Comment by adolph

5 months ago

It is interesting to compare/contrast/augment this story with those from folklore.org

  New team member Bud Tribble suggested that it should be able to take 
  advantage of the Lisa's powerful graphics routines by migrating to its 
  Motorola 68000, and by February 1981, Smith was able to duly redesign the 
  prototype for the more powerful CPU while maintaining its lower-cost 8-bit 
  data bus.
  
  This new prototype expanded graphics to 384x256, allowed the use of more RAM, 
  and ran at 8 MHz, making the prototype noticeably faster than the 5 MHz Lisa 
  yet substantially cheaper.

From folklore.org:

  The idea was what [Smith] called a "bus transformer" circuit, built out of 
  PAL chips, which adapted the 68000 to an 8 bit memory bus by exploiting the 
  fast "page mode" access mode of the RAMs. The new Macintosh, designed over 
  the Christmas break at the end of 1980, featured an 8 megahertz 68000, 64K of 
  RAM, and a 384 by 256 bit mapped display. It was 60% faster than the Lisa 
  (which used a 5 megahertz 68000) but a lot less expensive.