Gene Roddenberry's Apple Up For Auction
A early production Macintosh 128 (#776), a gift from Apple Computer to Gene Roddenberry, is up for auction.
If that's not enough to entice your inner geek, Apple later upgraded it to a Macintosh Plus for Roddenberry.
If you don't know who Gene Roddenberry is, just move along, nothing to see here.
Gene Roddenberry's Apple Macintosh Plus - A real screamer
It probably won't be the top-selling item at the auction, as Michael Jackson's "iconic illuminating white glove" worn on the Jacksons' Victory tour and the original cover art for the brothers' Victory album, are part of the same auction.
The Macintosh is the very first one to come off the assembly line at Apple Computer in Fresno, Ca., and had a then-whopping 1 Mb RAM (which could be upgraded to 4Mb). It supported the 3.5 inch double-sided floppy disc, was the first Mac with an SCSI port for fast data transfer to and from an external hard drive and was the first mass-produced computer to use the mouse. It was in production longer than any other Macintosh, lasting four years, to 1990.
Remember the seemingly high-tech beige-colored case with the nine-inch display? Roddenberry's had the short keyboard, external floppy drive, mouse and Apple logo deluxe padded carrying case.
And it can be yours. If you're a confirmed P.C. lover, but Star Trek fan, you can go where no PC owner has gone before.
Comments
|
That's megaBIT not megabyte, folks.... yeah baby! |
|
Megabit means it is 128KB of RAM? My, my, how the times have changed. I laughed at the dismissal of anyone who doesn't know who Gene Roddenberry is. Hardware geeks are still geeks, so I hope we all know. |
|
A keyboard! How quaint. |
|
Frankly it's not worth it. The Mac Plus only had a temporal dissonance range of 11 years, not enough to do any serious time travel. Professional chrononauts preferred the Macintosh IIfx, which used a weird, unique, and expensive memory scheme but had a 2047-year range (1023 past, 1024 future). Well! How do you think Roddenberry did his research? Of course, time travellers preferred the Motorola chips because of their mathematical precision. You could use an Intel chip, but because of the math flaw you never knew when you'd wind up. |
|
You could cut the top off of it, hog out the guts and plant flowers into it,.......... Visualize grass growing between the keys on the attempted keyboard,......... A real "Green" machine! What a conversation piece! |
|
You should buy it and do that realneil! Then, we'll finally be able to confirm whether or not time travel will ever be possible. Because, if time travel *is* possible, some ST fanboy from the future will come back and kill you. |
|
Let me see,........a 1200 dollar early production Macintosh 128 (#776), a gift from Apple Computer to Gene Roddenberry,................? Or a really nice new laptop? Hmmmm! |
|
@realneil: Guy Kawasaki, or possibly Andy Ihnatko (in-joke there... I keep attributing one's articles to the other), made a "Macquarium" out of a toaster-Mac case. It was fun and something you just can't do with a laptop. Unless you have really, really skinny fish. |
|
Seriously... if anyone here does get this system, I suggest you give it the Retr0bright treatment: http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com |
|
It would be cool to retrofit it with modern parts. |
|
The real question is, does it work? |
If it doesn't work, it can't be much slower than if it actually did! |
neilganon:
ROFL! I might be in the minority, but the first thing I would do is scan the hard drive for deleted files. There's probably the pilot for another ST series in there, that would include Majel in some form, of course. |
|
$800-$1200 seems a bit low for what's destined to be a museum piece. |
|
Cool! |
Post a Comment
