Welcome to the Lisa Emulator Project's History Page


So what does a Lisa look like internally?


Profile 5 Front View

Here you are seeing the Lisa's external 5mb Hard Drive...

The Profile5 is the external version of the Lisa's hard drive. It has a DB25 parallel port, which while could be fast, due to the sucky protocol used by the software is excruciatingly slow. The Profile is controlled by an on board microcontroller which speaks a particular procol to the Lisa of (ack/nak.) The protocol is very simple: read, write, verify.

When you turn the Profile on for the first time, it automatically does a full surface scan of every sector. This takes about 3 minutes to do, but it verifies the sectors and possibly relocates them as needed. This drive is also compatible with some of the Apple II's, and I inherited it from its owner who used it on an Apple II. These days, smart hard drives are available. They're called SCSI drives.

Profiles came in either 5 or 10Mb, this one is a 5mb drive, however, the profile self reports its size to the Lisa if the Lisa asks to read sector -1 (yes, minus one.) In theory, you could have upto 32Mb Profiles, possibly more.