Apple Lisa Emulation

I'll readily admit that I like collecting computer hardware, especially older, vintage items. Many items in the past were built for very specialized applications, and the inspirations and engineering behind them are oftentimes fantastic.

Unfortunately, collecting computers and peripherals can take up quite a bit of space. The Command Center currently holds 5 working computers (a 1.0 GHz Mac G4, 1.0 GHz AMD Athlon PC, a 600 MHz G3 iBook, a 180 MHz 603e PPC Powerbook 3400c, and a 16 MHz 68030 Apple SE/30), and there is not a lot much space for many additionally. The rest of my collection has, sadly, been relegated to the attic.

Most of my collection consists of vintage Apple computers My earliest Macintosh is a 512k Mac, and I also own a couple Apple II's: an Apple IIc and a currently non-functional Apple II GS. However, one of the most significant pieces of Apple computer hardware, short of the Apple I, has eluded me: the Lisa.

While a commercial failure (and carrying a $10,000 price tag), the Lisa was the first computer mass-produced with a Graphical User Interface when it debuted in 1983. While its 5 MHz 68000 processor was considered somewhat pokey even at the time, it was the first computer designed to be usable by anyone via a mouse and drop-down menus. Its fame was soon eclipsed by its related cousin, the Macintosh, a year later, but the Lisa was, in many ways, a significantly more powerful machine despite its slower clock speed, and it would be many years before the Mac OS incorporated some of the more-advanced features of the Lisa OS that included protected memory, cooperative multitasking, and support for 2MB of RAM. By comparison, the Mac OS did not gain protected memory until 2001 with the release of UNIX-based OS X. Despite the superiority of the hardware, and particularly the software, the much lower price of the Macintosh contributed to the commercial failure of the Lisa. Indeed, the final fate of the Lisa is quite sad: of the Lisa's that exist, most are no longer capable of running the Lisa OS since Apple offered a free upgrade that replaced some of the hardware with that capable of running only the Mac OS. Later Lisa's with the newer hardware were sold as the Macintosh XL ("extra large"?) and, with specialized software, were capable of fully emulating a Mac Plus and running up to System 7.5.5. Worst of all, in 1989, Apple threw away approximately 2,700 unsold Lisa in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory.

I almost bought a Lisa on eBay a few years ago, and am somewhat disappointed that I did not since it was in pristine condition (and never upgraded to a Macintosh XL), contained all documentation, and was being sold for less than its value. So, it was with great delight when I read that Ray Arachelian, after 8 years of working diligently on the only Lisa emulator (I had followed his sporadic progress for years), finally developed a completely working emulator! You can read an interview with him from Low End Mac's Ted Hodges here. And, make sure to give the emulator itself a try, as well. It now does not require the actual ROMs to run as earlier versions did. I did manage to acquire the ROMs for the earlier releases, however, and had my emulator running back in April, 2007.

The Lisa/Macintosh XL pictured at the beginning of this blog is not my own; the file is from the Wikipedia Commons. The screen capture was made running LisaEm 1.0.0 under OS X using a desktop designed by a "friend".