On December 4th, a rather special Macintosh will be auctioned: a model with a Twiggy disk drive. It used a 5.25-inch floppy drive (like the early Lisa models) instead of the 3.5-inch floppy drive of the final version.
The 5.25-inch floppy disks stored more data (872 KB) but were larger and – more importantly – the drive wasn’t reliable. So, Apple eventually switched to a compact format with only 400 KB of space. The Mac up for sale comes from Encore Systems, the company that developed MacWrite before the Mac was released. The prototype comes with a keyboard and a mouse, and it’s operational. Apparently, there are only two models of this type left in the world because Steve Jobs – after switching to a Sony mechanism – reportedly had the existing units destroyed. The estimated price for this machine is between €110,000 and €160,000.
The Mac
It sold for $150,075.
