Imagine tossing out an old broken computer, only to have it turn up decades later and sell for six figures. That’s pretty much what happened here, only this machine wasn’t just thrown away. Steve Jobs had it destroyed. According to Bonhams' own auction record, a battered 1983 prototype that was not meant to survive sold for $150,075 in New York. This is the story of the one that got away.
A drive built to fail
Before the Macintosh became the computer millions of people bought in 1984, early units were powered by a completely different floppy disk drive. It was called "Twiggy," a nickname borrowed from the thin 1960s fashion model, and it was carried over from Apple's earlier computer, the Lisa. The Twiggy drive was short-lived. Auction records for the lot describe these drives as unreliable, a problem that became obvious once the Lisa reached customers in 1983. Unlike the Lisa, the Macintosh didn't have a hard drive to fall back on, so a dying floppy meant a dead computer.
