At this point, I was of course very much aware of the historical importance of the Lisas. I realized that in the long run, none of my Lisas would continue to run, and the supply of replacement parts would get harder to find. I looked around on the Web and was able to find some parts for it, but it seemed to me that it was getting harder to find the parts than before. Ray: In late 1997, I was cleaning up around the house and decided to power on all of my machines – something I typically do to update software, patch OSes, etc., and I could no longer power on one of the two Lisas. Ted: What made you decide to write a Lisa Emulator? I kept the reusable parts from it, but unfortunately threw out its case and CRT because at the time I lived in a very small apartment and didn’t have the room to spare. Ray: Three, of which one was non-repairable.

By this time I had built the Hackintosh, and it was my main machine. So now I had two nearly complete Lisas and some spare parts.Ī year later, at work, they used Xenix 286, which was perfect, since the Lisa could run a version of Xenix, so I used that to teach myself Unix. Between the two, I managed to get one of these to work, the other I stripped and threw out. I couldn’t believe my luck that I had gotten it for free.Ī few weeks or months later, a teacher who had a couple of broken Lisas also bound for the trash bin asked me if I wanted them. Now, this was back in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1, so relative to those, the Lisa running Mac XL was an amazing machine. A couple of weeks later, when the power supply died, he was kind enough to order one for me, and he got me MacWorks floppies as well. He said I could have it and also gave me a hard drive. I asked my boss about it, and that was the first time I heard the word Lisa. I had played with the Mac Plus machines in the labs previously, so it was an interesting machine to me. It had an Apple logo, so I thought that it was some sort of Mac, since I saw a mouse there, too. One day, I saw a strange looking machine out in the hallway, where trash was usually placed. They had two or three classrooms filled with various PCs, Apple IIs, Macs, Commodores, and so on. It was at a training center for teachers.

I think I was in my junior or senior year at Brooklyn Tech at the time. Ray: I was working as a techie at my very first part time job. Ted: When did you have your first experience with a Lisa? Steve Hatle was very helpful in helping me explore the Lisa’s true operating system. Originally, I wasn’t aware of the historical significance of the Lisa, nor of the fact that I could run other operating systems on it, but as I talked to other Lisa owners on FidoNet and other BBS networks, it became clear that what I had was quite the gem.

Mac write emulator