the keyboard at a distance or latched to the base unit.

 

[Cosmo]

trag - wow, thanks for all that information, very handy indeed. No battery on the keyboard, nor have the 3.5" floppy drive. I'll need to open this one up and see what it has inside. Very interesting.

 

[trag]

Lots of torx screws to undo to open it up.

On the edge of the base unit opposite the edge that has the ports, there is a rectangular cut out. It is either plugged with a plastic insert, accommodates the business end of a floppy drive, or is missing both and just open to the air, allowing you to peer inside. In the first or third cases, you lack the floppy drive. In the first and second cases, you may have a hard drive, although it may or may not still work. They used a lot of Prairie-Tek hard drives early on and the things were failure prone.

Only 20, 40, 60, and 80 MB hard drives work in the 125, according to Outbound tech support back in the day. I've never tested other drives in it. The Connor CP2064 and CP2084 work well, IIRC. I could be misremembering that. It seems like there was a Maxtor drive too. Anyway, they're all 2.5", IDE drives -- yes, IDE, not SCSI.

And really, if you have an opportunity, please ask the previous owner about the docking card. He probably never had one, but since he was a dealer, he is more likely than average to have had one, and he might have a lead to one. I really, really, really want a docking card. It's my holy grail of unobtained old Mac stuff.

If you lack a floppy drive, but have a working hard drive, and assuming you have an older Mac with serial ports, there is a work around for not having a floppy drive.

Open the unit up and if there is not a Silicon Disk installed, install some SIMMs in the four slots for the purpose (125 has 9 SIMM sockets, four for Silicon Disk, four for system RAM (4MB Max.) plus one more for the ROM SIMM).

Close her up and boot from the hard drive. Copy your system folder to the Silicon Disk. Set AppleTalk to communicate through one of the serial ports and connect a PhoneNet or LocalTalk network to another Mac. On that Mac, insert a floppy disk and then under System 7 or later share the floppy disk (pretty sure this worked back when). Back on the 125 use AppleShare in System 6 or 7 to mount the shared volume and then install whatever you need to.

If you want to change the OS on the hard drive, you can use the above method, just make sure you don't lose power (use battery & AC adapter) to the Silicon Drive while the hard drive is in the transition state.

The 125 does not work with systems past 7.0.1, I think. I'm pretty sure it does not work with 7.1.

In any event, when you install a new system from Apple disks, you need to run an Outbound installer utility. This utility makes some minor modifications to the OS and adds a bunch of Desk Accessories or Control Panels which are specific to the Outbound. It also detects the Outbound's hardware configuration and writes appropriate code to a pair of 64Kbit EEPROMs inside the machine.