Hi welcome to Teardown! Tuesday We love retro computers Here on the EEV blog. Doesn't get as much retro as this little low in puppy. Everyone knows about the Apple Macintosh of course. absolute classic and well, they still.

it's still around today, but not many people accept. Your computer aficionados know about the Apple Lisa and this was Apple's first graphical user interface machine. It predates the Macintosh this one came out in January 1983, so it's over 30 years old. Fantastic! and I've got one.

I think they're pretty rare here in Australia there are over a hundred thousand made, which it was pretty much a failure. They expected to sell a lot more of these things, but unfortunately it was originally released at ten thousand US dollars. That was 1983 dollars and just the price of it. Even though the hardware and the graphical user interface and everything else is pretty impressive, it was just too darn expensive so it died.

What a shame. Now rumor has it this thing cost Apple about 50 million dollars to develop and it actually took them about five years to do it. They originally started developing this in around 1978, designed to be like the replacement for the Apple 2, which of course was the killer machine of the day and the graphical user interface technology of this of course comes from Martin 1979 after Apple were allowed in to visit the park and see the auto and their graphical user interface technology, the mouse and everything else. So unfortunately I don't have a keyboard with this and I don't have the mouse which was an absolute killer thing for this at the time.

everyone raved about the mouse and the graphical user interface largely. Well, the concept was stolen from Park, but hey, credit where it's due to the Apple team they actually developed that. Then they basically developed their own a graphical user interface system and you know, bought it to commercial reality. Whereas the Park Hardware wasn't real commercial, it was just sort of prototype.

They never really took it to market. Now of course this was a famously Steve Jobs baby and it was named after Steve Jobs as baby Lisa that's where the name comes from, which he finally admitted later in the game, a lot of people came up with what you know, the ideas for what the acronym actually are stood for. But no, it was named after his daughter Lisa and it's a pretty sexy looking machine. Check it out, just you know.

Even today I think it still holds up. Um, obviously modern computers don't look like this, but it still is. Has a beautiful quality to what. I really like the design of this thing beauty.

So a lot of the credit for the hardware in this thing generally goes to Wayne Rosen who was the Yaqui architect behind the hardware in this puppy which is what we're going to take a look at right? most likely can't get it booted I Don't think this thing works as we'll see in the back here I've already like just taken off the back panel I had a look and it doesn't look that terrific. So yeah, I don't know if it to get it back up and working it may require significant effort. No idea if there's actually a hard drive in here at all. So anyway, this is teardown.

Tuesday And you know we say you're on the Eevblog, don't turn it on, take it apart. and yes, I know what all your aficionados are going to say. Dave you're pulling a swifty. This isn't the original Apple Lisa Well, no it's not.

This is actually the Lisa 2, which came out a year later January 1984, but it's damn close to the original. The only thing they changed was that basically they changed to the Arts and the Sony 400k three and a half inch micro floppy here because of the original. Lisa had two five and a quarter inch drives. they were codenamed Twiggy and they were apparently horribly unreliable.

so they just dropped that and they had to use special special discs. So apparently they were horribly unreliable drives those twiggy's so it made sense to what changeover to the Sony micro Drive which was pretty much the Ducks guts at the time. And if you look under the bottom here which has room for the keyboard here, how it's all recessed in and that is a very nice design aspect of this I Really like and it's got nothing but a big clunky nut power switch under there. you know you can't easily hit that.

Very nice. And the keyboard port as well. And just for the Apple fanboys, there's the Money Shot. And by the way, this thing weighs a bloody ton.

And on the back here we've got what looks like a reset switch, but I can't press that at all that ain't working like a switch. We've got a video out, which is a kind of weird considering it has video building. We've got a parallel port, we'll get our mouse board and two serial ports as well and it looks like it's only a hundred and 20 volt. AC supply only.

So yeah, I'm not going to be able to power it up without a mains transformer - why drop the voltage? and it looks like we've got brightness and sync controls as well for the monitor here, so a little bit crusty. Another Apple logo for the fanboys and credits. Also got to go to Robert Pera tour as well. Apparently he worked on the hardware - was one of the key designers of this thing by the way.

Yes, it does use a Motorola 68000 processor and a screaming 5 megahertz so not as fast as the original. Macintosh Now apparently these things are really a sort of like modular and designed to be easily open and apparently as 2 clips on the bottom here. I Haven't never tried this, but apparently you're supposed to be able to lift. Yeah, there we go.

supposed to be I Lift that out. Ah, no hard drive ripped off. This is where the hard drive is supposed to go. and what? what? Wah Wah! And there's the Sony micro floppy and as you can see, it has seen better days.

Lots of rust and corrosion on there and it's going to get worse when we take a look inside. This is not a prime example of an Apple lease or unfortunately for those playing along at home, here is the serial number. There's an Apple Net number as well and it was made. There's a manufacture date, but I have no idea what that means.

Now one interesting feature is that here's the front panel that comes off. Got ourselves a micro switch there to detect whether or not somebody's taken off the front panel and apparently these things would shut down. If you took off the front or the rear panels, there's the original build plate on the bottom. It's the model number a 6s O three double O made in the USA USA USA and it has memory option whatever that is.

But this thing, the Apple the Lisa 2 came standard with one mega memory. Now you will see a lot of rust and corrosion inside this thing as we saw on the Sony Floppy drive here. but all the like all the aluminium metal work here really looks in good. Nick Um, nothing wrong with that at all like.

it just was built yesterday. Yeah, look at some of the corrosion on the serial port connector there, but that's not uncommon for machines of this vintage. I Did get this one from near the beaches near the northern beaches in that. Sydney So yeah, not the best environment with the saltwater air.

and to get the back pedal off, you just do these thumb screws here and bingo Bob's your uncle, we're in like Flynn look at that. look down here. look at the corrosion on that card edge connector. Oh man.

I Haven't seen anything that bad in a long time that is just awful. That may be like, well I'm not going to say unrepairable, but geez, that is pretty awful anyway. I have to get me to clean up and see what we can do with that, but this has bugger all chance of working and then we've got for backup batteries there were they've seen better days Oh Yuck. And there's our three expansion slots there and they're rather unusual in that there are not very deep, but they're as tall as the machine, so rather unusual work form factor expansion cards, but it makes sense of course given their overall system design.

and there's the main run for this thing and you're probably wondering who is son. Marketing Inc Well it turns out that there were a reseller back in the day and they you know sold Apple computers and older Apple computers as well and they try. They were very obviously very keen on this Lisa and did lots of like aftermarket development for it and things like that. so maybe they're that customized this.

ROM a little bit now. I Said this thing was modular and that doesn't? It just extend to the front and rear panels. all of this circuitry. All this card cage.

because this is just the I/o card at the back. we gather all the system I/o we're going to have the processor board behind that. We've got a base board and it's all supposed to just pull out. and that's why they've presumably why they've got a metal bar here and I'm gonna, it's supposed to port, it's supposed to pull out.

Um, yep, could be a bit rusty. it's giving. Let's give him. Yep, there we go and this is some clever, clever system design.

I Like that. Check it out! Got ourselves a total of four boards. plus obviously our memory boards. There's our main processor.

there's the Big Beast 68,000 up there and At plus the base board that's a really nice designed card cage. I Really love that. Thumbs up to whoever worked on that one. and just look at the attention to detail on this car cage.

look. They've gone to the effort to silkscreen the labels in here two memory cards of course, the CPU and the I/o and they've color-coded them. Brilliant. You can see that basically nothing has changed on the Lisa 2 here.

these are all using. you know the copyright 1982 boards here, so it's same with the CPU one as well. So really, essentially no difference. These change the yard rise over and just sort of change the marketing spec of the thing.

and it seems like this one might have the latest in quote marks firmware in this thing look 1985. and for all you 68,000 fanboys out there here, it isn't it. Beautiful in that huge dip package socketed of course in a crappy jewel wipe contact socket date code 21st week 83. And as I said before, this board is like a 1982 vintage and there's other chips on here, which around about 83 vintage.

So yeah, this thing was manufactured in the time that they were round about the time that they are manufactured the Lisa one. So this is a Lisa too. But as I said, it's basically the same machine and you bet your ass we've got a triple five time or aha, but it's twice as good. It's the 556 awesome and there's the crystal on it.

Doesn't say what speed, but the processor operated at five megahertz which was much less than the area than the first start Mac which ran at about eight or something like that. So yeah, it was a pretty sluggish machine with its complex operating system. As fantastic as the OS art was, and groundbreaking for its time, it was just apparently very, very sluggish. and we've got ourselves a classic four layer board construction here.

Very typical of the day. Of course, all the chips pretty much lined up in rows. The top side of the board has all the traces. most of the traces running in this direction.

because this is how you routed these boards back in the day. and of course that ground plane and power plate. and on the other side. of course you see all the other traces running in this direction like this, so it was just much easier to route.

It could have been routed by hand. it's a I think it probably was. Um, although they did have the auto routing algorithms to actually do these our boards, it was a, you know, a fairly common task back in the day to order out these. but I think somebody took a bit of pride in this one and actually hand laid that out and the board was made in Singapore that might have just been the bare board.

a it could have very well been are stuffed which is the technical term it really is in the US I'm not sure, but yeah, probably the blank board made in Singapore I Am really concerned with the oxidization on this board. I've really got to clean this up. Quick, smart, but yeah it's it's not in great condition. Let me tell you, we still have the odd Bunch There we go, We've got a pin there.

obviously needed a cap to ground. yes, some sort of tears to take the edge off that sucker. We've presumably got some sort of a gal or pal array under there dead giveaway that it's got the a part number on it. but the majority of the other chips are just done.

you know, off-the-shelf er, Jellybean 7/4 series and just below the CPU there. we've got a little bit of memory, so I'm not sure what they're not sure what they're doing there, but anyway, most of the other chips we've got a mix of all standard seven, four series jellybean logic. We've got LS series chips nicely. Our silkscreen, of course we've got F series.

We've got a LS down here. We've got our soul some s series logic, so that was fairly typical of the day to mix and match your logic. Families like that fur, just you know, like you use the seven for F for the fast stuff. Obviously, they coupled that into the memory.

There they decide to use F and for the lower speed stuff in interfacing they use LSO they might use, you know, slightly faster ALS And of course you had the decoupling now spread across the board like this. There we go. A couple of axial caps, just you know, not quite one per chip. You know they might be sharing one per two chips in the processor, might have one up near it here, but that's about it for the decoupling because this didn't run particularly fast.

And also with the huge ground plane on this thing, you'd get a fair bit of capacitance between You get a fair bit of distributed capacitance on the ground plane as well. that was fairly common for the day you could pretty much get away with. You could probably remove half those cabs, or you know, a good majority of them. The thing? It probably still work.

Now back over to this. IO board. now under this is pretty fancy. pantsy.

Look at this. you can see it's got its own. a ground plane. This is something you don't often find on here.

They've got a switching regulator with a 41 93 on there. There's the big-ass inductor. They've got the output filter cap for that and that's you know. I Don't know what that rail voltage they're generating there, but yeah, they obviously needed a bit more efficiency than what a regular regulator can provide.

Or maybe they're right. you know, stepping it up, maybe it's a boost? I'm not even sure of the configuration there. We've got some budges and mod wires on here look running all over the place to this: 7, 4 LS couple of pins. There we go.

Absolute classic stuff. I Love it. We've got another bog cap down in here obviously had to take the edge off that pin. and you know quite a few mods on here.

And we've got our custom Apple Cops chip here 1981. So pretty ancient. Oh look at that corrosion. Oh my goodness, Is there any anything left under that? Probably.

I don't know if it. mmm colourful, crusty stuff under the switch. mmm look at that. Yum yum.

Well, there you go that might fairly definitively date this bear board too with the 21st week 84, So that's relatively late actually. And by the way, if you're wondering what these are numbers across here and these letters, these are our grid coordinates. This was fairly common back in the day so that the service manual could go. we'll replace the chip at 11 D like that and bingo, that'd be that one.

And if you hold it up to the light, there you go, you can actually see through that. And this is a double-sided board. There's no ground plane in there, so the saved a fair bit of cost. They didn't need it like they did on the main processor board and the keyboard and parallel port controllers.

Here these are the 65 to 2v Ia, the standard I/o interface chip for the 6502 processor. Even though this is not a 6502 processor base machine, it's a Motorola 68000. you know, Totally different architecture. Still, you can reuse these sort of interface chips no problems at all.

and the serial port up here is controlled by the Zilog 8530. So once again, this was designed for the Z80 like a serial interface controller, but just like the 6502 Vis, you can reuse these things in pretty much any processor architecture. That's what they decided to do though. familiar with them and just reuse it, but they are their own individually.

Master Rond are processes just to handle those single tasks. We got ourselves a 6504 here I'm not sure what tasks that ones actually running got ourselves a gal here, but most of the other stuff on here as before, standard 7 for series logic and by the way, the Lisa had very advanced copy protection for its day. Pretty horrendous actually. if you think you know, DRM is a pain in the arse these days.

Each machine had an individual serial number program into it I'm not sure where it is, it's got to be either a gal or a Rama somewhere, but an individual serial number programmed in each machine which would then be written onto the original software disc when you ran it for the first time. So when you got your software for the thing, you could only register and run it on your Lisa machine. So if you're up, you know if you replaced your hardware, your software doesn't work anymore and you couldn't sell the software or anything. So pretty horrendous.

Um, you know, I mean if this machine actually got popular, no one would have stood for that. In fact, you could say it was sort of destined not to become popular, even if it was affordable because of that horrendous digital rights management on the thing and locking that software in on the original discs. But hey, people are clever. You know they found her ways around all the copy protection schemes back in the day.

So I'm no doubt somebody would have found a way around this bit because it wasn't popular. I Don't think anyone bothered. does anyone know? And here are 2 memory boards and they're slightly different. I Mean this one here has your traditional green solder mask on it, but this one here looks like yeah.

different color. So it sort of manufactured a maybe in different factory or a different time. certainly a different batch process and the memory chips are actually different. same type but from different manufacturers and it's separated into the lower bite and the upper bite.

I Believe these boards a total of 500 and 512 K words because it's a 16-bit machine or one megabyte of memory. and but that was a lot back in the day. 1 Meg was whoa once again. made in Singapore Looks like the 44th week 1983 this one and still made in Singapore yet again but much older 39th week 84.

So like a whole year difference between these two boards. So you've got a wonder like a but yeah, was this machine like a, you know, aftermarket upgraded or something like that? Not entirely sure, but yeah, there's a huge difference between them, so obviously not. probably not. our factory original boards like fitted when the machine was originally bought and these look for all the world like the bear board manufacturer markings here.

So we got ourselves Astro So is that the name of the company that made this one and send Mina there. So if anyone's got any detail on those companies, but maybe they're long gone I Don't know, you know, Well, they could be still around making boards, who knows. But as with all these boards in the Apple Lisa they're all branded like the processor board, the I/o board, and these boards. They're all got a date of 1982 on there so that's when they would have been laid out and on the older board.

check it out. we have Apple branded MOSFET D Rams Here these are the Mk II of 4564 N - 20. These are 200 nanoseconds 64k by one bit and there are. they were manufactured Xxx Week 83 by Mas Tech's so yeah, Apple ordered enough of these, they got their logo on them that's common and the other board from 84 these are Hitoshi these are Hm 60, 48, 64 um and a dash 3 so they 300 millisecond jobs.

Anyway, got the little Apple logo on there and assembled in the USA and we've got nine of these chips per Bank Look at that. So obviously we had a parity bit there because they you know to make up a bite you won't because these are these are one bit chips so you really only need eight of them, but they've got a ninth one there so that must be for parody. I'm presuming and so each Bank of those is 64 K so 60 428 I've got eight of those total. So this is actually a 512 ke board.

So the total system memory on the Lisa was one mega and I believe. Well, this Lisa 2 was sold standard with one mega memory so it would have been populated with two of these boards, but it was capable of going up to 2 Meg. But I Don't know if anyone ever sold boards that allowed it to be expanded up to 2 Meg at least I Not a per and possibly not Apple Maybe a are third-party what's left in this card cage. Well it's just pretty sad looking isn't it? There's not much in.

we've got one chip down here and a socket and looks like we have a couple of inductors and caps in there for the mouse port. That's some RFI stuff. So and a couple of dip switches down here for this cereal and they look really really crusty and look at the corrosion on the contacts and but they are pretty colors though. And there's the Lisa expansion bus 3 slots and it looks like we have a card ejector of some description here and then going into the main chassis there that looks like the video output connector.

so it's just got up. Free wires? just, you know. hard to see in there. It's a bit dark, but yeah, just the wires are going off to the CRT in there.

And then we got ourselves the disc drive connector and it's seen better days. The contacts. It all needs thorough cleaning as well, and that just goes off to a ribbon to the hard driver controller. And apparently it was pretty intelligent for the day.

It would map out bad sectors and do stuff like that. I Mean, we take it for granted these days, but that was pretty advanced stuff back then. and once again, with the modular nature of this thing, check it out. A power supply switching of course just pops out there.

We go with some big high current contacts down there. Very nice. A DataPower ink actually did that. There we go.

December 20th 1984 There in Orange County California Fantastic. That's made in the US as well. Got ourselves a little single-sided riser control aboard here. That might have been common across different products perhaps.

but um, it's it's okay. you know, for the day, look at all the look at all the hot snot down in there at Saban. It's not hot snot, it's actually silastic type stuff and just holding a few of the wires down. you know? and that's not too shabby.

Look: They've got the spaces down here on the diodes so they're lifting those off to get the airflow and the extra heat sinking of the leads down there. So it's it's not too, you know it's it's okay. it does look a bit how you're doing, but I I don't mind it at all, especially for the for the vintage. There we go.

Got some extra heat sinking on these diodes down here there. put them on that plate just to heatsink those and that a little spacer in there that just. it's a bit loosey-goosey but it does the business. and I was wondering where the micro switch was for the back panel.

There it is there. but I'm led to believe that the Lisa has like a soft shutdown function. Even the power button which I said was a big clunking power switch before on the front panel. Apparently it's still a soft button and the Lisa would actually are gracefully shut down and then not reboot to where it was which was pretty advanced for the day.

And maybe if you removed the front and back panels this is the back panel one so that would interrupt the processor in dirt. gracefully shut the Machine down. So yeah, you certainly can type how this thing up. you've got to override.

these are switches if you want to pair it up with the back covers. about, front or back covers off. And by the way, yes, this isn't quite the original color. It has yellowed with age which is very typical of the machines of the day.

It's the bromide that was used in the plastic and you can actually rejuvenate these things. Not terribly easy, but you can rejuvenate and get that original beige color. look back and the color should be reasonably accurate here on the video. I Have color balance my video camera so this is you know, not exactly our factory original color, but very common and unfortunately on this processor board.

even after trying to clean this up like really heavy scraping with a conductive brush and isopropanol alcohol, look, the pads are just eaten away on this card edge connector here and and that gunk is just caked on there and there's just I mean you know, ultimately it's repairable, but geez, you've got to put a lot of work into fixing something like this. So unfortunately, um, those batteries have have done their business and ruined this poor innocent processor board. What a shame. Mmm look what we have to deal with here and like that's like the Rot has started on these connectors and yeah, I think this one is, uh, be beyond economical repair that looks like a capacitor.

hmm used to be Wow Look at that and even the batteries are branded Apple Check it out. assembled in Mexico and you can see the Rot has started setting under the solder mask er there. and well yeah, that's just starting to eat away the copper under there in many places on the board like this. Check it out and that's yeah.

that's only going to get worse with time unless you got in there and thoroughly stripped it all down and put in new traces. and well, yeah, this thing is pretty much gone. And here's the Sony floppy drive controller. It's called the light adapter and there is the only Lisa logo that we've actually found inside these things so far.

There it is silk-screened onto the board, the other boards don't have it at all, and there's not a huge amount on there. There's just some 7/4 series chips and a 5.0 six 8 megahertz crystal. There it is, and the Lisa 2 also has this extra socket here for the AMD AM 95 1/2 a floating point math coprocessor. It's a 64 bit job and it's You know it doesn't have a huge amount of functionality, it's only got your basic operations, but hey, Math coprocessor was was not too bad in the day, but by the time this one was out I think like the Intel 808 E7 was around and it was.

it was better and sort of. Yet, this one wasn't that popular so it's not even fitted - there's not even sure if any of the Lisa software took advantage of it. Now this is actually a Lisa - machine as opposed to the different Lisa 2/10 which had the built-in 10 Meg harddrive in it and I probably should have known that before I even open it because it does have the Lisa - had the parallel port connector on the back for connecting over to the hard drive module whereas the 2/10 they redesigned this motherboard and left out the parallel connector on the back. Oh, and in case you're wondering about the glorious screen, a whopping 720 by 360 resolution monochrome only, of course, but hey, this was actually considered a high resolution screen back in its day, so not too bad at all.

And at the bottom of the CRT after you remove the main cover plate on here, we can see we got our system speaker and you can probably just see the part number on the tube down in there and it's dated 11 28 for the 1103. And quite frankly, I'm not hugely keen to take all the shezzy apart just to get in there and see the CRT, but it looks like you know, a reasonable quality board in there, as you'd expect, and nice and tidy on the wiring, looms, and things like that. So yeah, it wasn't just slapped together how you're doing. So there you have it.

I Hope you enjoyed that. Look at the Apple Lisa 1983 vintage 31 years old or more and it was designed in the late 70s. Took them five years, almost five years to get this thing to market. Absolutely incredible and then it just flopped.

It was. You know it wasn't a bad machine at all. It looked the business and the GUI operating system way ahead of its time with lots of advanced memory protection features and things like that that you know a lot of things. Didn't come around until a decade or more later.

So really advanced machine for its time. but its price killed it. That is why the Apple Macintosh won because it was targeted as a lower price machine and when it came out it was. It was very wimpy as well.

Kind of. This thing was the hardware was ultimately underpowered for what it was trying to do. Same with the original Macintosh But then the laser printer came out and desktop publishing and that's what so that you know created the success for the Apple Macintosh And this thing is just a footnote in Apple's history. But anyway, my hats off to all the designers and software people who worked on the Apple Lisa and ultimately a total flop.

but I Still like it doesn't look snazzy. look at that. Geez, I think I'm obviously the board's in this thing. you could if you're really keen fanboy and add a lot of time and energy on your hands.

You could repair the boards and get it up and working in original condition. but who knows. Maybe I could run an emulator inside or something like that, drive the CIT directly, get it back working as an Apple Lisa but maybe not using the original boards. unfortunately.

IB they they're I Think they're probably a bit too far gone and might not be worth attempting to repair those, and obviously I can't power the thing up because it's just not going to works not even worth trying, or because the edge connectors on the cards are eaten away and things like that. So yeah, it really requires substantial work just to get it to a bootable condition, let alone not having a hard drive in the OS and everything else. So anyway, if you've got any good ideas, what I can do, replace the CRT and turn it into a fish tank baby. Hmm.

nah. sacrilege. I'd get hate mail death threats. Yeah, what's the difference? Get those anyway.

So I hope you enjoyed that if you want to discuss it. Evie Blog forum links are down below and as always, if you liked teardown Tuesday Please give it a big thumbs up because that helps on YouTube with the search engine algorithms and all that sort of crap. Anyway, catch you next time. Oh there it is.

Ah, do that thing. a beauty and that for those who are curious about the famous signatures on the inside of the case. Yep, they're all there. Check it out and there folks is Steve Jobs Tada you you.