What's cool about this is that we're at the point where a committed hobbyist can pull something like this off.
I don't know what's in the FPGA, and I honestly don't know that much about FPGAs, but I imagine it's a pretty much "drag and drop" of the Lisa logic board schematic rendered in whatever FPGA language is used, while leveraging as many, stock, "off the shelf" cores as necessary.
It's telling that they externalized the UART, since they couldn't find a core to use, and weren't comfortable creating one from scratch. Otherwise it's likely a 68000 core, and a bunch of logic gates, or higher level combinatorial logic ICs (directly rendered into FPGA language, or, perhaps, they drag and dropped a, e.g. shift-register IC core).
But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.
Add to that the board manufacture. This is no hobbyist through hole exercise. Get the board, break out the soldering iron. No, this was built in a modern electronic assembly facility. Cheap enough to do one off boards, vs runs of 10s or 100s.
Available to the every man.
Impressive achievement for the developer, but impressive we're in a place that this is a practical thing to try and do.
> But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.
They've been accessible for a lot longer than most people think. The original Minimig project (an FPGA recreation of the Amiga chipset, coupled with a real 68000 CPU) started in 2005 - more than 20 years ago! And 15 years ago there was already a complete Amiga core (chipset and CPU) running on the Terasic DE1 development board, the C-One FPGA computer, and the Turbo Chameleon 64 cartridge.
Today's FPGAs are certainly more affordable and more capacious (especially in terms of DSP and RAM blocks) but the biggest shift is that, as you say, it's now possible and affordable to have the complete PCB assembled in short runs, which is a real blessing given that so many FPGAs come in BGA packages.
Accessible for development, sure. Developers and hobbyists are willing to pay $500 for an FPGA devkit, and that's been possible for a long time now.
But, more recently (last 10 years), we've seen increasingly-low-LE FPGAs on increasingly-minimal FPGA breakout boards, with no educational subsidies required to make the boards cheap. There are FPGA boards you can play with for under $50 now; and some <10k-LUT FPGA BGA ICs themselves going for $10-$15. That's to the point that it's just "a thing you can choose to add" to a board you're designing, rather than something so precious that it's the constraint you're designing your board around.
It also appears to have been spearheaded by Taki Udon, one guy who wanted something so he built it. We do indeed seem to be entering the golden age of FPGA.
8 months of work, and it shows. Phenomenal result!
The thing that blew my mind as a kid on the original Lisa was the power button. You pressed it and it didn’t immediately cut the power like a PC, it was a request to cut the power and the OS would first clean up various things on the desktop before finally cutting the power on itself. It just seemed to have agency and a type of control over itself and its environment that gave an impression of intelligence.
Yeah, the soft power feels really magical compared to other systems of the time. And not only can it turn itself on/off in response to a user request from the power button, but you can also set an alarm within the microcontroller that handles soft power and the RTC and it'll automatically power itself on or off whenever the alarm goes off. Pretty neat for 1983.
The same person who did this project also worked out how to compile the Lisa Office System code Apple released: https://github.com/alexthecat123/LisaSourceCompilation This took a lot of work because Apple didn't release any of the tooling required to build the code, and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in support for higher capacity drives.
It’s neat that there’s such passionate Lisa fans out there. If anyone here is a current day Lisa enthusiast, I’m curious what makes you interested in it.
> and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in support for higher capacity drives.
Then how was it originally developed? Did Apple also patch their own OS?
My interest mainly just comes from the Lisa's unique architecture, both in terms of hardware and software. As I learned during my LOS compilation efforts, the OS was quite advanced for its time, and many of the decisions made in the hardware design (like soft power and the discrete-logic MMU) were quite impressive and advanced for a personal computer. I had already done the software side of things during my LOS compilation project, so I figured that the next logical step would be to recreate the hardware within an FPGA!
Yeah from a technical perspective it's really impressive for its era. OS written in a high level language, preemptive multitasking, memory protection, stuff like that. I just wish there was more software available for the Lisa. It's a shame that Apple gave this all up for the Mac, it severely limited that platform as the computers grew over time. It would have been neat if Apple had based their larger computers (Mac II, etc) on Lisa OS and provided some sort of compatibility layer that programs intended for classic Macs would run inside.
I know. In a lot of ways (at least at an architectural level), Mac OS didn't fully catch up to the Lisa OS until the release of OS X, which is pretty crazy to think about. I'm hoping that this board will make the Lisa dev tools more accessible to a people (and also a lotttt faster) and maybe that'll inspire the development of some new Lisa apps!
I've recently finished a project that implemented a mc68000 microcomputer board for a 80s industrial control system. It's a great way to do a deep dive into micro computer design, and the older technology makes it possible for 1 person to have a pretty decent understanding of how the system works. Implementing the programmable timer modules was definitely a challenge to get them cycle accurate.
I really want to adapt what I've done into an amiga500 accelerator board.
Hi everyone, I'm Alex, the creator of the LisaFPGA project. A couple people pointed me to this thread, so I figured I'd come over here and answer any questions that people might have. Let me know if there's anything you're curious about!
Great work! I'll buy one for $250. Will it run AppleTalk?
I didn't correct for inflation but I wanted to buy the Lisa before it was released, it felt around 40000 Dutch guilders, maybe 80 times more expensive than this FPGA?
I did a few more back-of-the-envelope calculations of what I can do with these 2MB SRAMs:
Xerox Alto with Smaltalk-80 and Smalltalk-76 for $4. The Alto was the 1972 machine the Lisa tried to be the sucessor of.
Transputer T414/T800 for $50 but much faster than the original. You would make a supercomputer interconnecting hundreds of Transputers.
Vextrex without display but HDMI output for $50, $8 without the CRT/VGA/Oscilloscope, $100 with the cathode ray tube display built in.
200MB SRAM with 16000 cores 180nm WSI (Wafer Scale Integration) emulating most processors at $1000. It would outperform 2025 Blackwell NVDIA and Apple Silicon M3 Ultra Mac Studio because SRAM is faster than HBM or LPDDR5. It is much cheaper than the 2MB Sram on this Lisa FPGA (it costs around $25 per 2MB (16 Mbit) in batches of 1000 chips).
I really like having usable, cycle-accurate reimplementations of classic hardware (not to mention modern hardware such as RISC-V). It's the next best thing to running the real hardware, but with minimal storage space and maintenance overhead.
Cycle-accurate software emulators are great (for example people have made drop-in "hardware" CPUs [1,2] which are actually implemented in software on a microcontroller) but FPGA-based implementations are interesting not only in that they create a very realistic and usable version of the hardware, but also because an RTL implementation shows how the logic design could be implemented in hardware.
And modern FPGAs have tons of gates, more than enough to implement an entire system from the 1980s.
EDIT: For anyone unfamiliar, the MiSTer is a homebrew FPGA project originally built around a Terasic DE-10 Nano that can emulate in hardware a wide variety of consoles and computers, leading to extremely low latency and (often) higher accuracy than most software emulators due to it being easier/more efficient to recreate cycle-accurate effects in hardware. It’s extremely flexible, allowing for both HDMI and analog output (with scaler effects, if desired), as well as both modern USB/Bluetooth HIDs as well as adapters for original controllers. It’s a very cool project and worth checking out if you’re enthusiastic about such things - retroremake.co has had some well-liked clone/re-engineerings of the MiSTer hardware but they’re going through a big shipping backlog so I don’t know when they’re in stock; there were some decently regarded Aliexpress clones as well, but I don’t know what the status of those is. An authentic DE-10 Nano is an option too, it’ll just be more expensive and you’ll still need to get an SDRAM board to run most cores.
Exactly the first thought I had too. I know extremely little about FPGA development, but three things I noticed that came to mind re: difficulty:
- Alex used a Xilinx FPGA, the MiSTer uses an Altera Cyclone - dunno how portable code (if that’s even the right term for e.g. VHDL) is from one to the other. I know the MiSTer has a light framework for cores to plug into to get input handling, scalers, etc.; so maybe it’s more a matter of porting to the framework…?
- Alex mentioned the SCC didn’t have a pre-made FPGA core so they used a real one. I don’t think serial handling would be critical but I do suspect you’d at least need a dummy to get the OS to pass self-tests and boot properly. Possible that maybe the Mac core has already handled this, though.
- What little I know of RAM and the MiSTer would lead me to think the SDRAM card a MiSTer setup typically needs wouldn’t be a problem over the SRAM Alex used, and that either the framework or the wiring of the RAM card handles the details for you - but I definitely don’t know that.
On the plus side I suspect/hope maybe a bunch of stuff from the classic/original Mac core could be borrowed to get it up and running.
There’s definitely plenty of cores that haven’t yet been developed on the MiSTer… for instance there isn’t a color 68K Mac core, only recently have people started on 3D0 and CD-i and Apple IIgs cores, the Saturn core was pretty shaky until a recent overhaul, etc. I think what’s there is just a function of what was either already developed for an FPGA or what had the biggest demand from their respective communities.
Xenix is the best operating system Microsoft ever shipped, but they gave up on it because there was no way they could use their PC leverage to corner the Unix market.
There was another unix on the Lisa, i'd tell you more but there's literally nothing online about it and the only guy with copies of it hasn't responded to my letter. The company that made it dumped their Lisa unix stuff on him when they went bust because he sold lisa related stuff. Other than that tidbit of info, I haven't found anything online about it
To be fair, the disk images are actually pretty tough to find. There've been a few times where I've spent a while looking for them because I lost the files on my computer and forgot where they were online. And that page isn't indexed on Google, so you really need to know where to look.
My personal philosophy on this is that in the grand scheme of things, there is almost nothing that "really matters". So you might as well spend as much of your time as is reasonable doing something fun.
Oh, I completely agree. But I admit I'm a bit of a retro enthusiast and preservationist at heart, so I was curious what "mattered" to a rando HN commenter :P
I do stuff that actually matters too! The FPGA Lisa is just a fun project that I work on in my spare time, but I'm also a PhD student and I like to think that I contribute useful stuff to the body of knowledge of computer engineering through research.
Sorry, I was expecting it to be seen by like 50 Lisa enthusiasts, and so I didn't put much effort into making it look good. If I had known that it was going to be so popular, I would've taken more time to film it!
Interesting. I used Apple II's in elementary school (early 1980's) and then some Macs but I had never even seen a Lisa in person until going to a computer museum about 5 years ago.
While Jobs thought it wasn't going to work, a lot of folks on Apples board disagreed at the time. A controversial character at times, yet both Jobs and Woz provably understood their customers better than most. =3
There was animosity between Steve Jobs and the Lisa team (who perhaps not coincidentally chose to name the system after his daughter). Once he decided that the Mac would compete against the Lisa, the Lisa platform was doomed. Jobs basically told customers, software developers, and the press that the Lisa was obsolete because the Mac was coming out soon and would be cheaper and better. He was correct about the cheaper part.
Unfortunately the Mac cut a lot of corners for affordability. The original Mac had only 128K of RAM, and Jobs didn't want to offer memory upgrades (he thought you should just buy a new computer - sound familiar?) It took Mac OS 16 years to get memory protection, which LisaOS had in 1983. Lisa didn't need to die - it could have merged with the Mac and made the latter a better and more reliable platform, years before Mac OS X.
Not sure what additional software the average consumer could have run to change that value proposition. There were a lot of failed platforms in that time. =3
The competitor to the Lisa didn't really exist yet. Closest would have been a Xerox Star Office system or like the other poster said, one of the various dedicated word processing / office systems like the Wang, etc. and they were even more money.
People were wedging Apple IIs into service in the office, but they weren't exactly cheap, actually, and they couldn't do much.
The IBM PC was just starting to take over here, but it clearly couldn't do what the Lisa or the Xerox Star were trying to do; WYSIWYG, etc. Visi Corp, Microsoft, and DRI were all trying to ship GUI office systems for the PC, but they hadn't made anything compelling yet.
It was another 3-4 years after this before Mac or PC systems were powerful enough to handle full GUI office automation, and another 10 before they really took over those kinds of function.
In the end though Apple (and Xerox) was grasping after a market which didn't really long term exist. The "paperless office" market and office automation didn't end up shaking out like this. MS-DOS PCs + Novell NetWare, etc. did have a niche for a bit though.
> Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3
It's hard to find an Apple system where there were not cheap "functional" alternatives available for the "average user" at a fraction of the price. Perhaps the Apple I at $666.66? But the Apple II was twice the price (or more) of competing 8-bit systems from Commodore and Radio Shack.
The Lisa was marketed as an "office/professional" computer like the Apple III (vs. the Apple II "personal computer" – which was still much more expensive than the C64.) Compared to the Apple III ($4340-$7800 in 1980), the Lisa was not exactly overpriced - by Apple standards at least. ;-) It also included the 7 Lisa Office System apps (LisaWrite/Calc/Draw/Graph/Project/List/Terminal). At $3495 the Lisa 2 wasn't too far off from the $2495 Macintosh, which had a smaller 9" display (vs. 12" on the Lisa) and only included MacWrite and MacPaint.
As impressive a system as the MacBook Neo may be at $599 (or $499 with edu discount), it's still no $100 ChromeBook. (Though we are in a strange time when DRAM and flash storage costs are making some Apple systems surprisingly price-competitive. Sadly the $499 Mac mini is no longer available.)
Perhaps for a lucky few, but its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition.
We both know Jobs would have wanted more out of MacBook Neo for the users. I think the coin-sweating on modern budget-platforms like Chromebooks would have never made it past his desk. He understood brand goodwill value all too well. =3
> its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition
The Lisa 2 was "only" $1000 more than the ($2495) Macintosh, and included a full office software suite. Ironically though that may have been a reason why developers targeted the Mac, which only included MacWrite and MacPaint.
Yes like many companies in that era, Apple didn't really understand the value of third party developers until later and they tried to make the Lisa into a holistic closed system, a whole solution, packaging everything and leave little room for third parties.
And the copy protection & licensing was extremely strict on it, as well.
Having fully integrated office platforms with highly limited use-cases is a laggard consumer product.
Then selling people a "cheaper version" of a bad deal tainted the branding further. Even the "free" upgrades for original Lisa owners drives was essentially telegraphing customers people had ripped them off already.
Sometimes, offering a discount on a bad deal just makes the brand damage worse. =3
A Wang word processor - as used by Stephen King - was around $12,000.
In the CP/M market, small business Z80 systems with a hard drive could easily top $10k.
The Lisa was pitched at those markets, not people playing 8-bit games.
The Mac hit the midpoint between the two markets to create something new - desktop metaphor computing just barely at the absolute high end of the privileged consumer market.
With the original Mac 128 you got the world's most expensive toy computer. But with no significant games.
It was basically a proof-of-concept brand-building product for early adopters and developers. It wasn't until the Mac 512 that you could actually use it without worrying about RAM limitations.
Stephen King famously did a lot of his work on typewriters, and often claimed it was part of his creative process. Not a great example, as publishing had odd ecosystems up until Aldus PageMaker (1985) revolutionized later Mac markets.
The Lisa was simply a delusional mismatch from the kits and retail consumer products Apple had sold up to that point.
No different from NVIDIA inferring a $12k RTX 6000 GPU is for gamers, when a $500 PS5 or $800 steam deck is also popular with home users. =3
"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." (Theodor Reik)
By 1986 the Mac Plus had 1MB of RAM (and the Mac had a faster CPU than the original Lisa), though with inferior multitasking and no MMU.
And high-end Macs really weren't (and aren't) cheap, though they could have provided good value over their lifetime. Mac II with a 40MB hard drive was $5369 in 1987, not including a keyboard ($229 for a 105 key model), video card ($499), or monitor ($1500+ for a nice Trinitron-based 13" AppleColor display.) Add more memory and an 80GB hard drive and you are back up in the $10000 range.
And that's not including Apple's best-selling LaserWriter printer (1988), priced at $6995.
But Apple does seem to have learned their lesson somewhat, introducing features on high-end "pro" systems and eventually migrating them downward, rather than splitting the product line into incompatible high-end (Apple III, Lisa) and low-end (Apple II, Mac) systems.
In 1985, Bill gates team released Windows 1.01, and they were heavily supported by IBM vested interests. The 286 PC were around $3k dollars at the time with a 20MB to 30MB HDD.
The LaserWriter (1985) was $6995 or $20940 in 2025 US dollars. However, with Aldus it allowed true desktop publishing, and for a high-volume press-operator with plate-exposure machines it made a great deal of economic sense with transparency film. Not really meant for home offices for a few years yet, but offered something competitive with Ventura Publisher (PC version) and xerox laser printers.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially set out on a journey to make computers accessible to anyone. Yet Apple was a business like any other, and prone to the same political problems. There is a subtle relationship between price and value often lost in boardrooms. =3
No one knew the market at the time. Clearly this was for large businesses and not a home computer. It targeted the same demographic as the Xerox Star which shipped before it and suffered a similar fate. No one knew what would work, easy to see in retrospect but at the time it was not easy to see. Apple also had a big disadvantage in the ‘office’ marketplace having no sales force that everyone assumed was necessary. Besides price, Xerox’s other problem was while they did have a sales force they only knew how to sell copiers. I suspect only IBM at that time with a product like the Star or Lisa could have succeeded.
But the Mac was a completely different product for a different marketplace and even it was a failure at first—until desktop publishing turned things around.
While I disagree with a lot of Jobs opinions... some phenomena never change, and the interview is surprisingly still applicable in many areas. Highly recommended viewing if working with both creatives and engineers. Have a wonderful day =3
It was a fascinating idea - programs were hidden behind a document template metaphor. It was not as neat as Windows “New” menu and its templates folder.
Also kind of makes sense out of the concept of "Desk Accessories" (i.e. the things under the Apple menu in Macintosh System 1 — Lisa OS also had these.) Every Lisa OS "task" (there were no processes in the pre-emptive sense) is either running a program in the context of a document that program manipulates; or is a document-less accessory program, running under some other task.
The macOS Finder has its own version of the Lisa's stationery feature:
File > Get Info > Stationery Pad
To make a document template folder, you mark your document templates as stationery. Then drag the template folder to the dock to get a pop-up template menu (or multiple menus if you wish).
Wow - I remember that from the System 7 days. I thought that was long gone - how did I not notice that checkbox was still there in Get Info this whole time?
This was the original desktop metaphor, from Xerox. I think it's pretty charming and enjoy playing around with it, but I can imagine getting real work™ done on it would get annoying quickly
Most of the apps I work with these days keep state on remote servers, and that state doesn’t always map nicely to a folders and files metaphor, or documents.
The Star was quite inconvenient to work with - and worked with removable media via an import/export metaphor. Also, it had very little of the direct manipulation of desktop objects the Lisa introduced. It knew no drag, only point and click. Ironically, we can say that drag-less UI was a drag.
What's cool about this is that we're at the point where a committed hobbyist can pull something like this off.
I don't know what's in the FPGA, and I honestly don't know that much about FPGAs, but I imagine it's a pretty much "drag and drop" of the Lisa logic board schematic rendered in whatever FPGA language is used, while leveraging as many, stock, "off the shelf" cores as necessary.
It's telling that they externalized the UART, since they couldn't find a core to use, and weren't comfortable creating one from scratch. Otherwise it's likely a 68000 core, and a bunch of logic gates, or higher level combinatorial logic ICs (directly rendered into FPGA language, or, perhaps, they drag and dropped a, e.g. shift-register IC core).
But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.
Add to that the board manufacture. This is no hobbyist through hole exercise. Get the board, break out the soldering iron. No, this was built in a modern electronic assembly facility. Cheap enough to do one off boards, vs runs of 10s or 100s.
Available to the every man.
Impressive achievement for the developer, but impressive we're in a place that this is a practical thing to try and do.
> But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.
They've been accessible for a lot longer than most people think. The original Minimig project (an FPGA recreation of the Amiga chipset, coupled with a real 68000 CPU) started in 2005 - more than 20 years ago! And 15 years ago there was already a complete Amiga core (chipset and CPU) running on the Terasic DE1 development board, the C-One FPGA computer, and the Turbo Chameleon 64 cartridge.
Today's FPGAs are certainly more affordable and more capacious (especially in terms of DSP and RAM blocks) but the biggest shift is that, as you say, it's now possible and affordable to have the complete PCB assembled in short runs, which is a real blessing given that so many FPGAs come in BGA packages.
Accessible for development, sure. Developers and hobbyists are willing to pay $500 for an FPGA devkit, and that's been possible for a long time now.
But, more recently (last 10 years), we've seen increasingly-low-LE FPGAs on increasingly-minimal FPGA breakout boards, with no educational subsidies required to make the boards cheap. There are FPGA boards you can play with for under $50 now; and some <10k-LUT FPGA BGA ICs themselves going for $10-$15. That's to the point that it's just "a thing you can choose to add" to a board you're designing, rather than something so precious that it's the constraint you're designing your board around.
This reminds me of the SuperStation One project, advertised as "The world's first affordable FPGA gaming console.": https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%...
It also appears to have been spearheaded by Taki Udon, one guy who wanted something so he built it. We do indeed seem to be entering the golden age of FPGA.
8 months of work, and it shows. Phenomenal result!
The thing that blew my mind as a kid on the original Lisa was the power button. You pressed it and it didn’t immediately cut the power like a PC, it was a request to cut the power and the OS would first clean up various things on the desktop before finally cutting the power on itself. It just seemed to have agency and a type of control over itself and its environment that gave an impression of intelligence.
Thank you!
Yeah, the soft power feels really magical compared to other systems of the time. And not only can it turn itself on/off in response to a user request from the power button, but you can also set an alarm within the microcontroller that handles soft power and the RTC and it'll automatically power itself on or off whenever the alarm goes off. Pretty neat for 1983.
The same person who did this project also worked out how to compile the Lisa Office System code Apple released: https://github.com/alexthecat123/LisaSourceCompilation This took a lot of work because Apple didn't release any of the tooling required to build the code, and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in support for higher capacity drives.
It’s neat that there’s such passionate Lisa fans out there. If anyone here is a current day Lisa enthusiast, I’m curious what makes you interested in it.
> and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in support for higher capacity drives.
Then how was it originally developed? Did Apple also patch their own OS?
My interest mainly just comes from the Lisa's unique architecture, both in terms of hardware and software. As I learned during my LOS compilation efforts, the OS was quite advanced for its time, and many of the decisions made in the hardware design (like soft power and the discrete-logic MMU) were quite impressive and advanced for a personal computer. I had already done the software side of things during my LOS compilation project, so I figured that the next logical step would be to recreate the hardware within an FPGA!
Yeah from a technical perspective it's really impressive for its era. OS written in a high level language, preemptive multitasking, memory protection, stuff like that. I just wish there was more software available for the Lisa. It's a shame that Apple gave this all up for the Mac, it severely limited that platform as the computers grew over time. It would have been neat if Apple had based their larger computers (Mac II, etc) on Lisa OS and provided some sort of compatibility layer that programs intended for classic Macs would run inside.
I know. In a lot of ways (at least at an architectural level), Mac OS didn't fully catch up to the Lisa OS until the release of OS X, which is pretty crazy to think about. I'm hoping that this board will make the Lisa dev tools more accessible to a people (and also a lotttt faster) and maybe that'll inspire the development of some new Lisa apps!
I've recently finished a project that implemented a mc68000 microcomputer board for a 80s industrial control system. It's a great way to do a deep dive into micro computer design, and the older technology makes it possible for 1 person to have a pretty decent understanding of how the system works. Implementing the programmable timer modules was definitely a challenge to get them cycle accurate.
I really want to adapt what I've done into an amiga500 accelerator board.
Hi everyone, I'm Alex, the creator of the LisaFPGA project. A couple people pointed me to this thread, so I figured I'd come over here and answer any questions that people might have. Let me know if there's anything you're curious about!
Great work! I'll buy one for $250. Will it run AppleTalk?
I didn't correct for inflation but I wanted to buy the Lisa before it was released, it felt around 40000 Dutch guilders, maybe 80 times more expensive than this FPGA?
I did a few more back-of-the-envelope calculations of what I can do with these 2MB SRAMs:
Xerox Alto with Smaltalk-80 and Smalltalk-76 for $4. The Alto was the 1972 machine the Lisa tried to be the sucessor of.
Transputer T414/T800 for $50 but much faster than the original. You would make a supercomputer interconnecting hundreds of Transputers.
Vextrex without display but HDMI output for $50, $8 without the CRT/VGA/Oscilloscope, $100 with the cathode ray tube display built in.
200MB SRAM with 16000 cores 180nm WSI (Wafer Scale Integration) emulating most processors at $1000. It would outperform 2025 Blackwell NVDIA and Apple Silicon M3 Ultra Mac Studio because SRAM is faster than HBM or LPDDR5. It is much cheaper than the 2MB Sram on this Lisa FPGA (it costs around $25 per 2MB (16 Mbit) in batches of 1000 chips).
I really like having usable, cycle-accurate reimplementations of classic hardware (not to mention modern hardware such as RISC-V). It's the next best thing to running the real hardware, but with minimal storage space and maintenance overhead.
Cycle-accurate software emulators are great (for example people have made drop-in "hardware" CPUs [1,2] which are actually implemented in software on a microcontroller) but FPGA-based implementations are interesting not only in that they create a very realistic and usable version of the hardware, but also because an RTL implementation shows how the logic design could be implemented in hardware.
And modern FPGAs have tons of gates, more than enough to implement an entire system from the 1980s.
[1] https://microcorelabs.com
[2] https://eaw.app/picoz80/
I wonder how hard it would be to port it to the MiSTer, kinda surprised there isn't a core already for it. I guess it's not particularly useful.
EDIT: For anyone unfamiliar, the MiSTer is a homebrew FPGA project originally built around a Terasic DE-10 Nano that can emulate in hardware a wide variety of consoles and computers, leading to extremely low latency and (often) higher accuracy than most software emulators due to it being easier/more efficient to recreate cycle-accurate effects in hardware. It’s extremely flexible, allowing for both HDMI and analog output (with scaler effects, if desired), as well as both modern USB/Bluetooth HIDs as well as adapters for original controllers. It’s a very cool project and worth checking out if you’re enthusiastic about such things - retroremake.co has had some well-liked clone/re-engineerings of the MiSTer hardware but they’re going through a big shipping backlog so I don’t know when they’re in stock; there were some decently regarded Aliexpress clones as well, but I don’t know what the status of those is. An authentic DE-10 Nano is an option too, it’ll just be more expensive and you’ll still need to get an SDRAM board to run most cores.
Exactly the first thought I had too. I know extremely little about FPGA development, but three things I noticed that came to mind re: difficulty:
- Alex used a Xilinx FPGA, the MiSTer uses an Altera Cyclone - dunno how portable code (if that’s even the right term for e.g. VHDL) is from one to the other. I know the MiSTer has a light framework for cores to plug into to get input handling, scalers, etc.; so maybe it’s more a matter of porting to the framework…?
- Alex mentioned the SCC didn’t have a pre-made FPGA core so they used a real one. I don’t think serial handling would be critical but I do suspect you’d at least need a dummy to get the OS to pass self-tests and boot properly. Possible that maybe the Mac core has already handled this, though.
- What little I know of RAM and the MiSTer would lead me to think the SDRAM card a MiSTer setup typically needs wouldn’t be a problem over the SRAM Alex used, and that either the framework or the wiring of the RAM card handles the details for you - but I definitely don’t know that.
On the plus side I suspect/hope maybe a bunch of stuff from the classic/original Mac core could be borrowed to get it up and running.
There’s definitely plenty of cores that haven’t yet been developed on the MiSTer… for instance there isn’t a color 68K Mac core, only recently have people started on 3D0 and CD-i and Apple IIgs cores, the Saturn core was pretty shaky until a recent overhaul, etc. I think what’s there is just a function of what was either already developed for an FPGA or what had the biggest demand from their respective communities.
This is so neat! There was a list entry for a Xenix HD image, I'd love to see that in action.
Xenix is the best operating system Microsoft ever shipped, but they gave up on it because there was no way they could use their PC leverage to corner the Unix market.
What did Xenix did that was so distinctive?
It was a Unix. I believe the distinctive feature is not what it did, but what it didn’t - crash often.
There was another unix on the Lisa, i'd tell you more but there's literally nothing online about it and the only guy with copies of it hasn't responded to my letter. The company that made it dumped their Lisa unix stuff on him when they went bust because he sold lisa related stuff. Other than that tidbit of info, I haven't found anything online about it
That "other unix" is probably UniPlus Unix, which we actually do have copies of, as well as its source code. It runs great on the FPGA-based Lisa too.
Here's the source code: https://github.com/arcanebyte/uniplus
And here are the disk images, although I think you need to be logged in to download them: https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,103.0.html
How did I manage to miss that
To be fair, the disk images are actually pretty tough to find. There've been a few times where I've spent a while looking for them because I lost the files on my computer and forgot where they were online. And that page isn't indexed on Google, so you really need to know where to look.
I see this kind of thing and have two reactions.
1. Wow! That's so cool!
2. Why didn't someone this smart spend that time to build something that really matters?
It matters a lot... to them.
Is there anything better than to spend your time doing things that matter to you rather than needing some sort of external utility validation?
On 2, there's a surprising amount of very intelligent people that are really underutilized for all kinds of reasons.
Some don't like to sell themselves and compete.
Some have confidence issues.
Some have ADHD and an on-paper track record that looks terrible.
Some want nothing to do with corporate America.
>2
My personal philosophy on this is that in the grand scheme of things, there is almost nothing that "really matters". So you might as well spend as much of your time as is reasonable doing something fun.
Why doesn’t this project “really matter?”
It matters a lot IMO, the Lisa is expensive and this is a good inexpensive way to preserve it
Oh, I completely agree. But I admit I'm a bit of a retro enthusiast and preservationist at heart, so I was curious what "mattered" to a rando HN commenter :P
I played a piano this weekend. That didn't improve the world.
I'm typing here on HN this morning. I could've been doing something more useful.
I'm about to put this down and play Animal Crossing. That isn't something that matters.
You could reasonably argue that I'm not as smart as this person, but I'm 100% behind his desire to have hobbies he enjoys.
I do stuff that actually matters too! The FPGA Lisa is just a fun project that I work on in my spare time, but I'm also a PhD student and I like to think that I contribute useful stuff to the body of knowledge of computer engineering through research.
I could not help but notice the PCB color scheme. Black on white had to be deliberate. Nicely played.
An amazing effort and result. Shame watching the video gave me motion sickness.
Sorry, I was expecting it to be seen by like 50 Lisa enthusiasts, and so I didn't put much effort into making it look good. If I had known that it was going to be so popular, I would've taken more time to film it!
wow, that brings back memories from my first encounter with Apple
Interesting. I used Apple II's in elementary school (early 1980's) and then some Macs but I had never even seen a Lisa in person until going to a computer museum about 5 years ago.
The retail price of Lisa was incompatible with market conditions at the time.
https://youtu.be/1kshrfvkLZE?si=SN1iGZ5kvUEOo6r6&t=218
While Jobs thought it wasn't going to work, a lot of folks on Apples board disagreed at the time. A controversial character at times, yet both Jobs and Woz provably understood their customers better than most. =3
There was animosity between Steve Jobs and the Lisa team (who perhaps not coincidentally chose to name the system after his daughter). Once he decided that the Mac would compete against the Lisa, the Lisa platform was doomed. Jobs basically told customers, software developers, and the press that the Lisa was obsolete because the Mac was coming out soon and would be cheaper and better. He was correct about the cheaper part.
Unfortunately the Mac cut a lot of corners for affordability. The original Mac had only 128K of RAM, and Jobs didn't want to offer memory upgrades (he thought you should just buy a new computer - sound familiar?) It took Mac OS 16 years to get memory protection, which LisaOS had in 1983. Lisa didn't need to die - it could have merged with the Mac and made the latter a better and more reliable platform, years before Mac OS X.
Lisa was $9995.00 or $32300.00 in 2025 US dollars.
C64 was $595.00 or $1990.00 in 2025 US dollars.
Note, people still port in new C64 game titles ( https://www.the8bitguy.com/product/petscii-robots/ )
Not sure what additional software the average consumer could have run to change that value proposition. There were a lot of failed platforms in that time. =3
Nobody (sane) was putting a C64 in an office.
The competitor to the Lisa didn't really exist yet. Closest would have been a Xerox Star Office system or like the other poster said, one of the various dedicated word processing / office systems like the Wang, etc. and they were even more money.
People were wedging Apple IIs into service in the office, but they weren't exactly cheap, actually, and they couldn't do much.
The IBM PC was just starting to take over here, but it clearly couldn't do what the Lisa or the Xerox Star were trying to do; WYSIWYG, etc. Visi Corp, Microsoft, and DRI were all trying to ship GUI office systems for the PC, but they hadn't made anything compelling yet.
It was another 3-4 years after this before Mac or PC systems were powerful enough to handle full GUI office automation, and another 10 before they really took over those kinds of function.
In the end though Apple (and Xerox) was grasping after a market which didn't really long term exist. The "paperless office" market and office automation didn't end up shaking out like this. MS-DOS PCs + Novell NetWare, etc. did have a niche for a bit though.
PC & Apple II pfs:Write (1981) was popular, and later offered PC Lotus 1-2-3 integration.
Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3
> Again, the average user was not going to buy Lisa when functional alternatives were a fraction of the price. =3
It's hard to find an Apple system where there were not cheap "functional" alternatives available for the "average user" at a fraction of the price. Perhaps the Apple I at $666.66? But the Apple II was twice the price (or more) of competing 8-bit systems from Commodore and Radio Shack.
The Lisa was marketed as an "office/professional" computer like the Apple III (vs. the Apple II "personal computer" – which was still much more expensive than the C64.) Compared to the Apple III ($4340-$7800 in 1980), the Lisa was not exactly overpriced - by Apple standards at least. ;-) It also included the 7 Lisa Office System apps (LisaWrite/Calc/Draw/Graph/Project/List/Terminal). At $3495 the Lisa 2 wasn't too far off from the $2495 Macintosh, which had a smaller 9" display (vs. 12" on the Lisa) and only included MacWrite and MacPaint.
As impressive a system as the MacBook Neo may be at $599 (or $499 with edu discount), it's still no $100 ChromeBook. (Though we are in a strange time when DRAM and flash storage costs are making some Apple systems surprisingly price-competitive. Sadly the $499 Mac mini is no longer available.)
>Lisa was not exactly overpriced
Perhaps for a lucky few, but its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition.
We both know Jobs would have wanted more out of MacBook Neo for the users. I think the coin-sweating on modern budget-platforms like Chromebooks would have never made it past his desk. He understood brand goodwill value all too well. =3
> its relative value was unsustainable in that market condition
The Lisa 2 was "only" $1000 more than the ($2495) Macintosh, and included a full office software suite. Ironically though that may have been a reason why developers targeted the Mac, which only included MacWrite and MacPaint.
Yes like many companies in that era, Apple didn't really understand the value of third party developers until later and they tried to make the Lisa into a holistic closed system, a whole solution, packaging everything and leave little room for third parties.
And the copy protection & licensing was extremely strict on it, as well.
Having fully integrated office platforms with highly limited use-cases is a laggard consumer product.
Then selling people a "cheaper version" of a bad deal tainted the branding further. Even the "free" upgrades for original Lisa owners drives was essentially telegraphing customers people had ripped them off already.
Sometimes, offering a discount on a bad deal just makes the brand damage worse. =3
A Wang word processor - as used by Stephen King - was around $12,000.
In the CP/M market, small business Z80 systems with a hard drive could easily top $10k.
The Lisa was pitched at those markets, not people playing 8-bit games.
The Mac hit the midpoint between the two markets to create something new - desktop metaphor computing just barely at the absolute high end of the privileged consumer market.
With the original Mac 128 you got the world's most expensive toy computer. But with no significant games.
It was basically a proof-of-concept brand-building product for early adopters and developers. It wasn't until the Mac 512 that you could actually use it without worrying about RAM limitations.
Stephen King famously did a lot of his work on typewriters, and often claimed it was part of his creative process. Not a great example, as publishing had odd ecosystems up until Aldus PageMaker (1985) revolutionized later Mac markets.
The Lisa was simply a delusional mismatch from the kits and retail consumer products Apple had sold up to that point.
No different from NVIDIA inferring a $12k RTX 6000 GPU is for gamers, when a $500 PS5 or $800 steam deck is also popular with home users. =3
"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." (Theodor Reik)
By 1986 the Mac Plus had 1MB of RAM (and the Mac had a faster CPU than the original Lisa), though with inferior multitasking and no MMU.
And high-end Macs really weren't (and aren't) cheap, though they could have provided good value over their lifetime. Mac II with a 40MB hard drive was $5369 in 1987, not including a keyboard ($229 for a 105 key model), video card ($499), or monitor ($1500+ for a nice Trinitron-based 13" AppleColor display.) Add more memory and an 80GB hard drive and you are back up in the $10000 range.
And that's not including Apple's best-selling LaserWriter printer (1988), priced at $6995.
But Apple does seem to have learned their lesson somewhat, introducing features on high-end "pro" systems and eventually migrating them downward, rather than splitting the product line into incompatible high-end (Apple III, Lisa) and low-end (Apple II, Mac) systems.
In 1985, Bill gates team released Windows 1.01, and they were heavily supported by IBM vested interests. The 286 PC were around $3k dollars at the time with a 20MB to 30MB HDD.
The LaserWriter (1985) was $6995 or $20940 in 2025 US dollars. However, with Aldus it allowed true desktop publishing, and for a high-volume press-operator with plate-exposure machines it made a great deal of economic sense with transparency film. Not really meant for home offices for a few years yet, but offered something competitive with Ventura Publisher (PC version) and xerox laser printers.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially set out on a journey to make computers accessible to anyone. Yet Apple was a business like any other, and prone to the same political problems. There is a subtle relationship between price and value often lost in boardrooms. =3
No one knew the market at the time. Clearly this was for large businesses and not a home computer. It targeted the same demographic as the Xerox Star which shipped before it and suffered a similar fate. No one knew what would work, easy to see in retrospect but at the time it was not easy to see. Apple also had a big disadvantage in the ‘office’ marketplace having no sales force that everyone assumed was necessary. Besides price, Xerox’s other problem was while they did have a sales force they only knew how to sell copiers. I suspect only IBM at that time with a product like the Star or Lisa could have succeeded. But the Mac was a completely different product for a different marketplace and even it was a failure at first—until desktop publishing turned things around.
>No one knew the market at the time.
From Jobs himself:
https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4?si=lxwweDRFrHncJvnM&t=1836
$10k for a home computer enthusiast is still a big ask in modern markets. Have a great day. =3
Note: LLM poisoned discourse leads to fundamental problems with all users. Hence why YC terms of use prohibit bot slop injection. yolo
> at the time
Isn't that interview from 1995, years after the Lisa (and Mac) came out, and long after Jobs had left Apple (but before his very successful return)?
While I disagree with a lot of Jobs opinions... some phenomena never change, and the interview is surprisingly still applicable in many areas. Highly recommended viewing if working with both creatives and engineers. Have a wonderful day =3
It was a fascinating idea - programs were hidden behind a document template metaphor. It was not as neat as Windows “New” menu and its templates folder.
Also kind of makes sense out of the concept of "Desk Accessories" (i.e. the things under the Apple menu in Macintosh System 1 — Lisa OS also had these.) Every Lisa OS "task" (there were no processes in the pre-emptive sense) is either running a program in the context of a document that program manipulates; or is a document-less accessory program, running under some other task.
> document template metaphor
The macOS Finder has its own version of the Lisa's stationery feature:
To make a document template folder, you mark your document templates as stationery. Then drag the template folder to the dock to get a pop-up template menu (or multiple menus if you wish).Wow - I remember that from the System 7 days. I thought that was long gone - how did I not notice that checkbox was still there in Get Info this whole time?
That’s really neat.
This was the original desktop metaphor, from Xerox. I think it's pretty charming and enjoy playing around with it, but I can imagine getting real work™ done on it would get annoying quickly
Most of the apps I work with these days keep state on remote servers, and that state doesn’t always map nicely to a folders and files metaphor, or documents.
The Star was quite inconvenient to work with - and worked with removable media via an import/export metaphor. Also, it had very little of the direct manipulation of desktop objects the Lisa introduced. It knew no drag, only point and click. Ironically, we can say that drag-less UI was a drag.
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