
Extremely rare Apple Macintosh 128K with 'Twiggy Drive' listed for $100K on eBay - evo_9
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/04/12/extremely_rare_apple_macintosh_128k_with_twiggy_drive_listed_for_100k_on_ebay.html
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ajross
My nose says fake. An extremely rare (but otherwise well documented) item
offered for an online-only auction with _absolutely no_ history of the item
provided? No auction house would touch this.

The case is probably authentic (the differing signatures pointed out below by
joezydeco are good evidence, as is the difficulty of faking 30-year-old,
authentic-looking injection molded plastic), and maybe the logic board. The
drive could be anything: my memory is that the twiggy thing was just using off
the shelf DSDD full height disk hardware (i.e. an IBM PC/XT drive) with a
custom controller.

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jdabney
Here is a decent article written by Andy Hertzfeld. He was one of the original
people working on the Macintosh. The story explains they there were in fact
Twiggy drive Macintosh machines but they found the drives expensive and
unreliable which forced them to switch to the 3.5 inch Sony drives.

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sp332
Did you mean to include this link?
<http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Price_Fight.txt>

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alexg0
That Mac should have a black and white screen. Anybody cares to come up with
plausible reason how come in photos looks to be color?

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jws
Phosphors and white point fashions being what they were, the original
Macintoshes had bluish screens. The camera appears to have gone with that and
compounded it with some poor decisions about scene lighting.

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joshu
i check ebay a lot for interesting old stuff to put on the Shelf of Dreams
here at work.

wish this wasn't $100k.

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killnine
The picture with the signatures...?

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sp332
Early Macs had signatures of team members molded into the plastic inside the
case. It's stock :) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_128k#Credits>

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joezydeco
That's odd that the signatures on the panels don't match up. Were they
rearranged between proto and production?

<http://photos.appleinsider.com/ebay-120412-2.jpg>

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Apple_Ma...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Apple_Macintosh_128Kb_naked.jpg)

~~~
sp332
Oh, interesting. According to
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/mac-case-
sign...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/mac-case-signatures/)
the panel shown on Wikipedia matches a very early one. Maybe the other one is
later.

Edit: Here's the story from Andy Hertzfeld, one of the signers, explaining why
they might have changed over time:
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Signing_Party.txt&topic=Apple&#37;20Spirit&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date)

~~~
joezydeco
It _is_ weird that the prototype has the "February 10, 1982" engraved in the
mold just like the image on DigiBarn and Folklore. However perhaps the
engraver was following the image so correctly that they copied that as well.
On the OTHER hand, that date engraving looks almost too detailed to be real.

The molder and engraver did and still do exist. Funny thing, they're not too
far from where I'm typing this now. Small world.

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ricardobeat
I don't see the date on the auction image, where is it?

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joezydeco
Sorry, it's on the production machine image from Wikipedia. The prototype is
legit from all indications.

