Re: Birth of the Lisa

From: Nord, Al <Norda_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:15:07 -0500

Considering the Apple lisa's list price was $10,000.00 it is a miracle as many Lisas were sold that there were. Apple had a software serial number prom preventing other copies of software installed on other Lisas from working. So each Lisa owner had to purchase a legal copy of the software they wanted to use. I remember replacing logic boards and having to swap that prom chip so their software would continue to operate. The 5 meg Profile HD was also a treat. Apple decided to reverse their software writing to hard disk to make the profile HD the only HD to work inside the profile. I tried other Seagate st-506 5 meg HD's in the profile case but was never sucessful in getting them to write the boot track. One company devised a way to write the boot track but they charged too much from what I remember. The Mac plus also had an external HD20 meg drive that used the serial port on the MacPlus. The Mac portable used a special controller board to operate their internal HD's which failed regularly. I have swapped that controller board and used other HD's in the Mac portable but that's another story. Apple sure was innovative in their HD selections and often were the only ones available. But since the first Apple //e floppy drives sold for $500.00 with out the controller when they were introduced. Most of the other computers were still using the cassette drive to load and run programs like the TI-99 and the Comodore 64.

-----Original Message-----
From: LisaList [mailto:lisalist_at_email.domain.hidden] On Behalf Of Ray Arachelian
Sent: Friday, July 29, 2005 8:18 AM
To: LisaList
Subject: Birth of the Lisa

Found this during this morning's surfing on osnews.com...

http://braeburn.ath.cx/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid =9&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

"The Lisa project was initiated in 1978 to provide Apple's next generation business computer. According to the original marketing specifications, created in 1979, the computer bore little resemblance to the computer that was actually released several years later. It's major claim to fame was its inclusion of a bit sliced processor, but it became clear that such a processor would price Lisa well above the $2,000 goal that the marketers had set."

<SNIP>

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Received on 2005-07-29 09:14:40