The old school Macintosh prototype is headed to Bonhams, an auction house in Sandy Springs, Georgia, where it is expected to sell for between $80,000 and $120,000. The auction actually begins next week, though there’s a preview listing that outlines the pertinent details, including the history of the unique disk drive on the Macintosh and why a 5.25-inch form factor drive was ultimately scrapped.
“Among the last-minute major changes to the Macintosh was the disk drive. The original plan was to use the new 5.25-inch ‘Twiggy’ drive that was built to greatly expand the capacity of standard floppy disks. It soon became apparent with the release of the Lisa, which featured 2 of these drives, that they were very unreliable and that it would be unfeasible to rely on a single ‘Twiggy’ drive,” the auction listing states.
As the story goes, Apple’s design team scrambled to develop a 3.5-inch drive with Japanese company Alps, based on Sony’s latest drive at the time. Time constraints were an issue, however, and it’s said that Apple secretly worked with Sony to develop a drive that would be ready for the Macintosh’s launch in 1984 (it was introduced during Super Bowl XVIII).
“The finished Macintosh used the new disk format which featured the same data rate as the Twiggy, was more robust than a 5.25-inch floppy and small enough to fit into a shirt pocket. Reportedly, Jobs had all of the existing Twiggy prototypes destroyed,” the listing states.
It’s not clear how may Twiggy-based Macintosh systems are still in the wild, only that it remains a rare and usually elusive find and typically command big money on the auction block. In this case, it also comes with a prototype keyboard containing a hand-written serial number the label, and a prototype M010000 mouse.