There are a lot of different 500-series bezel styles. I believe defor was documenting them all, I forget exactly how many he had, but I seem to recall that there was of course the model without the indentation where the CD would go, and a model with an auto-inject floppy diskette on that thin line.
One neat thing that Apple did at the time was to sell models that didn't ship with manuals or installation media, as part of a lab pack. I have one of those systems, as well as the lab pack manuals and documentation for it. It's basically the same as all of the regular stuff, but it happens to have been available separately.
I don't know how much money it saved, but it must have been reasonable because I've seen it in installations with as few as two or three systems.
I don't know how much forgoing the CD saved, however. My LC520 came from the aforementioned "lab pack" installation of only two or three units and it still has a CD, so the CD-ROM may not have made that much of a difference. (That, or it seemed foolish to not use the CD-ROM at the time, because in 1993-1995, CD-ROM was today's Thunderbolt. You weren't sure when or what was going to use it, but it was going to be big and you wanted in. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the earliest systems with CD-ROM drives weren't anywhere near powerful enough to do much exciting with them, at least beyond reference texts and extremely short postage-stamp videos. (That was probably more exciting then than I'm remembering it to be now.)
About no-CD 580s: I wonder if that one is one of the ShreveSystems ones. Shreve had both cd and no-cd models of the 580 on sale at various levels of discount until 2008 or so, when they finally managed to run through the stock they'd had (and, they'd gotten that stock in like 1996 or 1997) for something like $39 apiece.
You saw this a lot at like the pacific Science center and places where they didn't want someone to tamper with the unit.
I roll a natural 20 on my local knowledge check.
Do you mean the one in the Café at the "end" of the PSC's indoor loop? I definitely browsed This Old Mac and AF on that system.
Thel ast time I was there, there was an exhibit in the center proper about the Internet, which consisted mainly of blue-and-white Power Macintosh G3s that had various Internet software on them. That was almost better, as a tamper-proof setup, because they just locked the towers inside little enclosures and bolted the monitors (the Apple Studio LCD display) onto the tables.
