Thread
Lisa?
Course. For starters it will be progressive scan, not interlaced, and no doubt the scan timings are all out as well. I realised that after posting and my apologies for leaving a red herring in thread.
Actually the Twiggy most certainly was used on the Lisa 1...and was also going to be used on the original Macintosh until they decided to switch to the Sony 3.5" Microfloppy. Indeed, if you have a look through the manual for the original Macintosh, you'll see a few photos of prototype Macs with Twiggy drives.
what Id like to know is how could apple have used a shugart 5.25 drive on a mac? it doesnt have motorized eject or a mechanism for autodetecting disks
Uncle!!! 
) The release of the Lisa would likely be the reason the Twiggy Drives were determined to be a failure and the reason for the development of the 3.5" Sony Micro Floppy equipped Lisa. I just wanted to verify that the first Lisas actually shipped with the Twiggy Drive. It made little sense to me that Apple would have used it for the Lisa and rejected it for the Mac. Production problems with the Twiggy would explain away that overly skeptical concern.
The concept design sketch above could well have been developed after the TwiggyProtoMac case design prototypes were already complete. ISTR that the Shugart Drives were considered as an alternative to the Twiggy Drive before the 3.5" Drives were developed, which I found in a quote from a member of the Mac design team. It doesn't surprise me at all that they would have had a backup plan in place, if only on paper, after the Twiggy Drive's failure. I never found a reference to Burrell Smith's having designed the "Sony Micro Floppy Drive," that's a very interesting tidbit!
H3NRY, did the prototype you handled have the same eject button arrangement as the Lisa?
The TwiggyProtoMac is the other candidate for a Clear ProtoMac Hack I have in mind, but I want to play around with vacuum forming plexi before tackling that one! Doing a forming buck for something that complex will be more than a trivial bit of work.
OK, here's the last bit of OT ProtoMac idiocy for this thread, I'm very interested in your experience with these cases, H3NRY!
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) The release of the Lisa would likely be the reason the Twiggy Drives were determined to be a failure and the reason for the development of the 3.5" Sony Micro Floppy equipped Lisa. I just wanted to verify that the first Lisas actually shipped with the Twiggy Drive. It made little sense to me that Apple would have used it for the Lisa and rejected it for the Mac. Production problems with the Twiggy would explain away that overly skeptical concern.The concept design sketch above could well have been developed after the TwiggyProtoMac case design prototypes were already complete. ISTR that the Shugart Drives were considered as an alternative to the Twiggy Drive before the 3.5" Drives were developed, which I found in a quote from a member of the Mac design team. It doesn't surprise me at all that they would have had a backup plan in place, if only on paper, after the Twiggy Drive's failure. I never found a reference to Burrell Smith's having designed the "Sony Micro Floppy Drive," that's a very interesting tidbit!
H3NRY, did the prototype you handled have the same eject button arrangement as the Lisa?
The TwiggyProtoMac is the other candidate for a Clear ProtoMac Hack I have in mind, but I want to play around with vacuum forming plexi before tackling that one! Doing a forming buck for something that complex will be more than a trivial bit of work.
OK, here's the last bit of OT ProtoMac idiocy for this thread, I'm very interested in your experience with these cases, H3NRY!
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Just imagine if you will: Instead of auto-ejecting a window pops up on the screen of the Macintosh when it's done with a disk and instructs the user to "Please remove disk from floppy drive #1".
(I know, it's a stretch, but isn't it awesome? With that one simple suggestion I've just cut the price of the Macintosh drive mechanism significantly. Now if we ditch that silly auto-inject system we can *really* start saving some money...)
Add a fifty cent microswitch and a "disk present" sense line to their already custom drive controller board?
Just to clarify, Burrell Smith didn't design the Sony 3 1/2 inch *drive*. He may of had a hand in the modifications that Apple put into the custom version they had made for the Macintosh but he by no means designed *the drive*. (The first Sony 3 1/2 drives hit the market in 1981 and companies like HP had used them for several years before Apple discovered them.) Here's folklore.org's take on the adoption of the Sony drive over the Twiggy.
As to using the Apple ][ 5 1/4 inch disk drive very early Macintosh prototypes used them, but I suspect "prototype" in this context means "circuit card screwed to a board". Color me skeptical that they ever made any "real" cases incorporating them, but it is of course very possible that the Appledesign concept sketch you linked in dates to an era where Apple ][-drive utilizing prototypes were what was floating around the office. (Thus making it perfectly logical for the artists/draftsmen to use them as component references when spitting out design drafts.)
Curiouser & curioser . . .
. . . found a link to the best ProtoApple pics I've ever seen and the source for the pics to which you linked, EudiG! The "original size " pics are just amazing! here's a link to the "Twiggy Drive pic" at its original size:
. . . and here's one to the rest of the pics showing the missing Lisa bits and the entire photo stream:
Head to the left or click on the "Concepts link and Prototype Links" to find some really great stuff, gang! [
] ]'>
Apple Concepts Link:
Apple Prototypes Link:
. . . found a link to the best ProtoApple pics I've ever seen and the source for the pics to which you linked, EudiG! The "original size " pics are just amazing! here's a link to the "Twiggy Drive pic" at its original size:
. . . and here's one to the rest of the pics showing the missing Lisa bits and the entire photo stream:
Head to the left or click on the "Concepts link and Prototype Links" to find some really great stuff, gang! [
] ]'>Apple Concepts Link:
Apple Prototypes Link:
Thanks for the link to folklore.org, EudiG! I love it! I don't believe any such well organized references were available 8-9 years ago when I tried to put my (now obviously mistaken) research materials together. You H3NRY and the gang have made my "ShugartProtoMackHack™" a much more simple exercise, now I can use any old Apple II drive to hide the slot loading optical drive . . .
. . . but I'll be needing a new name for it though. :-/
Back OT, for a change . . . :
. . . the detail shots of the Lisa should make it easier to envision what might be crammed into an empty shell.
. . . but I'll be needing a new name for it though. :-/
Back OT, for a change . . . :
. . . the detail shots of the Lisa should make it easier to envision what might be crammed into an empty shell.
I couldnt imagine a mac without disk ejection
Think different! :b&w:
Apple hasn't been using floppy drives with their computers since the release of the iMac in 1998, so there's really nothing to "think" about. All of the "AIO" Macs, in addition to the modular Macs, all had the auto disk eject feature, which was a pretty unique feature for its time (all DOS computers used manual ejection, including Apple's II-series, the III, and the Twiggy Lisa). Even the external floppy drives had auto eject, such as the 400k, 800k, and SuperDrive.
Apple's macs use auto disk ejection for the slot loading dvds as well. Plus every modern mac ive had (then sold to pay a bill) ive used a USB Imation SuperDrive. It has autoeject
OK, my mistake. When you said "disk," I thought you were referring to a "floppy disk," as there is no such thing as a "floppy disc." Obviously the auto eject feature is prevalent in the modern Macs, as it is a staple of Apple engineering. The main difference between the auto feature in the floppy, and the modern DVD drive is the DVD drive accepts a disc about three-quarters of the way in, while with the floppy drive, you basically have to insert in the whole disk before the drive accepts it.
In a way, the auto EJECTION makes sense considering that the Mac was designed to be used by people who were not at all computer literate. It removes the chance of data corruption if the disk were ejected in the middle of a write cycle. A menu or disk light could easily be ignored by somebody without a clue. To say nothing of the fact that going with the Sony 3.5 and the plastic shielded disks was the right move as well.
That being said, I don't quite understand the point behind auto INJECTION for floppies. That seems like a totally needless expense.
BTW, folklore.org REALLY makes you appreciate what a hack Steve Jobs is, and how brilliant the rest of the Mac team were.
That being said, I don't quite understand the point behind auto INJECTION for floppies. That seems like a totally needless expense.
BTW, folklore.org REALLY makes you appreciate what a hack Steve Jobs is, and how brilliant the rest of the Mac team were.
You guys sure found a bunch of pictures of prototypes! Some of those are obviously very early, earlier than any I have seen. Now you know what a Mac looks like with a 5.25" disk slot (suitable for a CD drive). It would be cool to build a modern Mac into that Lisa chassis if you can't find parts to restore it.
If you read closely, I didn't say Burrell designed the Sony drive, I said he designed it IN. I meant he designed it into the Mac. I could have phrased that better.
The Sony drive caused a bit of a problem when Apple held a programming course for the (pre-release) Mac in Palo Alto. The teacher offered us copies of his sample disks, which we all wanted, but none of us had 3.5" blank disks. We spread out across the peninsula at lunch hitting all the electronics stores looking for disks. Fortunately H-P had just released an industrial computer which used the brand new disks, and we cleaned out the H-P distributor, $400 for 4 boxes of 10 disks, then split up our cache of disks after lunch so each of us went home with a half-dozen disks of code and demos. Some of the demos were early enough they didn't have a Finder, such as the Pepsi Caps and the Alice disks.
I didn't have and couldn't afford a Lisa, so I adapted the Lisa / Mac programming tools to run on my Apple II and Mac, and my first Mac programs were written on the Apple II, transferred to the Mac by serial cable, and debugged with the serial version of MacsBug. Yves Lempereur quickly ported the S-C Macro Assembler from the Apple II to the Mac so we had a native Mac development system, and the Consullair C editor, compiler, linker, and assembler followed not long after. MacOS was a new and mysterious environment, much more complex and rich than Apple II DOS or PC DOS. Even the "phone book" programming manual didn't help that much - you sort of got the Mac philosophy by osmosis. We all knew the Lisa and Mac were the new face of computing.
The Lisa team's philosophy was different. They didn't offer or want outside developers' help. They envisioned a complete integrated office automation system supplied by Apple. Therefore there was no attempt to recruit developers, in fact the Lisa OS was considered a trade secret.
If you read closely, I didn't say Burrell designed the Sony drive, I said he designed it IN. I meant he designed it into the Mac. I could have phrased that better.
The Sony drive caused a bit of a problem when Apple held a programming course for the (pre-release) Mac in Palo Alto. The teacher offered us copies of his sample disks, which we all wanted, but none of us had 3.5" blank disks. We spread out across the peninsula at lunch hitting all the electronics stores looking for disks. Fortunately H-P had just released an industrial computer which used the brand new disks, and we cleaned out the H-P distributor, $400 for 4 boxes of 10 disks, then split up our cache of disks after lunch so each of us went home with a half-dozen disks of code and demos. Some of the demos were early enough they didn't have a Finder, such as the Pepsi Caps and the Alice disks.
I didn't have and couldn't afford a Lisa, so I adapted the Lisa / Mac programming tools to run on my Apple II and Mac, and my first Mac programs were written on the Apple II, transferred to the Mac by serial cable, and debugged with the serial version of MacsBug. Yves Lempereur quickly ported the S-C Macro Assembler from the Apple II to the Mac so we had a native Mac development system, and the Consullair C editor, compiler, linker, and assembler followed not long after. MacOS was a new and mysterious environment, much more complex and rich than Apple II DOS or PC DOS. Even the "phone book" programming manual didn't help that much - you sort of got the Mac philosophy by osmosis. We all knew the Lisa and Mac were the new face of computing.
The Lisa team's philosophy was different. They didn't offer or want outside developers' help. They envisioned a complete integrated office automation system supplied by Apple. Therefore there was no attempt to recruit developers, in fact the Lisa OS was considered a trade secret.