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Author Topic: The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign  (Read 11380 times)

rayarachelian

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The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign
« on: July 28, 2019, 08:17:43 pm »
Found this article via the current episode of the Retro Computing Roundtable: https://www.theverge.com/design/2019/6/26/18758789/apple-mac-design-snow-white-frog-polk-photo-essay
This Lisa that never was built featured an impossibly thin pair of twiggy drives at the bottom of a full page Xerox Alto style display:

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stepleton

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Re: The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2019, 04:12:14 am »
That's a pretty sharp-looking machine.

Suppose you were insane and you wanted to make your own---not a mock-up of course but the real thing. You get yourself one of those fancy FPGA SBCs and a free 68000 core, then program in the rest of the virtual logic based on the schematics, and soon you've got your Lisa-on-a-chip. You change the video state ROM to support the new tall layout (of course you're going to keep that 2:3 pixel aspect ratio) and make whatever other hacks are necessary to drive that Apple Portrait Display you're cannibalising. Who knows where you got those slim floppy drives from---maybe tearing apart some 3.5" USB drives from somewhere. (Not even you are crazy enough to try and simulate Twiggies.) By a lucky coincidence, you have an aunt who owns a factory that does one-off injection-molding jobs for prototypers who won't settle for 3-D printing, so copying the case isn't as tough as it might be for some.

Now comes the hard part: how do you hack the Office System to use a different screen size?
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rayarachelian

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Re: The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign
« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2019, 02:37:04 pm »
Quote
Suppose you were insane and you wanted to make your own---not a mock-up of course but the real thing. You get yourself one of those fancy FPGA SBCs and a free 68000 core, then program in the rest of the virtual logic based on the schematics, and soon you've got your Lisa-on-a-chip. You change the video state ROM to support the new tall layout (of course you're going to keep that 2:3 pixel aspect ratio) and make whatever other hacks are necessary to drive that Apple Portrait Display you're cannibalising. Who knows where you got those slim floppy drives from---maybe tearing apart some 3.5" USB drives from somewhere. (Not even you are crazy enough to try and simulate Twiggies.)

Sounds amazing, let's do it!  ;D
Although at this point I wouldn't bother with a CRT or twiggies anymore, I'd use a nice 1080p rotateable display, and our buddy Steve Chamberlin already has that fancy twiggy emulator here: https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

(Actually at this point, I'd stuff a Raspberry Pi with an LCD in a case like so: https://vintagemacmuseum.com/remembering-the-lisa-with-a-pixl/ - As neat as the Lisa on an FPGA is, it's overkill when you can do it for $35, plus case, LCD, SD card, etc.)

Quote
By a lucky coincidence, you have an aunt who owns a factory that does one-off injection-molding jobs for prototypers who won't settle for 3-D printing, so copying the case isn't as tough as it might be for some.
Ah, the good old "... And Roberta's your aunt" line! Love it!

Quote
Now comes the hard part: how do you hack the Office System to use a different screen size?
You can't do it directly because of the memory layout. You'd need to rewrite the guts of the OS to make it work, specifically the QuickDraw stuff. Can it be done? Yes.

Is it easy? Nope* (that asterisk indicates an exceedingly large-ish quantity of "nope").

However, that photo and the article was posted as a historical data point of what Frog Design had prototyped. ofc floppy drives that slim did not exist, and likely never existed as 5.25"; 3.5" ones used in slim laptops came in the late 90s for things like thinkpads and even some powerbooks.

This was part of a design contest of sorts where Apple went out to various design houses and asked for free submissions so they could pick the best one, and the winner was Frog. They asked for various designs for things like the Lisa, IIc, and Mac, and that was what they had submitted for the Lisa based, presumably on what Apple told them in the specs. They did win the IIc according to the podcast.

This post wasn't meant as hey, let's build this thing that never was and never could be built with 1982 technology, but it is an interesting thought experiment.
« Last Edit: July 29, 2019, 02:45:06 pm by rayarachelian »
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rayarachelian

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Re: The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2019, 02:51:05 pm »
The text under the photo reads:


Quote
Macintosh "lisa" Prototype


APPLE | 1983

The model for the "lisa" monitor from the Snow White language was crafted from wood and hi-density foam. The lisa was the first "what you see is what you get" monitor, but with a graphical user interface (GUI). Designed to be the same size as a sheet of paper, it paved the way to modern desktop publishing.

Interesting how they used lowercase "lisa" and Apple chose a script version in the name logo.
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stepleton

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Re: The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign
« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2019, 09:03:41 am »
Appropriate 5.25" floppy drives did exist, though... in Japan. The Sharp X68000 had them :D

I'll confess that one minor, sneaky motivation for my reply was to try and hijack community expertise to get different kind of peek into OS (and O/S) internals. Everything about making LisaFrog hardware in the way I described I kinda know how to do... or at least I could imagine how I would go about learning that stuff step by step. (I'm not saying it wouldn't be a huge undertaking, of course, with lots of missteps and learning along the way.)

Understanding the guts of the software is in some ways harder, since aside from the manuals on the LisaEm page or bitsavers etc., there's not a great deal of reading material that I know of. Reverse engineering seems to be the best way to get an idea of what's going on. Until I'm stranded on a desert island with a hex dump and a lot of time, though, I'll probably have to settle for asking "what if" questions on LisaList...
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rayarachelian

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Re: The Lisa as envisioned by FrogDesign
« Reply #5 on: August 04, 2019, 11:21:07 am »
So I just got my hands on "Keep it Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple" - while design is out of my wheelhouse by a lot, I'm really impressed by what I see there, there's some really cool and weird Lisa design photos, all, of course never made it to reality, there's some really cool modular designs in there that could be reconfigured in different ways, all or many part of the "Snow White" frog design stuff that was presented to Apple.

There's also lots of other stuff like Apple II's, tablets, laptops, cable connectors, etc. All very pretty. I guess it's my new favorite coffee table book.
Here's two of the images titled with "lisa" on them, there's lots more in the book.


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