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

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

#61

Post by musicale »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #45
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody (sane) was putting a C64 in an office. The competitor to the Lisa didn't really exist yet. Closest would have been a Xerox Star Office system or like the other poster said, one of the various dedicated word processing / office systems like the Wang, etc. and they were even more money. People were wedging Apple IIs into service in the office, but they weren't exactly cheap, actually, and they couldn't do much.…

PC & Apple II pfs:Write (1981) was popular, and later offered PC Lotus 1-2-3 integration. Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3

> Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3

It's hard to find an Apple system where there were not cheap "functional" alternatives available for the "average user" at a fraction of the price. Perhaps the Apple I at $666.66? But the Apple II was twice the price (or more) of competing 8-bit systems from Commodore and Radio Shack.

The Lisa was marketed as an "office/professional" computer like the Apple III (vs. the Apple II "personal computer" – which was still much more expensive than the C64.) Compared to the Apple III ($4340-$7800 in 1980), the Lisa was not exactly overpriced - by Apple standards at least. ;-) It also included the 7 Lisa Office System apps (LisaWrite/Calc/Draw/Graph/Project/List/Terminal). At $3495 the Lisa 2 wasn't too far off from the $2495 Macintosh, which had a smaller 9" display (vs. 12" on the Lisa) and only included MacWrite and MacPaint.

As impressive a system as the MacBook Neo may be at $599 (or $499 with edu discount), it's still no $100 ChromeBook. (Though we are in a strange time when DRAM and flash storage costs are making some Apple systems surprisingly price-competitive. Sadly the $499 Mac mini is no longer available.)

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

#62

Post by Joel_Mckay »

musicale wrote: post #60
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In 1985, Bill gates team released Windows 1.01, and they were heavily supported by IBM vested interests. The 286 PC were around $3k dollars at the time with a 20MB to 30MB HDD.

The LaserWriter (1985) was $6995 or $20940 in 2025 US dollars. However, with Aldus it allowed true desktop publishing, and for a high-volume press-operator with plate-exposure machines it made a great deal of economic sense with transparency film. Not really meant for home offices for a few years yet, but offered something competitive with Ventura Publisher (PC version) and xerox laser printers.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially set out on a journey to make computers accessible to anyone. Yet Apple was a business like any other, and prone to the same political problems. There is a subtle relationship between price and value often lost in boardrooms. =3

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

#63

Post by Joel_Mckay »

musicale wrote: post #61
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC & Apple II pfs:Write (1981) was popular, and later offered PC Lotus 1-2-3 integration. Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3

> Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3 It's hard to find an Apple system where there were not cheap "functional" alternatives available for the "average user" at a fraction of the price. Perhaps the Apple I at $666.66? But the Apple II was twice the price (or more) of competing 8-bit systems from Commodore and Radio Shack. The Lisa was markete…

>Lisa was not exactly overpriced

Perhaps for a lucky few, but its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition.

We both know Jobs would have wanted more out of MacBook Neo for the users. I think the coin-sweating on modern budget-platforms like Chromebooks would have never made it past his desk. He understood brand goodwill value all too well. =3

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

#64

Post by musicale »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #63
musicale wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3 It's hard to find an Apple system where there were not cheap "functional" alternatives available for the "average user" at a fraction of the price. Perhaps the Apple I at $666.66? But the Apple II was twice the price (or more) of competing 8-bit systems from Commodore and Radio Shack. The Lisa was markete…

>Lisa was not exactly overpriced Perhaps for a lucky few, but its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition. We both know Jobs would have wanted more out of MacBook Neo for the users. I think the coin-sweating on modern budget-platforms like Chromebooks would have never made it past his desk. He understood brand goodwill value all too well. =3

> its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition

The Lisa 2 was "only" $1000 more than the ($2495) Macintosh, and included a full office software suite. Ironically though that may have been a reason why developers targeted the Mac, which only included MacWrite and MacPaint.

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

#65

Post by Joel_Mckay »

musicale wrote: post #64
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Lisa was not exactly overpriced Perhaps for a lucky few, but its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition. We both know Jobs would have wanted more out of MacBook Neo for the users. I think the coin-sweating on modern budget-platforms like Chromebooks would have never made it past his desk. He understood brand goodwill value all too well. =3

> its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition The Lisa 2 was "only" $1000 more than the ($2495) Macintosh, and included a full office software suite. Ironically though that may have been a reason why developers targeted the Mac, which only included MacWrite and MacPaint.

Having fully integrated office platforms with highly limited use-cases is a laggard consumer product.

Then selling people a "cheaper version" of a bad deal tainted the branding further. Even the "free" upgrades for original Lisa owners drives was essentially telegraphing customers people had ripped them off already.

Sometimes, offering a discount on a bad deal just makes the brand damage worse. =3

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

#66

Post by cmrdporcupine »

musicale wrote: post #64
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Lisa was not exactly overpriced Perhaps for a lucky few, but its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition. We both know Jobs would have wanted more out of MacBook Neo for the users. I think the coin-sweating on modern budget-platforms like Chromebooks would have never made it past his desk. He understood brand goodwill value all too well. =3

> its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition The Lisa 2 was "only" $1000 more than the ($2495) Macintosh, and included a full office software suite. Ironically though that may have been a reason why developers targeted the Mac, which only included MacWrite and MacPaint.

Yes like many companies in that era, Apple didn't really understand the value of third party developers until later and they tried to make the Lisa into a holistic closed system, a whole solution, packaging everything and leave little room for third parties.

And the copy protection & licensing was extremely strict on it, as well.

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

#67

Post by ndiddy »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #58
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?

Apple hooked up the Lisa to a much larger larger external hard disk, the Priam Datatower. It could hold ~84 MB. The Datatower is extremely rare and AFAIK nobody with the skills to figure out how it works for emulation or cloning has a working one with a Lisa interface card.

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

#68

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ndiddy wrote: post #67
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Apple hooked up the Lisa to a much larger larger external hard disk, the Priam Datatower. It could hold ~84 MB. The Datatower is extremely rare and AFAIK nobody with the skills to figure out how it works for emulation or cloning has a working one with a Lisa interface card.

So then the OS did support higher capacity drives, just not anything that anybody can use these days

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

#69

Post by ndiddy »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #68
ndiddy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple hooked up the Lisa to a much larger larger external hard disk, the Priam Datatower. It could hold ~84 MB. The Datatower is extremely rare and AFAIK nobody with the skills to figure out how it works for emulation or cloning has a working one with a Lisa interface card.

So then the OS did support higher capacity drives, just not anything that anybody can use these days

The OS did, but the disk driver for the Lisa ProFile hard drives (which was distributed as part of the OS) did not. All existing emulation only supports the ProFile drives, not the DataTower. If you're actually interested, I think it would be a better use of your time to look at the readme file for the repo I linked (which goes over the patch) instead of nitpicking my comments.

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

#70

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ndiddy wrote: post #69
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then the OS did support higher capacity drives, just not anything that anybody can use these days

The OS did, but the disk driver for the Lisa ProFile hard drives (which was distributed as part of the OS) did not. All existing emulation only supports the ProFile drives, not the DataTower. If you're actually interested, I think it would be a better use of your time to look at the readme file for the repo I linked (which goes over the patch) instead of nitpicking my comments.

I didn't mean to nitpick, I was actually confused and curious. And I'm willing to believe that it's discussed in that repo, but that's a lot of text to go through.
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