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The RICM just got two Lisas!

m_thompson

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The Rhode Island Computer Museum just received a Lisa 2/5, a Lisa 2/10, and a NeXT Cube Turbo as donations.

The batteries on the on the 2/5 leaked everywhere. There is green corrosion on all of the connectors on the backplane, gold fingers, and it even ate through some of the traces on the I/O board. We removed the batteries and washed off the worst of it. We will give everything a good scrub with dilute vinegar and set this one aside for later restoration. We received two 5 MB Profile drives with the 2/10. Exploring the content of those drives will be done next week.

The 2/10 is in great condition because it never had batteries on the I/O board. We removed the boards and power supply, did a thorough inspection, cleaned the gold fingers, and reassembled it. The plug for the keyboard had a little corrosion on it that was easily cleaned. When we powered it on the Widget drive was stuck. We were able to fix that, and were rewarded with a boot screen. We need to rebuild the keyboard. Fortunately one of the RICM's volunteers has lots of experience doing that.

Apple Lisa 2-10 Booting.jpg
 
Congrats! Always wanted to play with a Lisa 2/5, so kinda jelly. :D

That 2/10 is in amazing shape and love the natural yellow. Its not bad at all, just looks well loved. I love retrobrite and all, but sometimes its goes too far and the machine is just unnaturally bleached too bright. I perfer the natural colors, like this case, when its a light cream. Simply gorgeous! Suggest a UV eggshell clear coat to keep it looking fresh. But hey im a sucker for natural light patina.
 
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Congrats! Always wanted to play with a Lisa 2/5, so kinda jelly. :D

That 2/10 is in amazing shape and love the natural yellow. Its not bad at all, just looks well loved. I love retrobrite and all, but sometimes its goes too far and the machine is just unnaturally bleached too bright. I perfer the natural colors, like this case, when its a light cream. Simply gorgeous! Suggest a UV eggshell clear coat to keep it looking fresh. But hey im a sucker for natural light patina.
The 2/5 is a much darker yellow, and almost brown in some places.
 
Congratulations on the Lisas!

Battery destruction is basically par for the course at this point for Lisa 1s and 2/5s. Good luck repairing yours!

Was the previous owner a collector or a "user owner", so to speak?

I ask because I see it's booting the Office System, and I'd think most people who had a Lisa 2/10 in the '80s would likely have eventually used MacWorks to turn it into a Macintosh once that platform became the way forward.

I've been in the Lisa "scene" for a long time and I've never seen a single example of a "real" Office System user's hard drive. How did people organise their work? What kinds of things did they use it for (assuming such a question can still be asked while respecting privacy)? What workarounds did they use against the Office System's shortcomings? And so on. If your 2/10 contains an example of this "organic" usage, it could be interesting.

The next time you run your 2/10, try to get to the Environments Window by (once it's booted) holding down the Apple key and pressing the power button. There's a chance that the previous owner also installed the Workshop.
 
Stepleton, thanks for the pointers on the Lisa. The donor's father was the original owner and user of the Lisas. There are just a few personal documents left on the internal Widget drive, and very little software. We received two 5 MB Profile drives. We will take a look at the contents of those next Saturday, and maybe find more files.
 
Oh interesting... There is not a lot of software for the Office System to begin with... Most people would likely have had just the seven office applications ("tools") provided, or perhaps fewer if they wanted to save space for documents they made with the applications they did use.

Good luck with the ProFiles --- note that like the Widget, working units will take some time to do a surface scan before they are ready (solid red LED). Before you try them with the Office System, or try booting from them, you may want to find a serial cable and image them first with BLU. The same might also be worthwhile for your Widget.

Beware RIFAs --- there are several in the Lisa and ProFile PSUs.
 
We tried the second Profile drive. It goes ready and is configured on the Lisa 2/10, but it doesn't show up on the desktop.
The first Profile drive let out clouds of smoke from one of the RIFA caps, so that one needs a little repair.

The 800 KB diskette drive will not eject a diskette. We have lots of Macs in the collection. Can we use a Mac drive in the Lisa, or do we need to get a new gear to repair the Lisa's drive?
 
You can't say I didn't warn you about those RIFAs! :) No harm done, though. Just remember that there are more RIFAs waiting to explode in the Lisa's power supply and in the other ProFile.

Lisa and Macintosh floppy drives are compatible and may even be identical. (I'm not sure --- if not, they're very close!) A replacement should work fine. Note that an 800K drive on a Lisa is a common aftermarket mod that was usually carried out for the benefit of MacWorks, the software that allowed Lisas to run the Macintosh system software and Mac apps. Lisas shipped from Apple with 400K drives like those found in original Macs.

It's strange to see an 800K drive in a Lisa that probably ran the Office System its entire life, although I do recall seeing an 800K floppy disk drive driver for the Office System, so you never know. In any case, the 800K drive can read 400K disks without trouble. Once you get your replacement 800K drive in, it will be interesting to see if you can format 800K disks with 800K of storage in your installation of the Office System.

Note that you may have a replacement I/O board ROM to support your 800K floppy drive. There's nothing you need to do about this, it's just good to know.

I'll repeat my recommendation about using BLU to image the hard drives ahead of time. That's hard to do without a floppy drive, of course! (But the dedicated BLU user can also bootstrap BLU itself over a serial cable.)
 
Note that you may have a replacement I/O board ROM to support your 800K floppy drive. There's nothing you need to do about this, it's just good to know.
The I/O board in the Lisa 2/5 has two ROMs in the top left corner, and in the 2/10 it has three. The middle of the three on the 2/10 says XL, Apple Computer Inc., and Sun Remarketing. My guess is that the XL ROM was installed to support the 800 KB floppy.

One of our projects for Saturday is to image the drives, and remove the RIFAs until we can get replacements.
 
I think the Lisa I/O boards in the 2/5 and the 2/10 will have only one ROM on them.

On the 2/5 I/O board, only the chip at position A1 is a ROM. The chip at position A3 is a 6504: a 6502 with a bunch of its pins missing. The 6504 runs the code in the ROM to establish the interface that the rest of the computer uses to access the floppy. It's a fairly high-level interface, with commands like "read sector", "write sector", and so on.

On the 2/10 I/O board, there's still only one ROM:
A3: that's the 6504 again
A2: the ROM
A1: that's an IWM.

The 2/10's aftermarket I/O ROM is indeed the modified version that Sun Remarketing (the company that remarketed the Lisa once Apple was done with it, essentially) provided for installation alongside the 800K drive. "XL" is short for "Macintosh XL". With that, odds seem good that your Lisa didn't run the Office System its entire life, but spent some time as a Mac.

Maybe your disk imaging exercise will tell the story. Good luck!
 
I read that there was a modification done during the Lisa to XL conversion that changed the shape of the pixels on the screen. How can I check if this modification was done?
 
Only some XLs will have had this modification carried out, not all. As your 2/10 has already demonstrated that it can run the Office System, the mod has not been installed on that machine. (The Office System is not compatible with the mod.)

For your 2/5, there are a few more ways besides trying to run the Office System. When it's powering up, you can look for ROM revision 3A in the top right corner of the screen during the self-test (compare with the small graphic here). But if it can't power up just yet:
  • Look at the ROMs on the CPU board: if they have part numbers 341-0346A and 341-0347A, those are the 3A "screen mod" ROMs. (See ROM revision info here.) Labels from Sun Remarketing may also be suspicious.

  • Look into the part of the case that holds the CRT and compare those insides with your 2/10. If you see something that looks added in the 2/5 (like IIRC a toroid that some of the wiring between the video board and the CRT goes through), that's a sign that you may have the screen mod installed.
 
We have a floppy drive emulator connected now, and were able to boot the Lisa diagnostics.
The LED on the Profile drive was on solid before we ran the diags, but it failed the diags.

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