"The old 'fritter archives are down, so I can't access the research I did to determine that the Mac was designed around the 5.25" Shugart Drive, not the "Twiggy Drive," as is commonly ASSuMEd!"
Since the Twiggy drive was the same size and shape as the Shugart 390 or the Alps copy that Apple used later for the Apple II and Apple /// series, the first Mac chassis were probably fitted with whatever was lying around the office, and that would be more likely an Apple II drive than a Twiggy, which was relatively rare even within Apple, because there were so many production glitches. However, the early Mac prototypes DID have Twiggy drives, and that was what Steve intended to ship before Burrell Smith started designing in the vastly superior Sony 3.5" drives.
Why is it people will do research on the web and come up with strange conclusions despite the written descriptions of people who were there at the time? Read about disk drives on folklore.org, or look at some of the Mac prototypes in museums. Apple swapped my early Twiggy prototype for a Sony prototype when they changed drives. Good thing, since the Twiggy drive I had was flaky. It could read its own disks most of the time, but was very poor at reading a disk written on another drive. And no, I don't have that prototype. Apple wanted it back when the Mac was about to ship, and they sent Beck-Tech a couple of production Macs.
The people who designed the Mac are still alive. Ask them.
As for square pixels, remember that NTSC "pixels" aren't square either. They are probably closer to Lisa-shape than Mac-shape, if they can be said to have any shape at all, since NTSC is not a pixel-based but analog system. The horizontal resolution is greater than vertical, so NTSC pixels are usually taller than they are wide, as in the Amiga, Apple //e, Apple ///, IBM CGA, Atari, etc. Like the Mac, Lisa isn't NTSC-compatible.
Not well-known or documented, the first Mac II video card aka the Toby Frame Buffer can output "NTSC" interlaced RGB. You need a little control panel which was available to developers who didn't have an Apple Hi-Res RGB monitor. I drove my Apple II RGB monitor that way for a month until Apple filled my order for a Trinitron. Remember that Apple II RGB with the motorized tilt control?
Since the Twiggy drive was the same size and shape as the Shugart 390 or the Alps copy that Apple used later for the Apple II and Apple /// series, the first Mac chassis were probably fitted with whatever was lying around the office, and that would be more likely an Apple II drive than a Twiggy, which was relatively rare even within Apple, because there were so many production glitches. However, the early Mac prototypes DID have Twiggy drives, and that was what Steve intended to ship before Burrell Smith started designing in the vastly superior Sony 3.5" drives.
Why is it people will do research on the web and come up with strange conclusions despite the written descriptions of people who were there at the time? Read about disk drives on folklore.org, or look at some of the Mac prototypes in museums. Apple swapped my early Twiggy prototype for a Sony prototype when they changed drives. Good thing, since the Twiggy drive I had was flaky. It could read its own disks most of the time, but was very poor at reading a disk written on another drive. And no, I don't have that prototype. Apple wanted it back when the Mac was about to ship, and they sent Beck-Tech a couple of production Macs.
The people who designed the Mac are still alive. Ask them.
As for square pixels, remember that NTSC "pixels" aren't square either. They are probably closer to Lisa-shape than Mac-shape, if they can be said to have any shape at all, since NTSC is not a pixel-based but analog system. The horizontal resolution is greater than vertical, so NTSC pixels are usually taller than they are wide, as in the Amiga, Apple //e, Apple ///, IBM CGA, Atari, etc. Like the Mac, Lisa isn't NTSC-compatible.
Not well-known or documented, the first Mac II video card aka the Toby Frame Buffer can output "NTSC" interlaced RGB. You need a little control panel which was available to developers who didn't have an Apple Hi-Res RGB monitor. I drove my Apple II RGB monitor that way for a month until Apple filled my order for a Trinitron. Remember that Apple II RGB with the motorized tilt control?