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#### Apple Macintosh XL

Usage :
This driver is still buggy. Neither the hard drive nor the serial port are supported. There are
many other bugs remaining with MMU emulation. Only Macworks will boot.

When you boot up the Lisa, you can see a self-test progress indicator. At least one test will fail :
you must discard the error message by selecting the 'Ignore' or 'Start-up from...' button. Then,
you get a boot device menu. Select the floppy drive unit, since it is the only available device.
If the mouse temporarily refuses to work, you may use the keyboard shortcuts Apple+2 and Apple+3
(the Apple key should be mapped to Control ; you must use the numeric keys on the main keyboard, not
on the numeric keypad). If the computer does boot, you will see an icon representing a weird floppy
disk with a cross (maybe it actually represents a twiggy disk).
If you boot MacWorks, you should eventually see a floppy disk icon with a question mark. At this
point, it is time to insert a bootable Macintosh image : to do so, use the file manager or whatever
osd equivalent you may have.

History and Trivia :
In late 1984, Apple's financial health was questionable, and Apple came to the conclusion that
it did not make sense to support both Lisa and Macintosh.
Therefore, on 1st January 1985, Apple discontinued the Lisa. However, they released
a program named MacWorks, which enabled a Lisa to run the Macintosh operating system.
The same day, they introduced a new variation of the Lisa hardware, named Macintosh XL,
which was a Lisa 2 whose video hardware was modified in order for it to display square pixels.
Additionally, existing Lisas could be upgraded to Macintosh XL. This modification improved
the appearance of Macintosh programs ; however, it prevented the Macintosh XL from running
the Lisa operating system, or any Lisa program, for that matter. Needless to say, it would have
been very easy to patch the Lisa OS to support the new video resolution : this was simply not done,
since Apple had discontinued the Lisa OS.
Macintosh XL was not very successful : Apple discontinued it in May 1985, and the remaining
stocks were sold to another company (Sun Remarketing) which did manage to sell them.
Though ill-fated, the Macintosh XL was an interesting machine. It was slow, slower than even
the original Macintosh, but it supported up to 2 Megabytes of RAM (while the original Macintosh
came with 128kb or 512kb only), had a larger screen, supported hard drives units (which
the original Macintosh could not do until the Hard Disk 20 was introduced), and it had three
expansion ports (it was thus the first expandable Macintosh, more than 2 years before Macintosh II
and Macintosh SE were introduced). A number of these was bought by developers who needed
the hard drive and appreciated the larger screen (anyway, Macintosh development was originally done
on Lisa, so the transition from Lisa Workshop on Lisa to Macintosh Programmer Workshop on
Macintosh XL was a natural one).

created on Tue Jan 01 12:56:01 2002