Hook´n´Port Prototype Mac OS
Find games for macOS like Friday Night Funkin', Cold Shot, Wrong Floor, Deepest Sword, Dying of Thirst on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace. Rapid Prototyping is our specialty! Mack Prototype is your premiere source of a wide range of rapid prototyping services designed to enhance your product development cycle. With a range of expertise including rapid prototyping FDM, CNC machining, polyurethane molding, and low-volume injection molding, we are uniquely positioned to produce exceptional results for your products and company. This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles. OPENSTEP became the Rhapsody prototype OS, which became Mac OS X Server 1.0, which grew into the Mac OS X we all know today. Through it all, OS X has kept many vestiges of its NeXT past, including.
Among personal-computer enthusiasts, there are many rare and desirable models from years' past. The Apple Lisa. Steve Jobs's NeXT computer. The Canon Cat. But there's a machine selling on eBay right now that's arguably the rarest of them all: a prototype of the original Apple Macintosh computer.
As you might imagine for such a once-in-a-lifetime find, the prototype Mac 128k is commanding a hefty sum: The starting bid is $99,995. The auction only has hours left, but at least one person has made a bid for the super-rare machine.
The seller, a longtime Mac enthusiast, told Mashable he found the machine in January via AppleFritter, a site dedicated to vintage Apple products. He bought the Mac from a person near Boston and says he paid a 'significant amount of money' for it.
'He was not advertising it for sale,' says Adam, who did not want to reveal his last name. 'I threw him a message asking if he was interested in selling it. He had originally bought it for $500.'
Once Adam got the machine, he worked furiously to get it working again. But there was a challenge: Apple designed the prototype to work with its proprietary disk format, Twiggy. Twiggy disks, with resemble old 5.25-inch floppy disks, were used with the Apple Lisa. However, the drives had a notoriously high failure rate, and Apple switched to Sony 3.25-inch disks for the production run of the Macintosh.
Even though Adam had working Twiggy disks for his Lisa machines, they couldn't coax his prize Mac to boot up. He suspects Apple made the prototype this way by design, so it wouldn't work for anyone else.
'It might be a specific pre-release version of the Mac OS that will only boot this machine,' says Adam. 'If anyone [has it], it would be one of the original Macintosh team back from 1983. Since this machine left Apple, it's never booted up.'
Since Adam can't get it to work, the Mac is now open to anyone on eBay who has $100,000 to spare. Adam hopes whoever the new owner is can give it a home such an iconic machine deserves.
'Because it's the only one,' Adam says. 'I don't feel that I am the right person to own it, due to its historical significance. It's very likely to be the world's oldest Mac. In my heart, and in my gut, it should belong in a Smithsonian or a museum.
'But I paid a lot of money for this computer. I'm not a rich person. I hope it'll sell and make my money back and make a decent profit to make it worth my while.'
Where would you like to see the prototype Mac end up? And how much would you pay for it? Share your thoughts in the comments.
If you’ve been a Mac fan for more than a few years, chances are you’ve seen or even used Apple’s most famous computer models. What you don’t often see are the machines that Apple kept to itself—the prototypes that never reached the market.
To explore this hidden world, we’ll take a look at four Macintosh prototypes from Apple, and one from an early Mac clone maker. When you’re done reading, we’d love to hear (in the comments at the end of this article) whatever tales you might have of your personal encounters with legendary Apple prototypes.
Translucent Macintosh SE (circa 1987)
During the testing process for many Mac models, Apple’s engineers routinely created a few prototypes of a particular computer with translucent plastic housing for air flow testing. Here we see this practice illustrated to stunning effect in this particular Macintosh SE prototype, although other Apple machines—from the Apple IIc to the Macintosh Portable—have been discovered with translucent testing cases.
Why translucent? With the help of a little smoke, engineers could easily see which components were or were not being cooled adequately and then make adjustments accordingly. It would take a new generation of designers to actually utilize translucent plastics in shipping products.
Twiggy Macintosh (circa 1983)
For most of the Macintosh’s early life in development, Apple intended its diminutive GUI-based machine to utilize Apple’s FileWare (aka “Twiggy”) disk media, a proprietary 5.25-inch floppy disk format that Apple developed for the Apple Lisa.
And that’s what you see here: a rare, early Macintosh (that actually works) with one internal Twiggy drive. This particular model, owned by collector Adam Goolevitch, is currently the only one known to exist in such a complete state.
FileWare drives never shipped in a Macintosh, however. The Lisa launched with two Twiggy drives in 1983, but the drives proved slow and error-prone in practice. Worried, Mac engineers devised a plan to include Sony’s new 3.5-inch floppy format in the Macintosh instead.
(That particular episode resulted in an amusing story about a Sony engineer hiding in a closet—an anecdote that you can find expertly told by Andy Hertzfeld at Folklore.org.)
The final, shipping 1984 Macintosh included one 400K 3.5-inch microfloppy drive, and that inclusion helped popularize the new disk format. It’s hard to imagine what the Mac platform would have become if it had stuck with the problematic Twiggy drives.
Colby Classmate (circa 1991)
Electronics engineer Chuck Colby is something of a minor (albeit little-known) legend in Macintosh lore. His company, Colby Systems Corporation, created some of the first Macintosh clones, including the portable MacColby.
Hook'n'port Prototype Mac Os Download
In 1991, Colby created the world’s first Mac-compatible tablet computer, the Classmate, which would have included a 68000 CPU, a 20MB hard drive, a floppy drive, a trackball, and a touch-sensitive membrane keyboard. At 5.4 pounds, it wasn’t as portable as an iPad, but it was a start.
While the Classmate came close to production, it never reached the market, and Colby left the Macintosh development world to work with video technology.
Apple Paladin (circa 1995)
In the mid-1990s, Apple tinkered with creating an integrated, all-in-one office appliance that included a computer, telephone, scanner, fax machine, modem, and printer. The result was the Apple Paladin prototype. It combined the guts of an Apple PowerBook Duo 230 (including its grayscale monitor) with a StyleWriter 1200 printer in a sleek white enclosure.
Early tests of the unit proved problematic, and after an internal corporate reshuffle, the Paladin was left without a division to call home, so it never reached the market.
Hook'n'port Prototype Mac Os 11
Apple MultiServer (circa 1985)
In 1985, Apple announced the Macintosh Office system, which would combine AppleTalk networking, a laser printer (the LaserWriter), and a networked file server for use in a business environment.
Of those three components, only two shipped. Apple never managed to release a file server during that era, although it certainly tried to develop one. One such attempt was the Apple MultiServer, seen here in an extremely rare prototype form owned by Jonathan Zufi, proprietor of Shrine of Apple.
Beneath its Apple-branded skin, the MultiServer would have been a rebadged 3Com 3Server, a network server powered by an Intel 80188 CPU. Presumably, it would have run 3Com’s 3+ file sharing software and not an OS designed by Apple.
According to Shrine of Apple, the server was cancelled at the last minute and the unshipped units were used for Apple’s sales offices.
Apple did eventually ship its own dedicated server systems (the Workgroup Server series), but not for another decade.
Paladin front panel image credit: Jim Abeles