Lisa’s Family Photos - Polaroid photos from the Lisa computer’s development

[Pál_K]

I remember the PDP-11 we used to keep in the adjacent room.

Since the mid-1980’s I’ve had my very own personal PDP-11 which I bought in separate parts from third-party resellers for pennies on the dollar (from Midwest Systems in Minneapolis). Over the first few years I built it up from just the CPU box with 4K words of memory and a DD-11 backplane to a system with some nice peripherals. It has console lights and switches, 28K 16-bit words of core memory, a dual RX01 floppy disk unit (8-inch disk, 256K bytes, and an RK05 disk drive (removable platters, 2.5MB), plus two terminals. My prize is an Extended Arithmetic Unit board which will provide multiplication. This is a true UNIBUS machine - not some flaccid LSI-bus compromise that DEC later went to.

I played around with it for many years, writing my own programs and learning about hardware.

It’s been in my storage unit for quite a while. I wouldn’t immediately apply power to any component without first checking (and likely replacing) the electrolytic capacitors in the power supplies. Those are usually the first things to fail over time.

 

[former member]

I was the envy of the group. Habitat modeling using satellite imagery (MSS Landsat 1 and 2) in the mid-late 80s.
New Mexico Inst of Mining "gave" me my first RISC machines -- Sparc II, IPX, and 10. Straight from the dumpster to my spare room (aka the junk room). How things change... today I'm such a slacker; Some nameless underpowered laptop.

But Brian seems to have had a Personal VAX! Hmm. I remember the PDP-11 we used to keep in the adjacent room. VMS still flashes in my mind during nightmares.

I used my 80286/80287 to process and display Landsat 4 imagery on my PGC monitors. Read in 3 bands of data, generated an optimized color look-up-table (256 colors, palette 4096) using a 3D histogram. I still have some of the Landsat 4 data, we cut it down to 512x512 images. I had imagery of my House in Mt Vernon as a test. The VAX 11/725- we would load it onto a P3A Orion that flew our custom IR sensor. 8 flight racks of equipment. My Vax was used to verify the data was good. Over 35 years ago. I still use compilers based on the Green Hills compilers. And still get paid for it.

 

[rfaspen]

Landsat 4 was/is for people with good vision or eyeglasses. The TM sensor (or now it's the ETM+ sensor) has become the defacto "satellite imagery". 30m resolution was heart stopping after working with the older MSS stuff at 80m.
Nicest data I've worked with was from the Daedalus hyperspectral sensor that NASA flew on a U2 out of Moffat in the Bay area. I had to get security clearance just to be in touching distance of that plane.....from the 1950s!!!

 

[JeffS7444]

My wife did some work on a Xerox Star in the tech writing job she had in the '80's. Soon after she bought a Lisa. It's in its box in our attic but hasn't been powered-up in a very long time.

The last time I saw an original Lisa w/"Twiggy" drives and original box being sold, it fetched something like 1700 USD, but I hope that you removed the clock battery from yours before putting it into storage!

 

[armadsen]

The last time I saw an original Lisa w/"Twiggy" drives and original box being sold, it fetched something like 1700 USD, but I hope that you removed the clock battery from yours before putting it into storage!

Lisa 2s go for about that (or sometimes more). The last working Lisa 1 with Twiggy drives that I saw sell went for around $50,000. There are very few in existence now. Most were converted to Lisa 2s under a program offered by Apple.

 

[former member]

$50K for a Lisa. That is about what the Vax 11/725 with extra memory, FPA boards, 9-track tape drive, and DRE-11c double-buffered DMA interface cost in the mid 1980s. You could buy them for ~$100 a few years later.

I need to get my IBM Mark 1 manual appraised. It is signed by "Captain" Grace Hopper, autographed it for me when I was in college.
A few over 200 copies ever published. I loaned it to a Museum recently for an exhibit about Grace Hopper. Was going to donate it to the Naval College in Annapolis for their "Grace Hopper" building, got some super-picky comment back from them - "what are the dimensions, why is it important". Last time I checked, it was going for the same amount as my #1 and #2 issues of Star Trek comic books. Always surprises me on what some items are valued at versus others. I have $0.24 invested in those comics.