Extremely rare Apple Macintosh 128K with 'Twiggy Drive' listed for $100K on eBay | Hacker News Reader

Extremely rare Apple Macintosh 128K with 'Twiggy Drive' listed for $100K on eBay

appleinsider.com

37 pointsevo_917 comments

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.

History of the item can be found here - http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/archive/index.php/t-...

Indeed, this looks more legitimate (I couldn't my way there from the linked article or the auction listing. Did I miss it, or are you the seller?). Money quote here:

> I bought it through an online ad. The elderly gentleman I purchased it off of is a retired engraver. The company he worked for was hired to make some award medallions for a ceremony at Apple. It would have been some point in 1983 I personally think, but he really couldn't recall. They sent over this Mac to use as a model for him to work off of. When the job was done, they tried to make arrangements to send it back. Apparently after several attempts, Apple just told them to keep it.

If I was about to drop $100k on this thing, I'd definitely want to find that "online ad" for verification.

> No auction house would touch this.

Not necessarily true. Auction houses have accepted a lot of fake baseball memorabilia for a long time. There's too much money at risk for them to admit that they do though.

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.

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

I emailed Andy to see if it's real. Haven't heard back.

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?

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.

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

wish this wasn't $100k.

The picture with the signatures...?

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

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...

Oh, interesting. According to http://www.digibarn.com/collections/weirdstuff/mac-case-sign... 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...

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.

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

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

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