Apple Lisa 1 - restoration project

[Ray Arachelian]

David W. Erhart wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I've been hoping to get an Apple Lisa for years now.  Recently I had 
> an Apple Lisa 1 and an Apple Lisa 2 donated to me.  The Lisa 1 needs 
> some restoration work but I think it has a good chance of booting 
> again.  The kind gentleman also donated a few Profile drives for the 
> Lisas along with documentation, still shrink-wrapped.  I've taken the 
> Lisa 1 apart to examine the damage from the battery acid.  Here are 
> pictures (tons of them) of the Lisa 1: 
> http://entertainment.webshots.com/album/563938145wklDTp
>
> I'm open to suggestions on how to revive the Lisa 1.

Hi David,

Those batteries are a NiCad pack.  The Lisas can run just fine without 
them.  They provide backup power when the Lisa is unplugged to the 
COP421 microcontroller, so that it can keep the date/time correct (this 
is worthless since that chip can't go beyond 1995), and also keeps the 
1K of PRAM memory that the floppy controller memory (a 6504) shares with 
68000.

Since it has leaked, it probably has caused a lot of damage.  You can 
find instructions here: http://lisafaq.sunder.net as to cleaning the 
board, but the odds are that it has damaged the board, and/or components.

If you have a spare I/O board (not one from a Lisa 2/10), I would swap 
the ROMs from the Lisa1 with the ROM from the Lisa 2 I/O board, and 
resolder the two resistors that were clipped from the Lisa 2 I/O board - 
I've forgotten what they are off the top of my head, but you should be 
able to resurrect the Lisa 1 that way.

Other things to worry about: the capacitors in the power supply, 
possibly the bridge rectifier diodes, and certainly the Twiggy mechanism 
which is probably very fragile.

If you wind up doing repairs on the Twiggy drives, please take pictures 
and try to document what you had to do.  There's a gap in this 
knowledge, and I'd like to update the LisaFAQ with that info.  Please 
take as many closeup pictures as you can, they're very useful.