When the first Macintosh model (actually titled the “Macintosh 128K”) hit the market in 1984, it featured a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive built by Sony, the industry standard at the time. Originally, Apple had planned to include its own proprietary Twiggy 5.25-inch drive, but engineers deemed it unreliable, despite its larger storage capabilities (860 KB to Sony’s 400KB floppys).
While the Twiggy disk could store an impressive 860KB of data, it was also notoriously unreliable — so bad, in fact, that one engineer responsible for the drive remarked to Steve Jobs, “Take out your .45 and shoot the friggin’ horse in the head.”
Just recently, an extremely rare prototype of the 128k Mac with a Twiggy drive has surfaced on eBay, but with an opening bid of $99,995, this antique is beyond what most of us could ever afford.
[via]
