Even Steve Jobs used a 512K in his demo of the original Macintosh. That's how little you could do with 128K of memory. People upgraded these just to make them functional. Upgrading one today would make no sense at all because of it's collectibility as a stock unit.
Even upgraded it remains an original Mac, just not original configuration. The traces for the 512K Ram were on the original board, and all that was needed was a RAM chip swap plus a bit of hardware for the addressing logic. Upgrading to use 800K disks is merely a ROM swap and drive swap - that's just software and a peripheral, and was always an intended part of the design. I may feel differently about destructive upgrades, but these are all non-destructive and 100% inline with the design of the machine.
The whole "collectibility" thing I find nuts. My oldest computer is a TRS-80 Model 1. It has the original Level 1 ROMs, and no numeric keypad etc. It is probably very "collectible" in that state. But it is also useless! The ROM has nothing but a 4K BASIC that won't even allow POKEs and PEEKs! There's just no way to get at the machine. So I am very definitely upgrading. I am writing a new ROM to give me a Z80 monitor and assembler as the OS. I have already upgraded from 4K to 16K of RAM. I am replacing some of the internal parts because of known failure modes etc. And even though this computer is sitting in a room full of other, generally much more powerful machines, I strongly maintain that even today my upgrade does make sense.
Ken
I a lot of cases I agree with you. This, however, is not one of those cases. I'm not saying you are wrong and you can certainly do as you please with your own machines. It would be interesting to see what you can do with an upgraded TRS-80.
I generally tend to keep my computers stock, especially if I only have one of them. The 128k Mac, to me, gets it's value from being 100% stock. I have a 512ke. I don't need another one. Typically I don't consider RAM upgrades to be a "stock" modification, but I do in the case of the 128k. To me it even decreases it's value if it says "128k" on the back of the case. Those 128k's, of course, were the ones sold after the 512k was released. The 128k's that only say "Macintosh" are truly the first Mac's.
Again, these are just my own personal opinions. Collecting Mac's just happens to be a hobby of mine.
) Who can say if such ones will turn out to be more valuable over time? I actually expect some of the upgrades that went in these machines will prove far more collectible in the long run since they are generally rarer, and also represent quite clever engineering. Yet frequently we have people here dictating what determines value.