Thread
Twiggy disks
Okay. So today I made my rounds in the recycling center. I was about to leave because I saw nothing good. Mostly industrial "computers", VCRs, DVD Players, and such. then i found a lisa with twiggy drives and a hard drive. how to write a blank twiggy disk with a pc?
To my knowledge, the Twiggy drive is the only drive capable of writing to them. They are *VERY* not-standard. Not just "non standard formatting like Apple's 400k and 800k disks", but physically treated differently.
So how do I go about getting software from the internet into this machine. Do External drives work with it? It came with a bunch of blank Twiggy disks, a System Startup Disk, and a bunch of other system installation disks
Mmmmhmmm... You should document this find in pictures.
Twiggy Lisas are rare as hen's teeth (as in, maybe less than a dozen are known to exist?), so if you found one you have something you could easily sell for several thousands of dollars on eBay. Someone must of been pretty stupid to drop it off at a recycle center.
Twiggy Lisas are rare as hen's teeth (as in, maybe less than a dozen are known to exist?), so if you found one you have something you could easily sell for several thousands of dollars on eBay. Someone must of been pretty stupid to drop it off at a recycle center.
Most people are stupid in NW Indiana. I dont want to sell it I want to keep it and use it. Does anyone know what interface the ProFile Hard Drive uses? Is it a form of SCSI? Are the DB25 Ports on the back a form of SCSI?
profile, serial
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=1128
ports are serial
i do not know if the 'Apple Lisa SCSI Interface Card ' works in a Lisa 1 (they works fine in my Lisa 2's)
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-Lisa-SCSI-Interface-Card-Tested-Made-Fresh-/200465344576?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eacaa6840#ht_1530wt_1141
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-Lisa-SCSI-Interface-Card-Hard-Drive-BOOTS-/200536880449?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eb0edf541#ht_1779wt_1141
ask the seller (Vintagemicros)
he has all the kowledge
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=1128
ports are serial
i do not know if the 'Apple Lisa SCSI Interface Card ' works in a Lisa 1 (they works fine in my Lisa 2's)
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-Lisa-SCSI-Interface-Card-Tested-Made-Fresh-/200465344576?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eacaa6840#ht_1530wt_1141
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-Lisa-SCSI-Interface-Card-Hard-Drive-BOOTS-/200536880449?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eb0edf541#ht_1779wt_1141
ask the seller (Vintagemicros)
he has all the kowledge
I find it hard to believe that someone would drop off a Twiggy Lisa 1 with documentation at a recycling center. Even finding a Lisa 2, or a Mac XL in that type of environment sounds pretty unrealistic due to their rarity, and high aftermarket value.
Definitely.
You have to understand. Most of the people in Northwest indiana are {removed - mod} . they are steel mill workers and {removed - mod}. they dont know what a lisa is. All they know its its an old computer in their office closet at work or something. they are {removed - mod}, they dont know its rare, they know it looks old and they think they should throw it away. they dont think like you and me {removed - mod}
{removed - mod}
A lot of people do not know what a Lisa is because it never had a major impact on the market. Sure, it was extremely revolutionary for its time, being one of the first mass-produced GUI computers, but poor marketing, a limited software library, and an unattainable initial price for most (not to mention the introduction of the cheaper, and much faster Macintosh) made the Lisa seem impractical, which was quite unfortunate. There was a lot of potential with the Lisa, which went to waste. But hell, a lot of people are even unaware that Apple used to produce certain peripherals, such as printers, scanners, cameras, and unique items like the Newton PDAs (although this has been surpassed by the iPad), and likewise are uncertain of its "collector's value." It doesn't necessarily mean that those people are complete morons. Not everyone is into computers/electronics, btw.
Well, if you did in fact find, and brought home a Lisa 1 from a recycling center, I hope you are sensible enough to take better care of her than her previous owner(s).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but... pics or it didn't happen. ;-)
My thoughts exactly. We definitely require photographic proof here. But that would be one hell of a conquest if JP did in fact find a Lisa at a recycling center.
Well then according to you it didnt happen. I Dont have a digital camera, cant afford one. Not trying to start a fight here, im just asking how i get software into it. If i didnt have a Lisa 1, why would I be asking how to load software disk images into it>
JP, finding a complete (or almost complete) Lisa 1 set is like finding the Holy Grail of vintage computers. There's not too many surviving units (there were never too many to begin with, as they sold poorly), so naturally we need some proof to confirm this extraordinary find.
You can't spend $10 on a basic digital camera? We're not asking for state-of-the-art photography here. Come on!
{removed - mod}
Sorry, it's just that this kind of post comes up from time to time. "I found the Holy Grail - what's it do?" Surely you can see how this must look.
To address your point about software, there's not software available on twiggy disks anywhere. There are several disk images in digital form (you can find them on ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/applelisa) but there's not an ADTPro, for example, for the Lisa. As the author of same for the Apple II, I've been waiting to get my hands on a Twiggy'd Lisa so I can write it. But so far... no luck at my local recyclers. If you'd trade a digital camera for some time on yours - perhaps we can talk about it.
Enough taunting in this thread. Leave it out. Same applies to insulting folk based on geography. Mod has spoken.
Not to stir the hornet's nest, but... does "no taunting" still leave room to attempt to convince to OP in a calm, rational, well-reasoned and non-insulting way that to have simply "found" an item as rare as a working Lisa 1 (with a full set of accessories, no less) lying in a recycling center is a claim of such extraordinary magnitude that any reasonable person would expect evidence to be supplied before believing said claim?
(That it is in fact a claim so fantastic that it essentially insults the intelligence of the readers of this forum to think that they would be so gullible as to believe it without seeing proof, particularly when the technological barrier to supplying said proof is so laughably low that essentially anyone who has access to the Internet should have within their power the means to supply it? I don't believe anyone is asking for anything beyond a few grainy webcam-resolution photographs of a Lisa 1 with something in the background to indicate that the photos were taken for the occasion rather than re-purposed from the results of a Google image search.)
Or is "no taunting" to be taken as the signal that no further discussion on the topic of "proof" is to be permitted and that from this point on anyone reading this thread should simply draw whatever appears to themselves to be the most obvious conclusion regarding the veracity of the claims within this thread, and by extension the veracity of the participants involved?
(I don't really care either way. I'll grant the metaphysical possibility that the OP is being perfectly truthful in his account and is, for instance, simply unaware of just how rare a find a Lisa 1 would be and thus fails to understand why his story sounds so fanciful.)
Bunsen laid the law down this morning because JP had labeled people residing in NW Indiana uneducated trash, and I joked by commenting on how all the "idiots" receive rare antiquities that most of us forum members would ultimately love to get their hands on. I found out about the edits through a PM sent to me this morning. Quite unexpected, but what can you do?
As stated before, I'm going to stick with David's comment: pics or it didn't happen (and I believe Bunsen utilized the same line in another thread on the Conquest forum). So it's good to know that we're all in agreement in regards to adequately proving one's find, rare or not.
That seems a reasonable way of putting it. The OP may or may not care whether anyone believes him. The reader may or may not care to draw their own conclusions. I wasn't aware myself of the rarity of the specific Lisa 1 until it was brought up here. Personally, I don't care enough to believe or disbelieve it. The issue for me as a moderator is that discussions from all stay this side of flaming and flame-baiting, and not the other.
Concorde: I'll explain my actions to folks here myself if necessary, thanks. You don't need to interpret for me.
That seems dubious. Cellphone?
Disposable camera -> Photo CD -> Internet -> Our eyeballs
Fair enough, although the "interpretation" was based on relevant facts of what did happen on this thread. I was just trying to clarify things here. :beige:
If as you say, you have a working Lisa 1 with Twiggy disks and a bunch of blank floppy disks and system and installation disks as well as a ProFile, you have the best (possibly ONLY) setup of anyone in the world for writing a program to copy files from another computer to Twiggy disks. No one else has the hardware. No one has ever had the hardware since the internet became popular. There is no way to copy stuff from the internet to Twiggy disks, and there never has been because Apple discontinued Twiggy production before the internet was invented. Sorry.
If you just want help getting the computer running, one of the owners of a Lisa 2 may be able to help, but he will need details and probably photos to see what may be missing or broken.
If you just want help getting the computer running, one of the owners of a Lisa 2 may be able to help, but he will need details and probably photos to see what may be missing or broken.
Well, the Internet was "technically" around during the era of Twiggy disks, just not as the way we see, and use it today.
The Twiggy era was 1982 and 1983. There was a net back then, restricted to military and research centers. The general public could not access it. You had to have an account on a research computer which you MIGHT be able to SLIP to from home with a dial-up modem and have a Unix terminal session. Not something mere mortals would attempt. 
Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" gives a good feel of internet-ery about that time.
Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" gives a good feel of internet-ery about that time.
you all act like this is the only lisa 1 left. I see them all over the internet in pictures.
JP, trust us, these units are VERY rare. We're not kidding. I've only seen one (and it was a complete set) posted on eBay about a month ago, and it went for slightly over $5 000. I haven't seen any 1s for sale since, and I have never heard of any 68k member write in the Conquests forum that they bought, or found a Lisa 1 (and this forum has been around for awhile now). The main reason for this is because many people who purchased Lisa 1's upgraded to the Lisa 2 system (Apple offered a free upgrade program in 84 when the original Mac was released), which means that the ones that were returned were either destroyed, placed in cold storage, or sold off. The fact that a handful of people kept their Lisa 1's is probably because they realized that the value of these units would skyrocket in the future, or they were completely oblivious about Apple's upgrade program.
Btw, just because there are tons of pictures of Lisa 1's on Google, it doesn't mean that there are tons of Lisa 1's around. A lot of what you see photographed was from brochures, manuals, advertisements, etc. Honestly JP, use some common sense.
I read or heard somwhere that there are a bunch of Lisa 1's in guarded storage somwhere and they are never allowed to be sold or destroyed. something about apple avoiding the inventory tax on computers that wouldnt sell. can anyone confirm or deny this?
never mind, i confirmed it. Also saw photos of a dozer crushing them into dust to ensure none of the parts were salvagable. It makes me wanna cry. Didn't apple realize that these would be come rare? Didn't they care that the Twiggy disk format was the ONLY auto ejecting , auto insert notification 5.25 format? what am i going to do when this lisa I have now fails? Ive seen the Lisa 2 and without the twiggy disk format it kind of sucks. theres nothing special about it. sure it would be fun to play with but its just not the same. So if my lisa 1 fails, say the CRT dies or worse, caps leak. or a twiggy drive fails. what am i going to do. How could I live in a world without Lisa? Slowly but surely the supply of automatically ejecting floppy disk drives will become smaller and smaller. things would have been better if we never progressed beyond the Lisa, or Beyond the SE / 30 or iifx. okay? but now. Now if this Lisa fails Im going to be at my wit's end dealing with grief. I have computer skills, but not the low level electronic skills required to repair a board. Ive always been a parts swapper tech. you can swap out parts when you do not have parts available. Seeing the phenomena that happened with every vintage computer becoming rare it makes me want to hoard not only computers vintage, but computers modern for they will also become vintage and forgotten. and is this what will happen to hard drive technology? when solid state takes over will we toss our Magnetic Plattered friends to the landfill? Will we one day toss out optical media in favor of flash as well? Will bluray and dvd become fragmentations of our memories? And what will happen then? DVD / Blu Ray is the last format alive in which the mechanism for loading and unloading the medium is motorized and controllable by software. What will happen to this world when auto-ejecting anything is a thing of the past and we are left with spring loaded MicroSD card slots that must be manually loaded and unloaded? In 30 years will I even still have this Lisa? Will I? Will it still work? What about my other vintage macintosh machines? Will MacOS still exist? In 30 years I will be 56 years old. I hope by then I will have quite a vintage computer collection. For now I must quest apon finding another Lisa, a Lisa 2. God I miss Lisa. Having this computer is like having a piece of her back.
Supposedly in the late 80s, Apple disposed of 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Utah in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory. Here is the link to the article: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1999/1/1999_1_64.shtml
I am assuming that they were a mixture of Lisa 1s, 2s, and the re-badged Mac XL. Quite sad if you think about it.
EDIT- Just saw your post. Mega friggin paragraph, btw.
Actually, that Lisa sold for $15,000, not $5,000.
Lisa 1's are more than rare. They basically don't exist. One apparently shows up from time to time on the Vintage Computer Festival Circuit. DigiBarn, which is famous for having everything, has a "former" Lisa 1, meaning they have the original Twiggy disk drives sitting loose but they are missing the front bezel. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a Lisa prototype that's missing the production plastics... but I think the point has been made here. Undoubtedly more people have seen sasquatch in the last year than have seen a "twiggy" disk drive.
Indeed. If the Internet awarded Oscars I'd nominate that as being a shoe-in to win the "Least Convincing Performance" award.
This story is essentially as believable as if someone posted on this forum "So, I went to a garage sale in my neighborhood and some old guy sold me an Apple I for a nickel. Can someone tell me how to load programs off the Internet onto cassettes for it?" I don't think there's anyone here, up to and including the owner of this website, that could say that and have it be believed without proof. If the OP is telling the truth there are any number of Macintosh-centric news sites (simply Google for more) that would consider this a human-interest story worthy of publishing. (You might even get a free digital camera out of it!)
Would it be breaking the "no taunting" rule to simply state that axiom so beloved by Internet forum denizens: "Don't feed the troll"?
Ah, so that fellow did re-list that Lisa 1. I wasn't aware of that. Here is a screen shot from the end of the first auction where the reserve was not met:
Well, you've got to admit, there is some intelligent pondering in that massive jumble (i.e., "when solid state takes over will we toss our Magnetic Plattered friends to the landfill?" "Will bluray and dvd become fragmentations of our memories?"). It could use a bit of a fixer-upper, nevertheless.
JP, that Lisa couldn't careless if you make it home, or not. It's just a machine. Get over it.