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Oldest known verson of the System/Finder?

Peter.Howard

Active member
I have been reading through old posts and notice that System .85 was shipped on the guided tour disk with the original Macintosh, this got me thinking, Is .85 the oldest known verson of the system software?

What happened to .83 etc or .34?

I know these would be pre release copies, but maybe someone knows something about them?

:b&w:

 

Mac128

Well-known member
This site will not let you search for a term with less than 4 letters or numbers. In order to do that you must use a Google site:search which will find any set of characters.

 

PatSter21

New member
@Mac128:

at 2:50-2:53, the window title looks like a Lisa one, and the icons are weirdly spaced.http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/Byte/2-1984/macintosh/macintosh_03.jpg

The background is black, the "opened icon" state of the diskette is white, not dotted white. The "Arrange" menu is in place of the View menu. Also, the folders look much more rounded. In MacPaint, there is a inverted brick pattern, a scaly pattern, and another odd pattern I can't name.

These look like versions before 0.85, and i'd guess they are 0.7x or 0.6x.

 

Mac128

Well-known member
Patster21 ... That YouTube video also shows a Mac with a Twiggy drive in it, good luck finding one now. Of course these versions existed, do you have source for them now? I think thats the point of this thread. Then again, if the point is merely to observe some differences in the way the Finder looked, then there you have it.

FYI, you are pointing out differences in the Finder, not Systems. System .85 comes with Finder 1.0 despite the Finder working completely differently than it did in final release. The System in the examples you post could well be 0.85 or, 0.2. Not sure what criteria used from which you've extrapolated the 0.7 or 0.6 version numbers.

 

Peter.Howard

Active member
Does any known prototype twiggy drive Macs still in existance?

Have a look at this, it appears to be a twiggy drive, note how long the disk slot is and the height of the indent surrounding the drive

image12.jpg.a2fb2d0cd5a2e805241efd799d4dacc1.jpg


Compared to a normal Macintosh

image16.jpg.5030c699abb8b61c1f6d962682806f06.jpg


 

Mac128

Well-known member
Yes that is a Twiggy drive. There are many such pictures in Apples early promotional literature that got an early start, remember the Sony 3.5" drive replaced the Twiggy very late in the process.

Any developer whom Apple gave a Mac to, such as Microsoft, would have had one with a Twiggy drive.These can be seen in numerous YouTube videos in early interviews with developers from the films used by Apple to promote the Mac and at the Shareholders meeting where the Mac was introduced. So unless they were contractually bound to return the protos to Apple who destroyed them, then there should be a few left in the wild, but none have ever surfaced, much less the clear plastic protos of the various stages leading up to the final Macintosh.

There is a story that in the early days of Apple, the storage room where all the design models and prototypes were being kept to that date had been thrown out overnight by a cleaning crew thinking it was garbage, thus eliminating much of Apples early product development and design history.

 

Peter.Howard

Active member
hey thanks for the response 128

So would in theory if you had a twiggy drive out of a Lisa, would it work on a M0001?

Or is it a case of the ROMs would be different?

interesting subject

I wonder as well if the prototype macs had 256k or 512k of ram.

twiggy_macintosh.jpg.6383e3f32876bbf946621cf06ed35d27.jpg


 

Dennis Nedry

Well-known member
Such a rare Mac might in fact fetch $25,000. Likely more!

You KNOW there are a few left somewhere. They can't all be gone.

 
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