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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Bruno Ferreira

Enthusiast recreates 43-year-old Apple Lisa with FPGA board — first commercial computer with a GUI faithfully cloned with modernized machine

LisaFPGA project.

Many think that Apple's history creating computers with graphical interfaces starts with the venerable Macintosh, but the company's first foray into designing GUIs actually started with 1983's Lisa. The machine was the first to bring a popular window application system and mouse control to general availability at an edible (if bitter) price of $9,995 dollars of 1983 vintage, equivalent to nearly $34,000 today.

Thanks to enthusiast and Youtuber Alex Anderson-McLeod, you'll soon be able to roll your own much-improved LisaFPGA clone. Alex designed a roomy one-board system centered around an Artix 7-100T FPGA as the Lisa's brains, coupled to 2MB of SRAM and emulated hard drive, floppy, serial, and naturally, keyboard and mouse connectors.

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