I took a few pictures of my Apple Lisa 2 with it's MacEffects replacement front panel (with the Lisa 1's "Lisa" badge).
The Apple Lisa 2 needs little introduction and it's difficult to speak of the machine with anything new. I wasn't really aware of this machine in the 1980s or 1990s, whereas compact Macintoshes were everywhere. Having watched endless documentays on the Lisa and Lisa 2, it seems the Lisa was an absolute pioneer, taking part of what Steve Jobs had witnessed at the Xeroc Pablo Alto Researc Centre (PARC). Jobs had seen how Xerox had developed a Graphic User Interface operating system with a mouse. They had also developed cutting-edge networking and object-orientated programming, but that's another topic.
Anyway, Jobs saw the future and pumped a lot of time into money into making a GUI computer - the Lisa - the first retail machine of this kind. It would have been mind blowing to move away from using keyboard commands to do everything with using a point-and-click interface which was designed to be intuitive and anybody could use.
My take on this machine is that technology was advancing at such a pace, by the time it was released with so many different chips, boards and bleeding edge hardware, at a great big price, you could make a new machine, smaller, cheaper and better. One of these machines was the Apple Macintosh (128k).
This quickly made the Lisa expensive, incompatible and out-of-date. The Lisa one became the Lisa 2 with a Sony 3.5" floppy drive and more reliable external hard drive, and you could modify it's ROMS to run Apple Macintosh software - but why not just buy an Apple Macintosh?
And so the Lisa was dead. Apple tried to buy most of them back through upgrades and nearly all of them were destroyed by burying them in the desert.
It's look is unique and it's original Lisa operating system extremely weird and charming. My experience of it is that every step of the way, the remarks on screen are wordy like some Shakespearean actor. You don't open applications, you make a new file in the style of one of those applications. There really isn't much you can do with the Lisa as very little software was developed for it.
My machine was imported from Europe from a chap who had already done a lot of work on it. The internal battery removed, hardware recapped, hard drive updated to a modern SD-solution. It's running the original Lisa ROMS which mean the resolution and operating system are as Apple originally intended.
The front panel is simple to remove and I purchased MacEffects who created a very very original-looking modified front cover with the Original Lisa' badge placement, which looked awesome. Normally, I would never modify a machine in this way but seeing how good the original badge was and seeing as it's reversible in about 5 seconds, I went with it.
