Is it a Lisa or Mac XL?!

From: MTPro_at_aol.com <(MTPro_at_aol.com)>
Date: Tue Nov 27 22:03:12 2001

I've been following all of the great Lisa discussion. People get very messed
up with the "what's a Lisa 2 and what's a Mac XL" criteria. If the machine in
question has not been adulterated with a ROM upgrade or screen modification,
etc., it can run the Lisa OS - any Lisa 2 or Mac XL. All Mac XLs are Lisa 2s,
Apple merely renamed them in 1985. The "plain" Lisa 2 is the same as the Lisa
2/5, just with no external 5 mb Profile hard drive. It was generally not sold
without a hard drive, as it was basically useless without one.

Here's the breakdown on differences per the Lisa/Macintosh XL Do-it-yourself
Guide -

Lisa 2: The Lisa 2 has one 3.5-inch 400K disk drive, different disk drive
controller circuitry, and a redesigned front panel to accommodate the single
3.5-inch drive opening. A 400K floppy controller, labeled the "Lisa Lite
Adapter," is mounted inside the disk drive cage. The System I/0 board is
socketed for an AMD 9512 arithmetic processor. It has nickel-cadmium battery
backup for the real time clock. One 512K memory board is standard. The mother
board has a mouse connector, two serial connectors, and an external parallel
connector. The power supply is rated 1.2 A.

Lisa 2/10: The Lisa 2/10 has a completely different motherboard. The mouse
connector is different. There's no external parallel connector on the back of
the computer. Instead, there's an internal parallel connector and a 10MB
internal I hard drive. An interrupt switch has been added. The system I/0
board is also different. There's no socket for the AMD 9512 coprocessor.
There's no nickel-cadmium battery backup for the real time clock. The disk
drive controller is different. An extra chip on the 1/0 board replaces the
Lisa Lite Adapter which was formerly located in the drive cage. The disk
drive cabling is different. The wiring harness is different. The power supply
is different. One megabyte of RAM is standard. If you have Lisa OS disks, a
10MB internal hard drive, no Lisa Lite card, no external parallel connector,
and a 1.8-A 110/220V power supply, yours is at least a Lisa 2/10.

Macintosh XL: The Macintosh XL is exactly the same as a Lisa 2/10. Only the
sticker on the box, the operating system, and the instruction manuals are
different. Instead of Lisa OS, the bundled OS is Macintosh System software
and MacWorks XL, a Lisa program which allows 64K Macintosh ROM emulation. If
you have MacWorks XL instead of Lisa OS disks, a 10MB internal hard drive, no
Lisa Lite card, and a 1.8-A power supply, yours is probably a MacintoshXL.

A lot of people confuse the hardware differences as coming about due to the
renaming, but this was not the case. When Sun Remarketing in Logan, Utah
bought up the bulk of remaining "Mac XLs" from Apple they slowly began
tweaking them to make them more Mac-like. My first Lisa which I bought from
them in December 1989 for $1095 had started life as a Lisa 2/5. Sun
Remarketing had installed the screen modification kit (giving it square
pixels like a Mac instead of it's native rectangular ones), Mac Plus 128k
ROMs to support the installed 800k drive and a Sun Remarketing installed
internal 20 mb hard drive. The hard drive was interesting because it was
installed internally, yet it's cable extended under the rear cage cover to
attach to the external parallel port. Ok, ok, I go on and on. Interesting
stuff eh? Best,

David Greelish
Publisher
Classic Computing Press
www.classiccomputing.com
Received on Tue Nov 27 2001 - 22:03:12 GMT