Return of the TwiggyMac

The Twiggy Mac is the stuff of myth surely? Macintosh prototypes up until a fairly late stage in the project to produce the Apple Macintosh in 1984 were 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. Luckily Sony had just bought out their new 3.5 inch floppy drive format and the rest was history...

But it was assumed that none of the Twiggy drive equipped Macintosh prototypes had survived as Apple 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.

I don't have any original Macs but i do have the second version, a 512K, and here it proudly is (serves as a clock stand these days to be honest)...

Saving endangered photographs

Conserving historic photographs is a very complicated business because of the variety of methods used in early photography, and the science itself is a fairly recent development. This fascinating article traces the history of photo conservation and the complications involved. Research into photo conservation was spurred in the 1990s by the explosion in value of historic and artistic photos and the discovery of some frauds.

What astounded me was that there have been over 150 different photographic processes developed in the 187 years since Joseph Niépce first took a photograph of the view from his window. The article lists some of these including processes i've heard of like daguerreotypes and also others i hadn't like ambrotypes and kallitypes!

Photo from Flickr Commons, British Officer from Sir William Dixson's collection of ambrotype portraits, ca. 1857-1858, possibly by Thomas Glaister (State Library of New South Wales)