EEVblog #696 - Apple Lisa Retro Computer Teardown

Dave tears down the 1983 vintage Apple Lisa, the first graphical user interface machine that pre-dates the Macintosh.

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[Dreamagine]

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!

[bartmaster]

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. 

[compu]

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 :)

[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!

[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.

[L]

Hi! I discovered this video thanks to the recommendation YouTube 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.

[cyrex]

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.

[shaneybrainy]

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

[wangruochuan]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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

[Landrew]

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.

[Corristo]

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

[stevenjensen]

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.

[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.

[tnito]

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!

[DSage]

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