A sidebar to the article “The Lisa 2: Apple’s ablest computer,” published in Byte, issue 12/1984, pp. A112.

By the time this is published, most owners of the original Lisa will have converted to the Lisa 2. There are three parts to the conversion process: getting all your files ready to be converted, making the actual hardware modifications, and updating to the new system software.

The most troublesome (and potentially risky) part of the conversion is getting all your files on the Profile drive before converting the hardware. This is necessary because the new system does not have any software drivers for the old 5¼-inch disk drives. If you convert and then find some files you forgot, there is no easy way to recover them. For everyone except developers the hardware conversion is done by a dealer. (Developers are given the kit to make the conversion themselves.) It involves swapping the old 5¼-inch Apple drives for the new 3½-inch Sony drive, swapping some integrated-circuit chips, and cutting one or two resistors off a board. In my case, the conversion went very smoothly.

The last step is to update the Profile drive with the new system software. All Lisa 2 conversion kits contain release 2.0 of the Lisa software system, which involve modifications down at the disk-directory level. When you update the drive, all the file-formatting changes are made at the same time, although users are not really aware that this is happening.

Once you have converted, you are unable to do a disk-to-disk copy; you must go through the Profile drive as an intermediate step.

David D. Redhed