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Extremely rare Apple Macintosh 128K with 'Twiggy Drive' listed for $100K on eBay - Page 2

post #41 of 63
4/12/12 at 3:59pm
There was one of these sitting in the corner of my old highschool library, but it was hooked up to a dual bay external floppy drive. Haven't seen it since 98... wonder if it's still there?
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post #42 of 63
4/12/12 at 5:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by jd_in_sb View Post

$100,000 is just a number he made up and is pure profit. Any reasonable salesperson would have said $100,000 + free shipping so his net income is $98,500. Putting up a potential barrier to that much profit by demanding shipping is just plain stupid.

When you get into the $100K market as buyer or a seller, 'stupid' is not something you run into very often.

Life is too short to drink bad coffee.

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Life is too short to drink bad coffee.

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post #43 of 63
4/12/12 at 5:33pm
And it still boots up.

Gotta love 
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post #44 of 63
4/12/12 at 7:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][ View Post

What about the suckers who bought the HP Touchpad before the drastic and desperate firesales?

I agree with you about the Xoom, but I don't think if I was a webOS fan and bought the Touchpad at retail I'd really regret it. It's not a bad device. HP really did have something with webOS but blew it.

I got one for $99 and use it when my iPad is charging and for tinkering purposes. webOS is a fairly standard Linux OS and easy to modify. The Linux side of it is tucked away and unnecessary except for those who want it, who can easily get to it in that case.

The iPad's 'walled garden' is simultaneously something I like and prefer for my primary device. Tinkering has the downside of breaking updates, which is why I don't jailbreak.
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post #45 of 63
4/12/12 at 7:32pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by jd_in_sb View Post

$100,000 is just a number he made up and is pure profit. Any reasonable salesperson would have said $100,000 + free shipping so his net income is $98,500. Putting up a potential barrier to that much profit by demanding shipping is just plain stupid.

Anyone who sees a $1500 shipping fee on a $100k item as a barrier to purchase wasn't going to buy it in the first place. If $100,000 for a very old(but very cool) computer seems do-able...
I think shipping companies charge around one percent for insurance if I recall correctly.
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post #46 of 63
4/12/12 at 9:32pm
what has been seen, cannot be unseen. I'm gonna have nightmares of case face here.

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post #47 of 63
4/12/12 at 9:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mainyehc View Post

That guy is Mister Macintosh!

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py..._Macintosh.txt

"Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won't be sure if you saw him or not. We'll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. Macintosh, and no one will know if he's real or not."

I always LOL at that
iMac 2007, Macbook pro 2008, Mac Mini 2011
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iMac 2007, Macbook pro 2008, Mac Mini 2011
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post #48 of 63
4/12/12 at 11:04pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doctor David View Post

Anyone who sees a $1500 shipping fee on a $100k item as a barrier to purchase wasn't going to buy it in the first place. If $100,000 for a very old(but very cool) computer seems do-able...
I think shipping companies charge around one percent for insurance if I recall correctly.

Good point!

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Please update the AppleInsider app to function in landscape mode.

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post #49 of 63
4/12/12 at 11:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone View Post

What is that guy in a trench coat logo next to the keyboard? It is also drawn on the memory PCB.

The guy is not wearing a trench coat, he's wearing a raincoat... a Macintosh to be exact.
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post #50 of 63
4/12/12 at 11:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by nagromme View Post

Did all (pre-cursor-keys) Macs have that slide-out drawer?

I used some pretty ancient yellow Macs" in school but I never thought to yank on the side of the keyboard to see what might happen.

I had a very early 128K Mac that I bought in May of 1984. All the shipped Mac up until then had the 3.5" drives and no tray that came out of the keyboard like this one. All of the 128K Mac and the 512K Macs had the signatures inside the case. It was really cool to see that at the time.

I spent a lot of time listening to that early drive grunt and groan as it was accessed or written to... and the only printer available was a really sweet dot matrix with a fabric ribbon. MultiPlan and I used to spent hours together doing an hours worth of work. When I bought the Excel upgrade to Multiplan it was like I had strapped a jet engine on my Mac. I think I had a Mac Plus by then with a whole Meg of RAM.

All of the early Mac used those terrible BitMapped fonts with city names, like Chicago, Monaco, etc. They looked so gooood compared to what PC printers were pooping out, but looking back from now, they were just plain terrible!
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post #51 of 63
4/13/12 at 1:16am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xero910 View Post

what has been seen, cannot be unseen. I'm gonna have nightmares of case face here.


That's hilarious. He looks like a terrified crab.
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post #52 of 63
4/13/12 at 3:50am
Can't help but wonder that if the Mac had shipped with a functioning Twiggy drive, if the fortunes would have turned out differently in the early days of the Mac?
Almost 900 Kb is a lot of difference compared to the 400 in the finished product. It would have made the Mac 128 actually usable and not an expensive proof of concept novelty.
The 512 Fatmac would also have benefited from a larger drive, but the question is if the 512 Kb upgrade couldn't have waited a year or more instead of being launched only 9 months later.
RAM was much more expensive than a slightly more advanced drive, back then.
The Twiggy discs would also have been less expensive to make.
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post #53 of 63
4/13/12 at 4:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by 'Apple

I wonder what a PC from 1982 goes for on Ebay?

A complete, original, working IBM prototype? Might fetch a pretty penny.

.tsooJ
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post #54 of 63
4/13/12 at 5:21am
Quote:
Originally Posted by msimpson View Post

Still have my Apple II and original Mac. My own personal computer museum. All the other pre-OSX Macs I have owned (LC's, SE's, PowerMac's, Quadra's, etc) are gone.


I have not been able to let go of any old macs, and have approx 250 or so now neatly tesselated in shelving in the shed, some of the older ones appear here... the Mac IIfx with dual radius rocket 040/ scsi2 daughter cards is quite a screamer!

Many dreams of creating a beowulf cluster of these machines, to have the combined processing power of a modern 4 slice electric toaster!!


http://gallery.me.com/t3chn0l0gist#1...&bgcolor=black
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post #55 of 63
4/13/12 at 6:18am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Macky the Macky View Post

I had a very early 128K Mac that I bought in May of 1984. All the shipped Mac up until then had the 3.5" drives and no tray that came out of the keyboard like this one. All of the 128K Mac and the 512K Macs had the signatures inside the case. It was really cool to see that at the time.

I spent a lot of time listening to that early drive grunt and groan as it was accessed or written to... and the only printer available was a really sweet dot matrix with a fabric ribbon. MultiPlan and I used to spent hours together doing an hours worth of work. When I bought the Excel upgrade to Multiplan it was like I had strapped a jet engine on my Mac. I think I had a Mac Plus by then with a whole Meg of RAM.

All of the early Mac used those terrible BitMapped fonts with city names, like Chicago, Monaco, etc. They looked so gooood compared to what PC printers were pooping out, but looking back from now, they were just plain terrible!

I did my doctoral thesis partly on a Mac Plus. There was only one in the entire department and I had to borrow time on it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JBFromOZ View Post

I have not been able to let go of any old macs, and have approx 250 or so now neatly tesselated in shelving in the shed, some of the older ones appear here... the Mac IIfx with dual radius rocket 040/ scsi2 daughter cards is quite a screamer!

Many dreams of creating a beowulf cluster of these machines, to have the combined processing power of a modern 4 slice electric toaster!!


http://gallery.me.com/t3chn0l0gist#1...&bgcolor=black

http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/
"I'm way over my head when it comes to technical issues like this"
Gatorguy 5/31/13
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"I'm way over my head when it comes to technical issues like this"
Gatorguy 5/31/13
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post #56 of 63
4/13/12 at 8:07am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jd_in_sb View Post

Good point!

Thanks. Stick around, I'm sure I'll have a bad point soon
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post #57 of 63
4/13/12 at 8:39am
Here is my concern about this Mac, I too own an originally 128M from 1984, it too still boot up and works, however its plastics has discolored over the 28 yrs, and mine has been in its original box for the last 24 yrs. I am curious how this unit was stored all this time since it looks to be the exact color as it was new.

Also, this unit had the signature in the back case and I though the final product got the signatures right before it went into product, I am not sure they were signed back in 82/83.
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post #58 of 63
4/13/12 at 8:45am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Apple ][ View Post


I think that it's safe to say that most Macs do not end up in a dumpster somewhere. I still have my old Macs that are more than a decade old. How many people with old PC's are still keeping those alive? Sorry buddy, the majority of them are already in some garbage dumb someplace.

Even Apple is reputed to have sent tons of Macs, Mac LCs, Peformas, Quadras and the Centris models to the dumpster just before Jobs returned to the company and reformulated the product line. By 1996, Apple had gotten it down to just Macs and Performas. In '97, before Jobs returned, there were just 4 Performa models released, the last one on April 1. Jobs returned on July 9th.

I did have a G4 Sawtooth that was a great machine that I used for nine years (which must be 63 years in "computer years"). I tried to give it away to a school or home for the elderly, but no one wanted it. I did finally give it away to someone who couldn't afford a computer, so I guess it didn't initially wind up in the dump. But I bet it's there now.

But if you really think that Macs don't wind up in dumpsters, I invite you to visit a recycling fair like the ones sponsored by TekServe. There you see old Macs by the ton ready to be recycled. The attached video has some info, although you don't see any Macs piled up. But I've been to those events and you see piles and piles of them. Since they were recycled, I guess technically, they didn't wind up in dumpsters, but eventually most of the non-toxic parts do.

http://youtu.be/1byzAWVnDR8
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post #59 of 63
4/13/12 at 10:52am
I saw one of those at good will a couple years back, I just didnt know that the twiggy disks were so rare, I thought the first rev of the original mac was all 5.25 inch twiggies... DAMN I feel stupid now...
You can't quantify how much I don't care -- Bob Kevoian of the Bob and Tom Show.
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You can't quantify how much I don't care -- Bob Kevoian of the Bob and Tom Show.
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post #60 of 63
4/13/12 at 10:59am
Reading up* on the Twiggy on Wikipedia it says this...
Quote:
The drives were notoriously unreliable and Apple was criticized for needlessly diverging from industry standards.

So people who complain that Apple has lost its way by using Thunderbolt or MagSafe need to get in line as these complaints against innovation go back many decades.


* I had not heard of Twiggy or had forgotten. The only Twiggys I could recall were the robot from Buck Rogers and the supermodel.

"Goodbyeee…"

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"Goodbyeee…"

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post #61 of 63
4/13/12 at 12:20pm
If he could come up with a bootable disk (and the machine finished booting!), then he might actually be able to get 100k for it ... as-is though, I don't see it happening.
From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that!" -...
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From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that!" -...
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post #62 of 63
4/13/12 at 3:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by jd_in_sb View Post

$100,000 is just a number he made up and is pure profit. Any reasonable salesperson would have said $100,000 + free shipping so his net income is $98,500. Putting up a potential barrier to that much profit by demanding shipping is just plain stupid.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doctor David View Post

Anyone who sees a $1500 shipping fee on a $100k item as a barrier to purchase wasn't going to buy it in the first place. If $100,000 for a very old(but very cool) computer seems do-able...
I think shipping companies charge around one percent for insurance if I recall correctly.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jd_in_sb View Post

Good point!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doctor David View Post

Thanks. Stick around, I'm sure I'll have a bad point soon

Well that was quick! LOL
Look what the cat dragged in: Mavericks!
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Look what the cat dragged in: Mavericks!
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post #63 of 63
4/17/12 at 11:31am
It has one bid now.

Wonder if Larry Ellison is bidding on it... or maybe Mr. Gates...
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