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 your time doing something fun.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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
30 comments:
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?
>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 your time doing something fun.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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/
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.
An amazing effort and result. Shame watching the video gave me motion sickness.
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.
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.
> 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).That’s really neat.
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 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
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.
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.
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