DosFox Builds "the First Apple Lisa Since 1986," Using Reverse Engineered Parts

Pseudonymous vintage computing enthusiast "DosFox" has built "the first Apple Lisa since 1986" — using a collection of replica and replacement boards originally designed to swap in for faulty parts in original Lisa devices.

"Strangely enough, how I was able to build the Lisa is directly tied to the fact that the Lisa has an incredibly leaky battery," DosFox explains by way of background to the project. "The CPU board, IO board, motherboard, and power supply were already reverse engineered and proven to work by two frankly incredible people: Alex [Anderson-McLeod] and 'Warmech'."

The Apple Lisa was the chunky precursor to the wildly successful Apple Macintosh family of desktop computers, with many of the features which would make its successor stand out — including a mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI) inspired by work at Xerox PARC and an integrated CRT display. Its high price and slow performance saw the device ship in only limited quantities — making it a highly-prized collector's item today.

For those who have original Lisa hardware, there has sprung up a cottage industry of replica hardware for replacing failing original parts — including the motherboard, which was frequently the victim of leaking batteries when Lisas were left in storage. DosFox realised that almost every part had already been cloned, meaning it is now possible, for the first time since the Lisa fell off the market in 1986, to build your own Lisa-compatible system.

"The machine I have replicated is effectively a [Lisa] 2/5," DosFox explains of the cloned Lisa. "This is due to two main reasons. The first, is that although I would love to build a Lisa 1, unfortunately, the Sony 400k and 800k drives are much more available than the original Twiggy drives."

"The second major reason," DosFox continues, "is that the Lisa 2/10 contains the IWM, which is a custom Apple part. It is important to know that within the Apple Lisa 2/5, there are only two Apple custom parts, both of which can be replaced easily. You can build an Apple Lisa from scratch."

Now housed in a custom-built laser-cut case and attached to a genuine Apple keyboard, mouse, and compatible monitor, the cloned Lisa is fully functional — and has already inspired others to begin the process of building their own from the same replacement parts.

More information is available on DosFox's Mastodon account and the project's Hackaday.io page, including links to each of the parts used in the build.