Return of the TwiggyMac

The Twiggy Mac is the stuff of myth surely? What am I talking about? Well the Apple Macintosh, up until a fairly late stage in the project (which was finally released in 1984 of course) was going to use the same 5 1/4 inch "Twiggy" disk drive as used in the Apple Lisa. Unfortunately the Twiggy drive was rubbish and often failed, indeed this was one of the Lisa's Achilles' heels (along with the huge price). Luckily Sony had just bought out their new 3.5 inch floppy drive format which Apple used instead and the rest is history...

It has been assumed that none of the Twiggy drive equipped Macintosh prototypes had survived as Apple had had them all recalled and destroyed in 1983. However one was found and later on another one turned up too!

After some restoration work the Twiggy Macs now work again and could boot from the original Twiggy system disks which included a beta version of Mac OS from August 1983. This version of the eventual first release of Mac OS included some intriguing differences from the final version including "Steve sez" in dialogue boxes. The whole story is recounted in the highly enjoyable Twiggy Mac website.

Heres how it ended up looking, my 512K