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Mac people: we see you. And we’ve combined professional CAD power with an ultra-intuitive UI, just for you. Designed for fluid mouse and keyboard input, it feels like your usual CAD – just faster, smoother, better. Concept, prototype, and bring your ideas to life on your favorite device. Macintosh prototypes An early clear prototype of the first Macintosh, assembled around 1981 with an Apple II disk drive. Now at the Computer History Museum. The first Macintosh computer system had been prototyped at Apple Computer from 1980 to 1983, prior to the release of the Macintosh 128K in January 1984. Protoype Mac SE 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.
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.
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'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.
I found this file kicking around on my hard drive, and thought I should at least put it out there.
This guide outlines the steps an individual must take to get FreeDOS installed and running on an Intel-based Macintosh. An interesting thing about this process is that it seems that some people believe this isn't possible;
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http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/09/12/1628227.shtml?tid=16
Mac users will need to run FreeDOS inside an emulator 'for the foreseeable future' due to the lack of support for the Extensible Firmware Interface, which Intel-based Macs use to boot, and which Hall says is not on the list of future features right now.
So now we're out to prove them wrong!
Before you start
Before starting, make sure that you have at least a few gigabytes of free space on your hard drive. While FreeDOS is perfectly happy with less than half a gigabyte, you'll have a much lower chance of ruining your data if you have lots of free space.
You'll need to download FreeDOS, so point your browser to http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, pick an iso image and a mirror, and start downloading. To burn the resulting iso image, follow these steps:
- Locate Disk Utility, which resides in /Applications/Utilities. Start it up.
- Insert a blank CD into the drive. If a window pops up asking what program you would like to open it, choose 'Disk Utility' and hit OK. A blank CD should show up in Disk Utility's left pane.
- Choose File->Open Disk Image... from Disk Utility, and choose the iso file that you downloaded.
- The iso image should also appear in the left pane as well. Select it, and hit the 'Burn' button from the toolbar. Hit the 'Burn' button to start the burn process.
Setting up the partitions
Now you need to shrink your existing OS X partition to make room for FreeDOS. Open up Terminal (/Applications/Utilities). First, you will want to find out your disk partition scheme, so enter the following:
This is what should get printed out:
There's two important things here. The first is the size of Apple_HFS, in this case it's 55 gigabytes. You need to decide how much room you want to allot to FreeDOS. 1 gigabyte is more than enough, so you want to shrink the Apple_HFS partition to 54 gigabytes. Get it? The other important thing is what is to the far right of Apple_HFS, in this case disk0s2. This is the device name of your OS X partition, and you will need this in your next command. But first, quit any open applications. You don't want to risk trashing your partition, so the only application that should be open is the Terminal. If you absolutely need your web browser open to read this, it's recommended to copy+paste the command into the Terminal, but don't hit enter until you've quit your web browser. Now that you're ready, type this:diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 54G 'MS-DOS FAT32' freedos 1G
disk0s2 refers to the device name of your OS X partition; if yours is different, replace it with the correct one. 54 is the new size of the OS X partition, G refers to gigabytes (other units include M for megabytes and B for bytes). Finally, 'MS-DOS FAT32' means that you want a Windows partition, freedos is the name that you want to give the volume, and 1G means you want to use the space left over from resizing the OS X partition for the FAT32 partition (1 gigabyte). The output of the previous command should look something like the following:
Naturally, you will want to reboot, so do that right now. Boot back into OS X to make sure everything is alright, then proceed with installing FreeDOS.
Installing FreeDOS
Insert the FreeDOS installation CD you made earlier into your CD drive. Reboot, holding down the 'C' key until you see the FreeDOS startup screen. For some reason the keyboard would lock up when using the arrow keys at certain points, fortunately the defaults were alright for everything. It should at a certain point ask you if you want to format the C: drive. Choose yes. If it says you need to run XFDISK first, do not continue! XFDISK only works with MBR-based partition tables, and you are currently working with a GPT/MBR hybrid partition table. You've probably done something wrong along the way.
Once FreeDOS is finished installing, the rest is easy. Reboot holding down the option key, and you should be given a choice between OS X and Windows. Choose Windows, and you'll be sent to the friendly DOS prompt.
Labels:freedos,mac