Apple’s Macintosh took many forms over the years, from its initial concept by Jef Raskin as a $500 appliance that contained a built-in keyboard, printer and 5-inch display, to its ceremonious debut in 1984 with an inflated price that was five times this initial vision. For a period in the Mac’s development, it was assumed that the computer would feature Apple’s proprietary Twiggy 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, which also came as standard issue on the original Lisa. Just recently, an extremely rare prototype of the 128k Mac with a Twiggy drive has surfaced on eBay, but with an opening bid of $99,995, this antique is beyond what most of us could ever afford.

While the Twiggy disk could store an impressive 860KB of data, it was also notoriously unreliable — so bad, in fact, that one engineer responsible for the drive remarked to Steve Jobs, “Take out your .45 and shoot the friggin’ horse in the head.” Ultimately, the company did just that, and the original Macintosh shipped with a 3.5-inch drive from Sony that could write only 400KB to its not-so-floppy disks. While this prototype will attract only the most affluent of bidders, the rest of us can enjoy the priceless photos of what might’ve been.

Apple Macintosh 128k prototype with 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drive for sale on eBay originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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