Interview with the creator of the LisaFPGA

[Rhetorica]

Recently, an engineer named Alex Anderson–McLeod built an Apple Lisa in an FPGA, bringing this ancient but crucial machine into a modern era of reproducibility. Here's an interview with him about his inspiration, process, and future plans:

This has already inspired other projects, like this one, which you should absolutely check out if you're reading this.

Alex's story lends some insight into how and why retrocomputing will stay alive: he developed a special interest in the Apple Lisa at age 11, and set his heart on building a reproduction because the original hardware was beyond his means to acquire. This is a spectacularly pristine example of how young people continue to discover and get invested in old technology—and quite contrary to the narrative put forward by most nostalgists, who generally expect their retro hobbies to die with them.

As the graybeards gather, to surrender their beloved retro tech into the ground, the young are already waiting behind them with shovels, ready to exhume it...

[ZombiePhysicist]

So cool! He likes weird historic machines. Maybe one of us should contact him and put next on his radar

[don_apple]

If somebody wants to play a round with an Apple Lisa, there is also a pretty good emulator out there: https://github.com/arcanebyte/lisaem

It works on macOS, so maybe somebody can port that to NeXTStep/OpenStep ...

[Rhetorica]

So cool! He likes weird historic machines. Maybe one of us should contact him and put next on his radar

See the link under the video—Gregory Casamento of GNUstep is already working on an FPGA Cube