High Treason's Museum

Systems

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High Treason's Museum - Systems - Lisa \ Quick Overview

Overview

Lisa as of October 2022

As the 1980s drew to a close, the 286 had matured and clone makers had really gotten the hang of things as they began to rapidly outplace, and outpace, IBM. In the last two years of the decade, whitebox 286 systems started to fall rapidly in price and offered good value, good performance and good compatibility. Indeed, by now the issues of IBM Compatibility were almost completely solved at the base system level and only a few things, like video cards, had a small way to go. The CPU itself would eventually scale up to 25MHz, but only in small numbers, with its design largely unaltered outside of a switch to CMOS later on, in part for the growing laptop and industrial markets.

While the CPU itself had racked up a few years since its introduction in 1983, the technology supporting it had moved forwards and was, in fact, brand new. When we looked at Tawnia, we spoke of its early attempt at a chipset, the C&T 82100, which largely served to integrate the majority of glue logic into just four NMOS PLCCs. By the time Lisa's motherboard was made, C&T had continued to advance their chipset designs. Now using fancy CMOS technology, with significantly lower power dissipation, it was possible to integrate almost the entirety of motherboard logic into just four PLCCs. There was no longer a need for 8237s, 8253s, 8259s or much of anything else, as the chipset did it all. It also had support for more memory right out of the box, allowing the installation of 36 411000 DRAM ICs in the motherboard, granting you 4MiB of RAM, with the option to expand using a card later, to the full 16MiB. C&T would also add interleaving to the chipset to make memory operations even faster. Other vendors would soon enter the chipset scene, though some would simply manufacture C&T's design with their own branding (TI and Siemens did this), whereas others like VLSI would go on to add their own innovations. Chipsets were certainly instrumental in bringing down the cost and complexity of computers.

The 286 also saw video interfaces change. From its introduction in the murky days of MDA, HGC and CGA, it practically saw off EGA, saw PGA appear, observed the birth of VGA and was still going as SVGA entered the scene, although owning such a card would be rare. Sound cards would soon be appearing and the exciting world of CD-ROM was on the horizon.

Lisa is an example of a machine from when the 286 was at the top of its game. It had better performance than the 386, it had equal expandability in most any practical sense, it was cheaper (we're talking $600-1,200 vs. $8,000-10,000) and most software was still firmly 16-Bit for the army of 8088s still in operation in the wild. Whilst 16Mhz is a hair faster than usual, you'd have almost looked like an idiot for not buying a 286 in this time. Such a system could quite comfortably have seen you into the early 1990s, until the 386 matured, scaled to higher clocks and became more affordable. That said, very few titles took full advantage of the 286. In its lifespan the 8088 stuck around in huge numbers and software had to be written to work on it. Compatibility was rarely broken until programmers began targeting the 386 in later years. Still, until that happened, the 286 would do most anything the 386 could, and do it better, at a lower price.

Overall, I feel that Lisa also serves as an example of the PC's move into the home. It still bears the marks of a business machine, but also takes tentative steps into the realm of multimedia. Speaking of multimedia, this machine is named after Lisa Raccoon.

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High Treason's Museum - Systems - Lisa / Specs

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System Performance

At 16MHz, Lisa leaves poor old Tawnia in the dust, even with the relatively slow early SVGA clone, not that the plain old Everex VGA was all that quick in the first place - Lisa would keep it saturated, though, whereas Tawnia will always be held back by the older CPU and motherboard. You can also see here how an equivalently clocked 386 can come in slower. Also noteworthy is how a 1990s 12MHz 286, using even more mature technology and a faster VGA card can be faster still, under the right conditions.

There never really was any question which system would come out on top here.

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Pictures

Lisa's rear end. Using a low profile chassis makes things a tad cramped, but this earlier chassis design doesn't suffer from the issues that Chiana's does, whereby attaching the 10Base2 connector would be awkward. Also note the metal blank covering an opening intended for PS/1 style motherboards.

The motherboard is about as large as something can be in the Baby AT classification. Obviously the slot count doesn't match the table above, because a riser has to be used. Memory is still in DIP format, though there's a strange female IDC connector for expansion.

Chaintech had the slots branded. This motherboard is using the Chips & Technologies 82200 "NEAT" Chipset, the successor to the old 82100 used in Tawnia's motherboard. This chipset was fairly abundant and underwent several revisions, with more features over time.

Less common than the PLCC CPUs are the CLCC type, mostly reserved for higher clocks speeds and greater heat output. CPUs hadn't quite migrated to the more efficient CMOS process fully yet and our NMOS one here gets rather toasty most of the time. I think 16MHz was as fast as the NMOS 286 got.

CLCC chips are quite pretty when flipped over. This one came from AMD, at this time still producing 1:1 clones of Intel's designs with no real deviations. In 1988, this would have been among the faster CPUs, with the brand new 386-25 being many times more costly and needless in most cases, due to 16-Bit software.

ISA is a parallel bus and so you can use a riser like this. The chassis design necessitates doing so. Unfortunately as buses became less parallel in nature, we lost the ability to do this and so also lost this nice form factor. That said, there's a fair bit of variety in these risers, so they're not guaranteed interchangeable.

Trident were never known for making high quality video cards and the TL8800CS is no exception. It is slow, its image quality is rather poor and overall it's quite ugly. It was a lot cheaper than most other SVGA cards though and compared with Tawnia's Everex from just a year prior, is quite a step up.

With slots at a premium, why not use one up with a proprietary CD-ROM controller. Its use is somewhat limited on a 286 beyond playing audio CDs, though the system is just barely fast enough to run Willy Beamish, albeit with some minor compatibility problems from the TL8800.

Cogent's eMaster Ethernet card is a fairly capable one, featuring BNC, RJ-45 and an AUI port, as well as some acceleration. Driver for this card aren't fantastic in Windows land, but as this machine only networks under DOS, it hardly matters.

It is quite novel that Intel use the SX and DX moniker on other chips, in this case the 82596SX Network Co-Processor at 20MHz. Like the 386, the DX version is intended for a 32-Bit bus, whereas our SX version is for 16-Bit. Internally the chip is still 32-Bit.

I/O Cards are generally quite boring. The  only remarkable thing about this one is its unusually long fingers. It is one of the uglier ones I've seen, but by the time it was made, the concept was so well established that most all of them functioned identically. It is shown here for completion sake.

It didn't take very long to clone the Sound Blaster, with varying degrees of success. This card is a clone of the Sound Blaster 2.0, but it's an early enough and cheap enough attempt to have a few slight DMA issues. Most software works, some doesn't. The single chip FM is interesting, as is the PC-Speaker input and output, a feature so many cards lacked. Sound quality is not amazing, but what did you expect? I like this card.

You can click the above pictures to see full size versions in a new window

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System Achievements

Lisa holds a few records:

• Fastest 286 in collection, along with SupersPort

• Earliest SVGA Card I own

• Oldest CD-ROM Drive here

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Videos Available

Lisa first appeared in this video, not in final configuration.

Soon after, this video showed how well the 286 stood up to an equivalently clocked 386 system at the end of the 1980s.

Video for Windows v1.1