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| My wife and I have adopted a 41-year-old baby named Lisa | |
| Posted by: Huxley on 2025-08-04 10:35:55 I've been collecting Apple / Mac stuff (and more general vintage computer / gaming stuff) since I was a broke kid scrounging around at yard sales in the early 1990s, and I'm proud that I've managed to put together a respectable collection which includes both beloved classics and esoteric oddballs. As some of you know, my wife and I have turned our collection into a pop-up museum we call The Retro Roadshow. We're so excited that the San Francisco Bay Area community has really embraced what we're doing, and we're seeing a rapid escalation in demand for our events. It's delightful and overwhelming! Earlier this year we debuted a brand-new presentation + exhibition we call "Tales From The Orchard," which explores Apple's intertwined history with several related firms (NeXT, Be Inc., General Magic, Newton, etc.). Staging this event at the Cupertino Library just blocks from where so much of this history was made decades ago was a profound honor for both of us - especially given that several people who were actively involved in Apple's early years were in the audience! We always try to tell these stories by looking at a wide range of people and the products they helped create, but with an extra emphasis on on the particular items we've brought to share in the hands-on portion of the event. As you can imagine, sharing this historical view and then inviting everyone to get hands-on and play with these fascinating products is a pretty fun experience for everyone! However, my own personal "white whale" has always been the Apple Lisa. I had a few close calls where I was almost able to pick up a Lisa for a price I could afford, but for various dumb reasons it never actually came together. Thankfully, some stars aligned recently when I saw a post in another forum from @Zhinü who mentioned an interest in re-homing their Lisa. We went back and forth for a while, and in the end my wife and I were able to purchase the Lisa, keyboard, and a ProFile drive at the VCFWest event this past weekend! The system was set up as part of Zhinü's exhibition, and watching a stream of people play with the Lisa with huge grins on their faces was all the proof we needed that this system is going to be a real star of our Retro Roadshow experience. We're already negotiating with a couple Bay Area venues who want to host our Apple-themed event later this Fall, and knowing that we can now add a Lisa to the mix is beyond exciting for us! All that said, here's my ask: we know that this Lisa 2/10 can run LisaOS and/or MacWorks, but since we already have several early Macs in our collection/exhibition, we currently plan to just have this Lisa be a Lisa full-time. Speaking as someone who has obsessed over this machine but never actually used one, I'd be really grateful for any tips / tricks / suggestions you might share - especially things which can help us give our attendees the most fun and informative hands-on experience once we're able to share this beautiful machine! 🙂 Huxley  | |
| Posted by: ClassicGuyPhilly on 2025-08-04 12:09:06 Wow congrats what an awesome addition to your collection and roadshow! | |
| Posted by: cheesestraws on 2025-08-04 12:12:45 Run GEMDOS on it ;-) | |
Posted by: joshc on 2025-08-04 12:14:55My wife and I have adopted a 41-year-old babyerm, weird? named LisaAhh it all makes sense now... carry on! 😀 | |
| Posted by: JT737 on 2025-08-04 12:15:13 That's awesome @Huxley ! When I was a little kid in the '80s, my parents used to work at a computer store that sold Apple/Macs. I still remember playing with a Lisa on the showroom floor! Unfortunately, I can't remember a thing as far as any cool tips or tricks go. Only thing that I can suggest is one you probably already know: A BMOW floppy emu. If you get the software package with it, it has a section of stuff for the Lisa. | |
Posted by: Huxley on 2025-08-04 12:35:00Wow congrats what an awesome addition to your collection and roadshow!Thank you! We really couldn't be more psyched. The list of truly historically-significant personal computers that we can't currently exhibit has gotten wonderfully small - if you know someone with an extra Altair sitting around collecting dust, please let me know 🙃 Run GEMDOS on it ;-)Hahah I've seen some screenshots of XENIX running on Lisa, but GEMDOS is new to me... erm, weird?😛 That's awesome @Huxley ! When I was a little kid in the '80s, my parents used to work at a computer store that sold Apple/Macs. I still remember playing with a Lisa on the showroom floor! Unfortunately, I can't remember a thing as far as any cool tips or tricks go.Good call. I do have a couple FloppyEMU's with the Lisa software bundle - I'm definitely planning to do a fresh OS and Lisa Office installation soon. I guess what I'm really trying to understand is if there were any interesting / fun Lisa OS apps beyond the "Lisa Office 7/7" stuff that dominated the platform, before it just became more sensible to run the Lisa as a double-wide Macintosh... | |
Posted by: stepleton on 2025-08-04 13:12:52All that said, here's my ask: we know that this Lisa 2/10 can run LisaOS and/or MacWorks, but since we already have several early Macs in our collection/exhibition, we currently plan to just have this Lisa be a Lisa full-time. Speaking as someone who has obsessed over this machine but never actually used one, I'd be really grateful for any tips / tricks / suggestions you might share - especially things which can help us give our attendees the most fun and informative hands-on experience once we're able to share this beautiful machine! Congrats on your Lisa! As an interactive exhibition machine, the Lisa presents a challenge: it is slow. Furthermore the Office System apps are not very different to a modern-day office suite. This combination of attributes does little to stir the heart. In a way, Lisa is a victim of its own success as a vision of the future: it's easy for a person to approach and try it out and think that what we have is a contemporary computer, just jankier and laggier. (NeXT computers suffer the same problem in my opinion; you use one for a few minutes and think "huh, this mouse could use a scroll wheel" and walk away. NB: I love NeXTs and own four of them.) You imagine a world where the Lisa had won 40 years ago and it is not very different from today, I don't think. There are not really games to speak of for the Office System. I seem to remember that there is something under development right now. @warmech ? The visible differences for Lisa tend to be quirks and so maybe not super interesting (stationery pads, the funny-looking W characters in the system font, page buttons on scroll bars, the apple-option-0 screen dimmer, the fact that they hadn't figured out the slider and pop-up menu UI elements yet and so the Preferences contrast control and the LisaTerminal baud rate selector are acre-wide forests of radio buttons, and so on). Meanwhile, the more intriguing differences to my mind (the massively-overengineered OS, the fact that they wrote their own OO Pascal dialect, the homebrew hardware MMU and the look-before-you-leap TST.W approach to page faults on the 68000, the DRM scheme, the fact that Apple thought it was a good idea to ground-up design its own hard drive, and more) are not really easy to see or explain quickly. My recommendation is: get an ImageWriter and use the Lisa to print off customisable souvenirs for people who walk up, like a name badge ornament or some kind of fun certificate. The Lisa can print in the background (cf. massively-overengineered OS), so people can still play with the machine while it's printing, and this multitasking sets it apart from early Macs. The printer noise will attract people and bring dismay to your neighbouring exhibitors (j/k), and people will linger around your table while waiting for their printout. (The Lisa's stately progress ensures they will wait for a while.) Every so often, shut the Lisa down and field-strip it: show how you can pull out the drives, all of the logic boards, the PSU, and any expansion cards without any tools. Then put everything back and power the Lisa back on, showing how it brings you right back to where you left off, with all of the same documents open. (Eventually.) Congrats again and good luck! | |
Posted by: joshc on 2025-08-04 13:41:49but GEMDOS is new to me... GitHub - cheesestraws/lisa-gemdos: GEMDOS for the Apple LisaGEMDOS for the Apple Lisa. Contribute to cheesestraws/lisa-gemdos development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
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Posted by: ClassicGuyPhilly on 2025-08-04 18:23:03if you know someone with an extra Altair sitting around collecting dust, please let me know 🙃 You're welcome 🤣 | |
| Posted by: CC_333 on 2025-08-09 18:40:02 I saw that Lisa! I was tempted to get it myself, but I didn't have the means. I'm glad you got it though! I would love to have one myself someday, but I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that it'll likely never happen because the prices are simply too high, and my budget is perpetually small. I did finally get an Apple III though (at the Mactober Fest that @bigmessowires put together a couple years ago); Never thought that would happen either, so who knows! c | |
| Posted by: olePigeon on 2025-08-11 08:58:21 OK, I had nightmares about the 1973 movie. Good thing it's not an actual 41-year-old baby. | |
| Posted by: adespoton on 2025-08-11 15:23:45 Am I the first person who thought of Mork from Ork? A great Robin Williams performance of its time. And the TV show ended right before the Lisa was released! | |
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