Beschreibung:

THE EARLIEST KNOWN MACINTOSH TO APPEAR AT AUCTION. Macintosh Personal Computer, Cupertino, CA, circa February 1982, with 5-1/4 inch "Twiggy" disk drive slot in front panel, no disk drive internally, logic board MC1001-02, copyrighted 1982, contained in pre-production PTA Prototypes smooth plastic molded case, 330 x 245 x 250 mm, no serial number to case, no labels on reverse, with keyboard, mouse and additional logic board. THE MACHINE THAT "HAS CHANGED OUR LIVES FOREVER" (Wozniak). Extremely rare early 1982 prototype with the earliest iteration of the logic board to ever come to auction. The Macintosh began as a personal project of Jef Raskin, who envisioned a Swiss army knife of a computer: a low-cost, easy-to-use, high volume appliance named for his favorite apple. Already by 1981, utilizing the 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessor used in the Lisa, they had the design for a machine 60% faster and much less expensive than the Lisa. It was this design that caught the attention of Steve Jobs who, after being removed from the Lisa project, was looking for something new to capture his attention. Once Jobs took interest in the project, it wasn't long before Raskin was forced out. Jobs "immediately saw that Burrell's machine could become the future of Apple" (Hertzfeld p 121). Jobs took over the project in January of 1981 and more than changed the direction, he wanted to build a "friendly" computer —the personal computer as a tool for personal empowerment. He engendered a non-conformist attitude in his team and a shared vision of a product that was "insanely great." It was an approach that utilized years later when Jobs returned to save Apple with the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. "The best products, he [Jobs] believed, were 'whole widgets' that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment of Microsoft was creating in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies" (Isaacson p 137). The Macintosh would take the GUI (graphical user interface) that Steve Jobs and the Lisa developers had borrowed from Xerox PARC as well as the WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) approach also pioneered at Xerox PARC and make it accessible to the masses. Jobs recognized the importance of third-party software developers. After all, it was the third-party spreadsheet program Visicalc, created first only for the Apple II, that drove many to adopt the personal computer—beginning with the Apple II. The team also realized that they had to show software developers how to work with this new playground. Unlike the Apple II where each piece of software could have its own key commands, they wanted to maintain a consistent user experience. They created a manual for software developers, Inside Macintosh, and issued prototype Macintosh computers to important developers such as Microsoft and Randy Wigginton's company Encore Systems as early as late 1981/early 1982. This example would have been right around the time the first prototypes were leaving Apple. Original Macintosh team member Dan Kottke writing on the Folklore.org website fixes the date of this iteration of the digital board at February 1982. The date that the first prototypes went out to developers is less fixed. Among the last-minute major changes to the Macintosh was the disk drive. The original plan was to use the new 5 ¼-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 team scrambled, under the direction of Jobs, to develop their own 3.5-inch drive with Japanese company Alps based on the latest Sony drive, but realized, excepting Jobs, that they wo