I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#51

Post by AlexTheCat123 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

JSR_FDED wrote: post #16

8 months of work, and it shows. Phenomenal result! The thing that blew my mind as a kid on the original Lisa was the power button. You pressed it and it didn’t immediately cut the power like a PC, it was a request to cut the power and the OS would first clean up various things on the desktop before finally cutting the power on itself. It just seemed to have agency and a type of control over itself and its environment…

Thank you!

Yeah, the soft power feels really magical compared to other systems of the time. And not only can it turn itself on/off in response to a user request from the power button, but you can also set an alarm within the microcontroller that handles soft power and the RTC and it'll automatically power itself on or off whenever the alarm goes off. Pretty neat for 1983.

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#52

Post by AlexTheCat123 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #31

I see this kind of thing and have two reactions. 1. Wow! That's so cool! 2. Why didn't someone this smart spend that time to build something that really matters?

I do stuff that actually matters too! The FPGA Lisa is just a fun project that I work on in my spare time, but I'm also a PhD student and I like to think that I contribute useful stuff to the body of knowledge of computer engineering through research.

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#53

Post by AlexTheCat123 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #39

rbanffy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a Unix. I believe the distinctive feature is not what it did, but what it didn’t - crash often.

There was another unix on the Lisa, i'd tell you more but there's literally nothing online about it and the only guy with copies of it hasn't responded to my letter. The company that made it dumped their Lisa unix stuff on him when they went bust because he sold lisa related stuff. Other than that tidbit of info, I haven't found anything online about it

That "other unix" is probably UniPlus Unix, which we actually do have copies of, as well as its source code. It runs great on the FPGA-based Lisa too.

Here's the source code: https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus

And here are the disk images, although I think you need to be logged in to download them: https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,103.0.html

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#54

Post by AlexTheCat123 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

GianFabien wrote: post #17

An amazing effort and result. Shame watching the video gave me motion sickness.

Sorry, I was expecting it to be seen by like 50 Lisa enthusiasts, and so I didn't put much effort into making it look good. If I had known that it was going to be so popular, I would've taken more time to film it!

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#55

Post by mghackerlady » Mon, May 04, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC

AlexTheCat123 wrote: post #53

mghackerlady wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was another unix on the Lisa, i'd tell you more but there's literally nothing online about it and the only guy with copies of it hasn't responded to my letter. The company that made it dumped their Lisa unix stuff on him when they went bust because he sold lisa related stuff. Other than that tidbit of info, I haven't found anything online about it

That "other unix" is probably UniPlus Unix, which we actually do have copies of, as well as its source code. It runs great on the FPGA-based Lisa too. Here's the source code: https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus And here are the disk images, although I think you need to be logged in to download them: https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,103.0.html

How did I manage to miss that

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#56

Post by AlexTheCat123 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #55

AlexTheCat123 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "other unix" is probably UniPlus Unix, which we actually do have copies of, as well as its source code. It runs great on the FPGA-based Lisa too. Here's the source code: https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus And here are the disk images, although I think you need to be logged in to download them: https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,103.0.html

How did I manage to miss that

To be fair, the disk images are actually pretty tough to find. There've been a few times where I've spent a while looking for them because I lost the files on my computer and forgot where they were online. And that page isn't indexed on Google, so you really need to know where to look.

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#57

Post by ndiddy » Tue, May 05, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

AlexTheCat123 wrote: post #50

ndiddy wrote: post #41

The same person who did this project also worked out how to compile the Lisa Office System code Apple released: https://github.com/alexthecat123/LisaSourceCompilation This took a lot of work because Apple didn't release any of the tooling required to build the code, and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in…

My interest mainly just comes from the Lisa's unique architecture, both in terms of hardware and software. As I learned during my LOS compilation efforts, the OS was quite advanced for its time, and many of the decisions made in the hardware design (like soft power and the discrete-logic MMU) were quite impressive and advanced for a personal computer. I had already done the software side of things during my LOS compi…

Yeah from a technical perspective it's really impressive for its era. OS written in a high level language, preemptive multitasking, memory protection, stuff like that. I just wish there was more software available for the Lisa. It's a shame that Apple gave this all up for the Mac, it severely limited that platform as the computers grew over time. It would have been neat if Apple had based their larger computers (Mac II, etc) on Lisa OS and provided some sort of compatibility layer that programs intended for classic Macs would run inside.

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#58

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Tue, May 05, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #41

The same person who did this project also worked out how to compile the Lisa Office System code Apple released: https://github.com/alexthecat123/LisaSourceCompilation This took a lot of work because Apple didn't release any of the tooling required to build the code, and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in…

> and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in support for higher capacity drives.

Then how was it originally developed? Did Apple also patch their own OS?

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#59

Post by AlexTheCat123 » Tue, May 05, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #57

AlexTheCat123 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interest mainly just comes from the Lisa's unique architecture, both in terms of hardware and software. As I learned during my LOS compilation efforts, the OS was quite advanced for its time, and many of the decisions made in the hardware design (like soft power and the discrete-logic MMU) were quite impressive and advanced for a personal computer. I had already done the software side of things during my LOS compi…

Yeah from a technical perspective it's really impressive for its era. OS written in a high level language, preemptive multitasking, memory protection, stuff like that. I just wish there was more software available for the Lisa. It's a shame that Apple gave this all up for the Mac, it severely limited that platform as the computers grew over time. It would have been neat if Apple had based their larger computers (Mac…

I know. In a lot of ways (at least at an architectural level), Mac OS didn't fully catch up to the Lisa OS until the release of OS X, which is pretty crazy to think about. I'm hoping that this board will make the Lisa dev tools more accessible to a people (and also a lotttt faster) and maybe that'll inspire the development of some new Lisa apps!

Re: I recreated the Apple Lisa computer inside an FPGA [video]

#60

Post by musicale » Wed, May 06, 2026, 3:35 AM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #44

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Wang word processor - as used by Stephen King - was around $12,000. In the CP/M market, small business Z80 systems with a hard drive could easily top $10k. The Lisa was pitched at those markets, not people playing 8-bit games. The Mac hit the midpoint between the two markets to create something new - desktop metaphor computing just barely at the absolute high end of the privileged consumer market. With the original…

Stephen King famously did a lot of his work on typewriters, and often claimed it was part of his creative process. Not a great example, as publishing had odd ecosystems up until Aldus PageMaker (1985) revolutionized later Mac markets. The Lisa was simply a delusional mismatch from the kits and retail consumer products Apple had sold up to that point. No different from NVIDIA inferring a $12k RTX 6000 GPU is for gamer…

By 1986 the Mac Plus had 1MB of RAM (and the Mac had a faster CPU than the original Lisa), though with inferior multitasking and no MMU.

And high-end Macs really weren't (and aren't) cheap, though they could have provided good value over their lifetime. Mac II with a 40MB hard drive was $5369 in 1987, not including a keyboard ($229 for a 105 key model), video card ($499), or monitor ($1500+ for a nice Trinitron-based 13" AppleColor display.) Add more memory and an 80GB hard drive and you are back up in the $10000 range.

And that's not including Apple's best-selling LaserWriter printer (1988), priced at $6995.

But Apple does seem to have learned their lesson somewhat, introducing features on high-end "pro" systems and eventually migrating them downward, rather than splitting the product line into incompatible high-end (Apple III, Lisa) and low-end (Apple II, Mac) systems.