Twiggy 128K prototype, again.

[sirwiggum]

Photos on here

http://applefritter.com/content/macintosh-128k-prototype-twiggy-drive

Something about the front panel doesn't sit well with me.

Sure, its supposedly a prototype, but the panel just looks a bit rough and ready to be something assembled by Apple.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it. but I think Trash80toHPMini might have a point.

 

[Macintosh128k]

Something about the front panel doesn't sit well with me.

you may have hit the nail on the head there, look at this folder on the ebay sellers account:

http://adam.trideja.com/Apple%20Computer%20Pics/128k:512k/Proto%20Mac%20128k/

that is the SAME front panel, with the hand written black pen under the bezel

and the image watermarks are from ebay..........

Another Hitler diaries?

 

[sirwiggum]

At the very least, it would make a handy mini ITX project with a DVD/Bluray drive }

 

[slomacuser]

But the number written is different ... something like 1031 and 1027

that is the SAME front panel, with the hand written black pen under the bezel

 

[Macintosh128k]

Yes I see that now after saving the photos and resizing them up a bit.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The faceplate bezels look rough and ready because they're soft tooled, short run prototypes for engineering purposes. No prototype would be clean on the inside and textured on the outside unless they had gone to the final hard tooling production steps. Hard tooling is expensive today and back then it was murderously so.

The numbering scheme on the ProtoBezels is an interesting observation. Thirty would be a nice round estimate for a soft tooled prototype run. The first ten or fifteen having been brutalized in the process of fit and fitting refinement and the last ten or fifteen hitting the streets as pre-production seed units . . . with functional EXTERNAL FDDs! A few of the MacTwiggyDrives must have been functional, just wildly impractical in terms of a shipping product.

Interesting observation about the sheet metal enclosure blocking the only visible source for convection cooling air, that's worth looking into in terms of theoretical ProtoHoaxMac production.

I've been collecting pics and info on the TwiggyMac for over ten years and nothing I've seen has or read about them has been conclusive. What I find really entertaining is that many of the 128k's most elegant solutions were done in secret, by qualified engineers right under the nose of THE STEVE, who'd all but forbidden any design and testing alternative that wasn't at the center of his (tunnel)VISION of "insane greatness."

[sJ "bashing" disclaimer mode]

No disrespect for the dead here, he was more of the architect type, the TEAM were more akin to the civil engineers who actually design the building after correcting the pie in the sky sketches and models of the dreamer. Luckily, INSANELY GREAT engineers sometimes translate such visions into concrete glass and steel, IRL. Plastic, glass and steel in the case of the (lobotomized) 128k and the Macintosh Team.

Steve Jobs was no Edison of the modern age by any stretch of the imagination, IMHO. He was more the consumer electronics Frank Lloyd Wright, of the modern age, IMHO. Both were geniuses, herding other (young and eager to surpass their mentors) geniuses in many specialized fields along the master's visionary path. The folks doing the real work and coming up with the ideas that work IRL never get the credit due them in any field, especially politics! [}] ]'>

Charles Eames would be a far more accurate parallel to SJ in terms of "hogging the glory" in the world of Industrial Design, but that's too obscure a reference.

SJ WAS A GENIUS! There, I've said it! But he had feet of clay . . . who doesn't . . . am I the only one here who finds his particular brand of clay insanely irritating?

[/sJ "bashing" disclaimer mode]

p.s. sorry about the tangent, this might actually make an interesting topic! Whatcha think? The SJ "bashing" thread? :?:

 

[Mk.558]

The seller could have at least tried System .97 and System .85 to see what would happen. If he's got a Lisa, there's the twiggy writer, if he's got a 128K, I will bet that he has something else besides that -- like a AIO or IIci. I don't see much of an excuse not to test it so we can say "guys, I tried .85 and .97, and 1.0 to see what would happen and it _______________."

As for for bashing Steve Jobs, as they say, "Credit goes up and blame comes down."

 

[Mac128]

Yeah, Trash, there's a lot of assuming going on here, with no understanding of what it takes to prototype something. The reality is there were A few dozen of these Mas in circulation for developers which Jobs was finally convinced were the key to the Macs success. And they didn't just send out a box of circuit boards. There a numerous pictures around showing Microsoft with a couple of the Twiggy Macs. Keep in mind the Twiggy Mac persisted right up until about November before the Macs went into production. And the software made some substantial leaps during the month of December. You all know the story of how the there were so many bugs the Guided Tour would not run on the release System, which is why we even have System .85. This Mac uses a completely different storage system!! Why on earth would System .85 run on it? Why on Earth would a Lisa formatted Twiggy drive be readable in a Macintosh which used a completely different file system? Why would a drive Steve Jobs was not even aware of at the time be even remotely compatible? Especially one Sony had to make substantial changes to in order to work with the Mac (and which, by the way is incompatible with the Lisa).

On another note, can you imagine if Apple had sent out the standard production run Twiggy drives to developers? They would have paid Apple to take the Macs back and get out of their contract. I do wonder whether many of these developers just took the backs off of them as they began to heat up and surely exhibit problems. On the other hand, the engineers knew they were shipping the Mac with substandard specs, which is why the flyback has provision for a more robust part. I would imagine the prototypes had the original over-engineered specs while the unit was in development to limit the likelihood of hardware related problems entering the equation (that and engineers always over-engineer anyway). Only when Sculley demanded they increase the profit margin were they asked to limit the design specs. Surely the engineers realized that the huge, heat producing Twiggy drive, blocking much of the airflow, required superior parts over a more ventilated production model had shipped with. The fact remains, had the Mac shipped with the final analogue board used in the the late model Mac Plus, the 128 would have had a much better track record, fan or no. And I suspect that even fell short of the specs the engineers required for TwiggyMac.

 

[Gorgonops]

On the subject of "Twiggy Macs" and ventilation slots, keep in mind that the guy driving this project was the same person that insisted that the Apple /// have *no ventilation whatsoever*. None. No fan, no slots, no holes, *nuttin*. Remember that Steve Jobs was forcefully booted from the Lisa team, no doubt in part because the failure of the Apple /// validated worries that his unreasonable engineering demands would compromise what Apple considered their most "mission-critical" project, and he basically took over the skunkworks Macintosh project in retaliation. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the engineers had to fight tooth-and-nail for every hole they had to carve in that case, nor would it surprise me if a few of the early TwiggyMacs died, or even literally went up in flames, when fitted with their prototype skins.

And Trash, have you actually tried emailing Andy Hertzfeld and just *asking* him whether working-and-skinned Twiggy prototypes were ever actually in circulation? He has the reputation of being fairly approachable.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

Practically speaking though, what System/Finder combination would even allow you to use that Twiggy drive?

Something a lot older than System .85,

If you owned this thing you would want to talk to someone like Andy Hertzfeld, he might know of someone that still had some disks for one of these.

Surely there would still be a few of these in the basements of the original design team

Wisful thinking I know

I think it's possible that the Mac would boot from any system version compatible with the 128k that you could get onto a twiggy disk. In the video, when the disk was inserted, the drive tried to read the disk, seeked around, failed, and spat it out. This proves that there is at least a somewhat-twiggy-compatible driver in ROM. The Mac is able to operate the twiggy drive without any OS running, so it's not completely absurd to imagine that any OS will work on it.

 

[Mac128]

Take a look at 6:30 on this video, that sure looks like a functional "skinned" prototype to me. Circa 1983.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTK4-QYnDNw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This brings up an interesting point which I'm sure must have been discussed at some point, but in the Pirates of Silicon Valley movie, Jobs shows Gates the Mac on his first visit and it is a production model 128K, when it should have been a Twiggy drive.

As for the Twiggy-driver being in ROM, not really sure I know what to think about that video. I've seen PC formatted disks behave the same way. But the fact that a Mac tries to access a proper disk format, does not mean there is a driver that can access the disk properly.

http://adam.trideja.com/PrototypeTwiggyMac/TwiggyMacDiskRead.avi

 

[Mk.558]

Here we are:

(I wonder if they made that clip on some Amiga product. Except the Amiga 1000 didn't come out until '85.)

All this talk is building up some pretty intense need for someone to actually do it.

 

[Macintosh128k]

I'm going out on a limb here,

A normal 128k mac has two ROM chips, low and high, that EPROM adapter card on the prototype has four, is it possible that "somehow" it could be setup to use both twiggy and sony floppies?

if that was even possible would you have to call some address (that is stamped on the EPROM card) through the debugger to tell the machine how to boot up?

Has anyone mentioned the amount of RAM that machine has? is it 128k? 256k? 512k?

I cannot read the RAM chips to see what they are

 

[Dennis Nedry]

As for the Twiggy-driver being in ROM, not really sure I know what to think about that video. I've seen PC formatted disks behave the same way. But the fact that a Mac tries to access a proper disk format, does not mean there is a driver that can access the disk properly.

The floppy drive driver must be in ROM because the OS is on the floppy drive. There is no way to get the driver off of the floppy drive if it can't operate yet. Whether this driver actually works properly with the twiggy drive is unknown - and I think that's what you're saying. But if it does work with twiggy properly, it will be able to at least begin to boot any OS from the twiggy that would work on a 3.5" drive on that Mac. The fact that the twiggy tries to do some things makes me suspect that there could be a working twiggy driver in ROM.

It is quite possible that the OS swaps in its own floppy driver ASAP, so that could pose a problem, but nothing unreachable for a $100k machine.

if that was even possible would you have to call some address (that is stamped on the EPROM card) through the debugger to tell the machine how to boot up?

Can the debugger be summoned before a System file is loaded? I haven't ever tried it.

 

[JDW]

I see from that YouTube video (thank you Mac128) that those two photos are actually from Microsoft. Such makes sense because Microsoft was assigned to be one of the earliest developers for the Mac 128k.

 

[mcdermd]

And those photos seem to illustrate how I saw my dad work from home when I was a kid. He was coding by hand - literally writing code on graph paper with a pencil. It was much better when he could finally connect to the vaxen via a borrowed vt100 terminal and modem.

 

[sirwiggum]

Makes a change from some of the devs I've worked with, who jump straight into an IDE.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

. . . Trash, have you actually tried emailing Andy Hertzfeld and just *asking* him whether working-and-skinned Twiggy prototypes were ever actually in circulation? He has the reputation of being fairly approachable.

EEEK!!!! 8-o No way! He's part of the MacPantheon and there's no way I'd ever so so bold as to try to get in touch with that gang!

< . . . besides, why sully a perfectly entertaining hypothetical discussion with FACTS! [)] ]'> >

For the sake of discussion, if there weren't at least 64 functional MacTwiggy's roaming the earth, the stealth Sony gambit would have been front burner instead of closeted skullduggery. How high a yield do you imagine they achieved for ProtoMacTwiggys? The prospect that the engineers couldn't get the other 64 from the ProtoRun to function wouldn't have sufficed to remove THE STEVE's blinders.

Such awakenings required acts of God, Skully or mere happenstance . . .

. . . such as the incredulous existence of a more tightly bound and myopic tunnel vision demonstrated by the CopierHeads in Rochester . . . :

The production yield of LisaTwiggys was abysmal from everything I've seen or heard. Were they skinned? Not from what I've seen.

The Mac version probably needed to be shielded from the CRT's magnetic and RFI fields, whereas the Lisa Design's compartmentalization precluded that particular problem, as the integrated shielding of the Sony MicroFloppy's exoskeleton chassis solved it. The Shugart Mechanism lacked proper shielding as well. When computers were large and AIO's compartmented ( Trash80 AIOs ) such was not a design requirement. Sony was developing a MicroMechanism for future MicroPCs and included exoskeletal shielding and exoskeletal protection to make the media better suited to less careful handling and portability as the ubiquity of computers (and HDDs, which escaped SJ's notice) was becoming apparent to many more in the industry than just THE STEVE.

 

[Mac128]

Trash, that seems a reasonable assumption. Obviously I misunderstood what was meant by "skinned" here. Gorgonops was referring to the metal cover on the drive, not the plastic case itself. That said, I notice that only the inside of the front bezel has been coated with the magnetic paint, and hastily so, suggesting that there might have been some issue with interference requiring shielding on the front of the case. Considering the inherent problems with the Twiggy drive, I'm sure they needed all the help they could get even working with the prototypes for development. Keep in mind, the Twiggy was also being developed as an external drive for the Apple II/III lines as well (UniFile and DuoFile) – it was going to completely replace their reliance on the Shugart/Alps drives. So they were already prototyping the drives with shielded covers in order to meet Federal guidelines at the time these prototypes were being assembled.

Looking at that case now, I'm even more shocked that there was no vents along the bottom lip either, which would have been rendered moot as well since the Twiggy case blocks most of the entire front of the machine. Literally the bottom vents along the analogue side of the Mac offered little cooling at all since the volume of air was restricted so substantially, and most of the air drawn in from the drive side of the case would have been trapped by the drive itself. Convection hardly had a chance in that prototype, with its only source of intake essentially cut off from the vents. The analogue board also has the original upper RF shield/heat sink which was quickly removed after the production 128Ks hit the streets as it restricted airflow (although, ironically, it may have aided conductive heat dissipation in a ventless prototype). Clearly there were some substantial last minute modifications (more than apparent by the inelegant piece-meal 3-part bucket tacked-on top vent solution). I would imagine there was a catastrophic failure of developer prototypes, considering how many hours those things were surely routinely run to get the software ready in time. And look at those Microsoft photos, I'm sure typical of the standard working environment, poorly ventilated rooms with stacks of papers blocking what vents there were - that second picture is hysterical ... even if there were top vents that thick stack of papers surely would have smothered any life from it. Given that, Apple probably had to go back and actually make a few more prototypes than they initially planned. At least now I am convinced of the superior components used in these prototypes.

And Dennis, my point about the driver being in ROM, I'm sure there was one. However, just because the driver recognizes the Twiggy hardware and Fileware disk format, does not mean it is capable of reading the file format of the disk itself. If I stick a 750K PC formatted disk into an 800K Mac drive, the .sony driver will recognize both the drive and the disk format, and search the disk looking for anything usable. But it won't find anything it can use. So the fact the Twiggy drive searches a Twiggy disk, is not evidence to me that if System .85 were somehow installed on a Twiggy formatted disk, that it would boot this Mac, simply because the drive understands the physical media being inserted. In fact I would bet it wouldn't given Jobs predilection for making everything on the Mac just different enough to be incompatible with anything else Apple produced, even if System .85 would actually boot on this ROM version. While I'm all about experimenting, since none of us have the unit, I think its futile to suggest that there would be any compatibility between such an early ROM and such a late system considering how inter-dependent the system and ROM were to each other. Remember the ROM handled most of the System calls so less of it had to exist on the disk and RAM. Looking at this prototype, this may have even been during the 512K RAM stage which would have required even less of the system to exist in ROM, before Sculley mandated it ship with only 128K.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The "skin" is one of the more interesting features of the TwiggyMac to me from an engineering standpoint. It's obviously an afterthought/bugfix, or it should have been designed into the MacTwiggy chassis. Production units MAY have been slated for a white metal chassis tooling upgrade, but the sheet metal shielding is a rather elegant feature for a "can't touch this" SJ AIO-ALLyou'llEverNeedJustAsIs fantasy production.

Upon reflection, don't jump to the conclusion that it blocked all the air for convection cooling. Blocking it a/o retarding/redirecting its flow, may have been one of its design parameters. IDK how much power the Twiggy drew off the ribbon cable, but it could have turned 25% of whatever it drew into waste heat and still remain a small portion of the overall power/cooling budget of the 128k.

Being an inverted closed box actually would have trapped the MacTwiggy's rising waste heat up where it could exfiltrate via the floppy disk opening, while helping to redirect/detain the balance of the front setback's cool, vented air down into the MoBo's root cellar. The balance of the front vented air, carrying the MoBo's paltry heat output, would have escaped mainly between the skin and component side of the AB, forming a nice short chimney effect in that crevice and up and around the backside toward the CRT's yoke assy.

Perchance, are the hottest parts of the AB located between the shell and the AB PCB? Perhaps directly above the chimney accelerated airflow? :?:

If the WAGs above should happen to be accurate, the AB/shell design could have been quite an elegant solution, albeit insufficient, for the Mac's convection cooling program overall. :approve: