Re: LISA OS? where?

[paule@csra.net (Paul A. Eisenstat)]

Again this has nothing to do with the Apple II but I would like to clear up
a few "misconceptions" I've seen in this group regarding the Lisa/MacXL.
Much of what I'm about to say comes from Larry Pina's Excellent book
"Macintosh Repair and Upgrade Secrets" which includes a chapter on the
Lisa/XL and from my own experience in selling/parting out over a dozen of
these machines.

The MacXL as sold by Apple was not just a Lisa running Macworks. It
included the MacXL "Screen Modification Kit" which replaces the roms _and_
changes the monitors aspect ratio. With the MacXL roms and the screen
modification kit the startup screen should show you 3A/88. Send me an email
if you have something other than that and I can give you the meaning of the
code (of hand I don't remember them all, I'll have to look them up).

Sun took this modification one step further and came up with the 800k disk
drive interface (a single chip replacement on the I/O board). They also,
with Apple's help, came out with Macworks Plus, this loaded the rom image
from a Mac Plus at the Lisa's startup and functionally gave you a Mac Plus
running on a Lisa/XL. I believe the last system software version supported
by Sun was 6.03 (although they always claimed it worked best with 6.02).
Sun also came up with a parallel to scsi converter and offered Widget
replacements in both 20 and 40 meg versions using a scsi drive whose name
eludes me at the moment, the drive manufacturer is no longer in business. I
have been told the converter only supported these two particular drives but
have never had any experience with these. 

A "real" Mac/XL (that is with XL roms and smk) will _not_ run the Lisa OS
but only MacWorks or Macworks Plus. Dafax took Macworks Plus and modified
it and last I heard were running 7.1 on it and were working on running 7.5
but I don't know if that ever came through. Dafax had numerous other
modifications, including bootable scsi cards and a little device to make
the sun 800k modification really work! Like I said in an earlier post I had
one XL running 7.1 at 16 mhz with 10 megs of ram.

I think we need to set up a place to talk about these grand old machines. I
occasionally hear from several other Lisa/XL owners, have parts on occasion
to sell/trade (no widgets though, if any of you guys find a working widget
but it! it is worth its weight in gold). How about someone starting a
newsgroup for this stuff :-)

That's all for now.

Paul A. Eisenstat

In article <bede0005-2804970841350001@pub-30-c-177.dialup.umn.edu>,
bede0005@gold.tc.umn.edu (Rob Bedeaux) wrote:

> > 
> > Mac XL isn't the same as Lisa. Mac XL is a Lisa converted to early Mac
> > :-( My opinion is that the only real Lisa is a real Lisa! So, where do I
> > get a new HD to my Lisa?
> > 
> > 
> > Paul Dunkel
> > 
> > 
> Paul, Actually, a Lisa II as sold by Apple is the exact same thing as a
> Mac XL.  What apple did was send out 2 disks which made the Lisa act like
> a mac.  On the first disk is a Lisa program which loads Mac roms into
> memory.  This then brings up the familiar icon to insert a system disk. 
> This was the second disk supplied in the set.  This disk booted the user
> to the Macintosh finder.
>   It was only when Sun purchased a quantity of them (5,000 i think), that
> a Mac XL became something else.  What Sun did were several conversions. 
> These included replacing the 400k drive with an 800k (required a rom
> switch), replacing the 10 meg widgest drive with some strange 20mb
> versions, and the worst of all forcing the square pixel ratio which the
> mac had.  You can tell if you have one that has been corrupted beyond use
> by checking the boot up procedure.  If as it starts up, it goes through a
> series of internal tests (there are icons showing the procedure on
> screen).  In addition, there must be a model/rome revision listing on the
> top right.  It will have a a number and a year mine says H/88.  These
> indicate the Rom revision "h" and the model type Lisa 2/10 "88"  I don't
> remember the specifics for the others.  If these items are present then
> you have a Mac XL which is capable of running Lisa Office and workshop.  
> Also, Paul an external Apple Profile hard drive will work on a Lisa 2 and
> 2/5 with no additional hardware.  The 2/10 did not have a parallel port,
> but there are cards around which when plugged into one of the interal
> slots will give you an external parallel port.  
> If you need more info you can e-mail me as I have several hundred pages of
> Lisa articles, specs, and diagrams of the Lisa's subsystems.
> 
> rob
> bede0005@gold.tc.umn.edu