Lisa?

[mactjaap]

Thanks a lot Bunsen and applefreak!

So to conclude about the model number:

A6S0300(P)

It is a Lisa 2/10 or Macintosh XL. Also reverred to as a Lisa XL.

I found an article on:

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/computers/lisa2.html

which makes it clear for me that the Lisa 2/10, Lisa XL, Macintosh XL are basicly the same machine:

Models in this Series:Lisa 2: basic system, still used Lisa OS 7/7.

Lisa 2/5: Lisa 2 with 5MB Widget drive.

Lisa 2/10: Lisa 2 with 10MB Widget drive.

Macintosh XL: same computer, different name. No longer ran Lisa OS 7/7 or bundled application suite. Now ran the Mac emulator, MacWorks.

Remains ....what is the infomation you can read from the serial sticker?

-Is there a production date on like on Compact Mac's?

- Is there location information on?

- What is an Applenet No.?

- The word Manufactured... is it a date code? Or a location code? Or just an internal number???

Sticker:

 

[applefreak]

Apple engineers on the Apple Lisa team were working on the design of a local area networking system known as "AppleNet", based on the Xerox XNS protocol stack running at 1 Mbit/s

The Technical Support people will need the AppleNet number and the ROM's serial number.

starting up a lisa in service mode displays the serial number and applenet number

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Was Apple actually using the "Twiggy Drive" in the Lisa?

I did a LOT of research on it back in the day. IIRC, I discovered that the Twiggy drive project was an abject failure and wasn't considered ready to ship for the Mac at its introduction. Hence, I'd be very surprised if they had used it on the original Lisa. The Mac was originally designed to use the Shugart 5.25" FDD. Now I wish I'd taken Tom Owad up on writing an article about how I came up with all the information I did in determining this to be the case. It's probably all still in the 'fritter archive."

Maybe next I'll . . .

. . . I can't even find a link to the old 'fritter forums archive over there! 8-o

 

[Byrd]

Did the glaring spectacled man come with the Lisa too?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The old 'fritter archives are down, so I can't access the research I did to determine that the Mac was designed around the 5.25" Shugart Drive, not the "Twiggy Drive," as is commonly ASSuMEd!

I'd greatly appreciate any first-hand in-hand information on the FDD Mechanism hiding behind the Lisa's front bezel! Pictures would be REALLY COOL! :?:

 

[jpolster2009]

It does not run off of standard Composite! It cant! Remember the lisa doesnt have square pixels!

 

[applefreak]

Remember the lisa doesnt have square pixels!

its shows up the half (a part) of the display like the Lisa 2 does without the Apple Lisa Screen Mod Hardware Kit

 

[H3NRY]

"The old 'fritter archives are down, so I can't access the research I did to determine that the Mac was designed around the 5.25" Shugart Drive, not the "Twiggy Drive," as is commonly ASSuMEd!"

Since the Twiggy drive was the same size and shape as the Shugart 390 or the Alps copy that Apple used later for the Apple II and Apple /// series, the first Mac chassis were probably fitted with whatever was lying around the office, and that would be more likely an Apple II drive than a Twiggy, which was relatively rare even within Apple, because there were so many production glitches. However, the early Mac prototypes DID have Twiggy drives, and that was what Steve intended to ship before Burrell Smith started designing in the vastly superior Sony 3.5" drives.

Why is it people will do research on the web and come up with strange conclusions despite the written descriptions of people who were there at the time? Read about disk drives on folklore.org, or look at some of the Mac prototypes in museums. Apple swapped my early Twiggy prototype for a Sony prototype when they changed drives. Good thing, since the Twiggy drive I had was flaky. It could read its own disks most of the time, but was very poor at reading a disk written on another drive. And no, I don't have that prototype. Apple wanted it back when the Mac was about to ship, and they sent Beck-Tech a couple of production Macs.

The people who designed the Mac are still alive. Ask them.

As for square pixels, remember that NTSC "pixels" aren't square either. They are probably closer to Lisa-shape than Mac-shape, if they can be said to have any shape at all, since NTSC is not a pixel-based but analog system. The horizontal resolution is greater than vertical, so NTSC pixels are usually taller than they are wide, as in the Amiga, Apple //e, Apple ///, IBM CGA, Atari, etc. Like the Mac, Lisa isn't NTSC-compatible.

Not well-known or documented, the first Mac II video card aka the Toby Frame Buffer can output "NTSC" interlaced RGB. You need a little control panel which was available to developers who didn't have an Apple Hi-Res RGB monitor. I drove my Apple II RGB monitor that way for a month until Apple filled my order for a Trinitron. Remember that Apple II RGB with the motorized tilt control?

 

[Gorgonops]

Like the Mac, Lisa isn't NTSC-compatible...

Of course it isn't, but...

Earlier there was the suggestion of putting the guts of a compact Mac into this gutted Lisa's case, and I do have to vaguely wonder if the Lisa monitor might be able to sync up with the output from that. I'll admit I don't know nuttin about birthin' no babies when it comes to the specifics, but based solely on a read of the specs and a look at the monitor board schematic on sunder.net it seems to me in principle you might be able to Frankenstein a compact Mac board into a Lisa. Both monitors are TTL and what specs I've been able to find indicates that they both run at 60hz and have approximately the same vertical resolution. (342 vs 364 lines. The latter figure changes to 431 with MacXL "square pixels" modification. I have no idea if the XL screen mod involved swapping out the monitor board or simply adjusting it. If it's the former then you might have less luck with an "XL-ed" Lisa 2's monitor than a plain one.)

Anyway. Someone with more monitor hacking experience might be able to shed more light on this. Granted the 512x342 on a 12" monitor you'd end up with would give your mutant hybrid a sort of Fisher-Price "My First Mac" vibe, but.. that's the best reason to do it!

I'd greatly appreciate any first-hand in-hand information on the FDD Mechanism hiding behind the Lisa's front bezel! Pictures would be REALLY COOL! :?:

The Lisa 2 was the same drive as the Mac 128k so far as I know. If you're looking for pictures of Lisa 1 "Twiggy" mechanisms a Google image search for "Apple Lisa Twiggy" will net you plenty of pictures. Here's a site with some. The drive itself isn't much to look at.

(Note the Lisa in these pictures sold for $10,000 a few years ago)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I did some digging around in my iDisk backups from back in the day and found the two most convincing pieces of evidence that the Shugart Drive was, at the very least, considered in the early stages of Mac development.

I never said that all the early ProtoMacs were based upon the Shugart FDD, ISTR that there were several case designs vying for early prototyping. IIRC, from research done about 9 years ago, the final 128k form factor was a late to the gate entry and that Steve Jobs had wanted to use the "Twiggy Drive" up until the very last second. I'm pretty sure that I included quoted txt from several sources on the design process from the folks who'd done the work, but I'm not certain and I can't check it out.

I'm sure that the Lisa didn't use the Shugart FDD, that's fairly obvious from the pics. I just wanted to KNOW that they used the "Twiggy Drive" from someone who had their hands on an actual Lisa. I'm unfamiliar with the third drive you mentioned, so I'll need to research that one now too! [] ]'>

ClearShugartProtoMacHack™

Reference materials:

IIRC, the ShugartProtoMac pic was, ostensibly, from a scan out of Appledesign that I found somewhere in my searches. I did a cut & paste of the front part of the Shugart Mechanism Pic I'd found and aligned it as best I could with the Appledesign scan. I have a lot of shots of two Lisa Style FDD ProtoMac, as shown in the early advert, that I've collected over the years. There is one conspicuous difference, the "Twiggy" ProtoMac Case has the asymmetrical opening of the Lisa, but no holes for the oddly offset eject button, nor does the case in the advert appear to have provision for the button for that matter.

Still curious about all of this, but the ClearShugartProtoMacHack™ has been bubbling up from the back of my mind with regularity ever since I found that very cool pic. I wonder if it was done by FrogDesign?

Thanks for the link to the drive bay pics, G!

 

[Bunsen]

/MOD/ Discussions about this Lisa belong in this thread. Any discussions about that other Lisa belong in its own thread.

 

[Bunsen]

Like the Mac, Lisa isn't NTSC-compatible.

Course. For starters it will be progressive scan, not interlaced, and no doubt the scan timings are all out as well. I realised that after posting and my apologies for leaving a red herring in thread.

 

[LCGuy]

IIRC, I discovered that the Twiggy drive project was an abject failure and wasn't considered ready to ship for the Mac at its introduction. Hence, I'd be very surprised if they had used it on the original Lisa. The Mac was originally designed to use the Shugart 5.25" FDD.

Actually the Twiggy most certainly was used on the Lisa 1...and was also going to be used on the original Macintosh until they decided to switch to the Sony 3.5" Microfloppy. Indeed, if you have a look through the manual for the original Macintosh, you'll see a few photos of prototype Macs with Twiggy drives.

 

[jpolster2009]

what Id like to know is how could apple have used a shugart 5.25 drive on a mac? it doesnt have motorized eject or a mechanism for autodetecting disks

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Uncle!!! ) The release of the Lisa would likely be the reason the Twiggy Drives were determined to be a failure and the reason for the development of the 3.5" Sony Micro Floppy equipped Lisa. I just wanted to verify that the first Lisas actually shipped with the Twiggy Drive. It made little sense to me that Apple would have used it for the Lisa and rejected it for the Mac. Production problems with the Twiggy would explain away that overly skeptical concern.

The concept design sketch above could well have been developed after the TwiggyProtoMac case design prototypes were already complete. ISTR that the Shugart Drives were considered as an alternative to the Twiggy Drive before the 3.5" Drives were developed, which I found in a quote from a member of the Mac design team. It doesn't surprise me at all that they would have had a backup plan in place, if only on paper, after the Twiggy Drive's failure. I never found a reference to Burrell Smith's having designed the "Sony Micro Floppy Drive," that's a very interesting tidbit!

H3NRY, did the prototype you handled have the same eject button arrangement as the Lisa?

The TwiggyProtoMac is the other candidate for a Clear ProtoMac Hack I have in mind, but I want to play around with vacuum forming plexi before tackling that one! Doing a forming buck for something that complex will be more than a trivial bit of work.

OK, here's the last bit of OT ProtoMac idiocy for this thread, I'm very interested in your experience with these cases, H3NRY!

__________________

 

[Gorgonops]

what Id like to know is how could apple have used a shugart 5.25 drive on a mac? it doesnt have motorized eject

Just imagine if you will: Instead of auto-ejecting a window pops up on the screen of the Macintosh when it's done with a disk and instructs the user to "Please remove disk from floppy drive #1".

(I know, it's a stretch, but isn't it awesome? With that one simple suggestion I've just cut the price of the Macintosh drive mechanism significantly. Now if we ditch that silly auto-inject system we can *really* start saving some money...)

or a mechanism for autodetecting disks

Add a fifty cent microswitch and a "disk present" sense line to their already custom drive controller board?

I never found a reference to Burrell Smith's having designed the "Sony Micro Floppy Drive," that's a very interesting tidbit!

Just to clarify, Burrell Smith didn't design the Sony 3 1/2 inch *drive*. He may of had a hand in the modifications that Apple put into the custom version they had made for the Macintosh but he by no means designed *the drive*. (The first Sony 3 1/2 drives hit the market in 1981 and companies like HP had used them for several years before Apple discovered them.) Here's folklore.org's take on the adoption of the Sony drive over the Twiggy.

As to using the Apple ][ 5 1/4 inch disk drive very early Macintosh prototypes used them, but I suspect "prototype" in this context means "circuit card screwed to a board". Color me skeptical that they ever made any "real" cases incorporating them, but it is of course very possible that the Appledesign concept sketch you linked in dates to an era where Apple ][-drive utilizing prototypes were what was floating around the office. (Thus making it perfectly logical for the artists/draftsmen to use them as component references when spitting out design drafts.)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Curiouser & curioser . . .

. . . found a link to the best ProtoApple pics I've ever seen and the source for the pics to which you linked, EudiG! The "original size " pics are just amazing! here's a link to the "Twiggy Drive pic" at its original size:




. . . and here's one to the rest of the pics showing the missing Lisa bits and the entire photo stream:




Head to the left or click on the "Concepts link and Prototype Links" to find some really great stuff, gang! [] ]'>

Apple Concepts Link:




Apple Prototypes Link:

 

[Gorgonops]

So Trash... just as an aside I really love those pictures you posted of the Twiggy-drive prototype Mac faceplate that someone took a jigsaw to in order to fit the Sony drive in behind it. Now who does that remind me of... Oh yeah!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Thanks for the link to folklore.org, EudiG! I love it! I don't believe any such well organized references were available 8-9 years ago when I tried to put my (now obviously mistaken) research materials together. You H3NRY and the gang have made my "ShugartProtoMackHack™" a much more simple exercise, now I can use any old Apple II drive to hide the slot loading optical drive . . .

. . . but I'll be needing a new name for it though. :-/

Back OT, for a change . . . : . . . the detail shots of the Lisa should make it easier to envision what might be crammed into an empty shell.

 

[jpolster2009]

I couldnt imagine a mac without disk ejection