Thread: Prototype Apple Macintosh Computer Selling for $100,000

Among personal-computer enthusiasts, there are many rare and desirable models from years’ past. The Apple Lisa. Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer. The Canon Cat. But there’s a machine selling on eBay right now that’s arguably the rarest of them all: a prototype of the original Apple Macintosh computer.

As you might imagine for such a once-in-a-lifetime find, the prototype Mac 128k is commanding a hefty sum: The starting bid is $99,995. The auction only has hours left, but at least one person has made a bid for the super-rare machine.

The seller, a longtime Mac enthusiast, told Mashable he found the machine in January via AppleFritter, a site dedicated to vintage Apple products. He bought the Mac from a person near Boston and says he paid a “significant amount of money” for it.



“He was not advertising it for sale,” says Adam, who did not want to reveal his last name. “I threw him a message asking if he was interested in selling it. He had originally bought it for $500.”

Once Adam got the machine, he worked furiously to get it working again. But there was a challenge: Apple designed the prototype to work with its proprietary disk format, Twiggy. Twiggy disks, with resemble old 5.25-inch floppy disks, were used with the Apple Lisa. However, the drives had a notoriously high failure rate, and Apple switched to Sony 3.25-inch disks for the production run of the Macintosh.

Even though Adam had working Twiggy disks for his Lisa machines, they couldn’t coax his prize Mac to boot up. He suspects Apple made the prototype this way by design, so it wouldn’t work for anyone else.

“It might be a specific pre-release version of the Mac OS that will only boot this machine,” says Adam. “If anyone [has it], it would be one of the original Macintosh team back from 1983. Since this machine left Apple, it’s never booted up.”



Since Adam can’t get it to work, the Mac is now open to anyone on eBay who has $100,000 to spare. Adam hopes whoever the new owner is can give it a home such an iconic machine deserves.

“Because it’s the only one,” Adam says. “I don’t feel that I am the right person to own it, due to its historical significance. It’s very likely to be the world’s oldest Mac. In my heart, and in my gut, it should belong in a Smithsonian or a museum.

“But I paid a lot of money for this computer. I’m not a rich person. I hope it’ll sell and make my money back and make a decent profit to make it worth my while.”

SOURCE

so.. any takers?

50 new iMacs or this? I'll go with 50

this is pretty cool if you're one rich ass computer nerd lol. I don't think I'd spend 100k on this if I had the money laying around... I'm more of a watch and car guy