Tech enthusiast and YouTuber Alex Anderson-McLeod has given new life to the Apple Lisa, which is the company’s first commercial computer with a graphical interface and has been in production since 1983.
Tech enthusiast and YouTuber Alex Anderson-McLeod has given new life to the Apple Lisa, which is the company’s first commercial computer with a graphical interface and has been in production since 1983.
As Tom’s Hardware writes, citing a video by Anderson-McLeod, where he talks in detail about his experience, the Apple Lisa was «breathed» into new life and significantly modernized using an FPGA board.
«Many people believe that the history of Apple’s creation of computers with graphical interfaces begins with the venerable Macintosh, but the company’s first step in developing graphical interfaces actually began with the Lisa in 1983,» the publication writes, recalling that 43 years ago such a computer cost $9,995, which is equivalent to almost $34,000 today.
Meanwhile, Alex Anderson-McLeod developed a large single-board system built around an Artix 7-100T FPGA as the Lisa’s «brain», combined with 2 MB of SRAM and emulated connectors for a hard disk, floppy disk, serial port, and keyboard and mouse.
At the same time, the «clone» is much superior to the original thanks to the use of modern equipment and the author’s design decisions.
«First, you don’t need a video converter, as the board outputs video via HDMI with an option to scale; both primary video modes can be switched on the fly. While the board includes original connectors for input devices, it also has convenient USB ports for a keyboard and mouse, so you don’t have to buy original versions,» the publication explains.
Similarly, serial ports can be redirected to the main USB-C connector thanks to the presence of a USB hub, eliminating the need to look for USB-serial adapters and bulky DB25 connectors. Floppy images can be loaded from an SD card, a direct connection to a PC, or a native floppy drive connected to the appropriate port.
«Even for its time, the Lisa was quite slow due to its software solutions and the use of a 5-MHz variant of the Motorola 68000 processor. As a hint at these limitations, Alex included two overclocking multipliers that could bring the machine to the equivalent of 75 MHz,» the material notes.
The video shows the LisaFPGA version, but the author claims that he will soon release version 3 with a few fixes. He promises that the project will be fully published on Github, and he is currently considering selling clones and will talk about them at the Vintage Computer Festival Southwest this month.
Although the Apple Lisa was generally considered a failure due to its high price, this model paved the way for the Macintosh of 1984, a machine costing already $2459, which was able to gradually popularize graphical interfaces and the Apple brand worldwide.
As dev.ua wrote, enthusiast engineer and YouTube blogger Colin Furze showed an experimental bicycle in which classic springs and shock absorbers were replaced with a magnetic system built directly into the frame.
