What is it?

Over the past few months, I've been reverse-engineering some of the PCBs in the Lisa as a fun project to both help people replace corrosion-damaged boards relatively inexpensively and to allow people to build their own Lisa expansion cards without having to track down and pay for the originals. The results of this project are these Gerber files for the Lisa 2/5 I/O board, the 2/5 motherboard, and the 2-port parallel card. One of my biggest goals with this project is to make the replicas as accurate to the originals as possible, and I think I did a pretty good job with that!

Why did you make it?

Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, produced from January 19, 1983, to August 1, 1986, and succeeded by Macintosh. It is generally considered the first mass-market personal computer operable through a graphical user interface (GUI). In 1983, a machine like the Lisa was still so expensive that it was primarily marketed to individual and small and medium-sized businesses as a groundbreaking new alternative to much bigger and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers such as from IBM, that either require additional, expensive consultancy from the supplier, hiring specially trained personnel, or at least, a much steeper learning curve to maintain and operate. Earlier GUI-controlled personal computers were not mass-marketed; for example, Xerox PARC manufactured its Alto workstation only for Xerox and select partners from the early to mid-1970s.

What makes it special?