Get your rare Twentieth Anniversary Mac on eBay

Want a piece of Apple history? Bring your wallet and your cut-throat bidding skills and head on over to eBay, where there's an untouched, unopened Twentieth Anniversary Mac up for grabs.

This wasn't celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Mac; rather, the TAM was created as an homage to the 20th birthday of Apple in 1996. The special-edition Mac didn't actually make it to market until 1997 due to the fact that Apple seemed to have overlooked the impending celebration in 1996. At the time it started selling, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac sold for US$7,499.

What did you get for your money? A PowerPC 603e CPU running at 250 MHz, 32 MiB of RAM, a 12.1" active matrix display with a best resolution of 800 x 600 pixels, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive and a 2 GB hard disk drive. Those were pretty low specs even for the time, but the cool factor of the TAM was enhanced by the incredible design.

Made in a metallic green / gold color, the TAM featured one of the first desktop LCD displays, leather palm rests on the keyboard, a built-in TV / FM tuner and remote, and it even had a custom-designed Bose sound system. Only 12,000 of these wonders were built, and of the manufactured TAMs, 399 of them were kept for spare parts. Both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were given TAMs, as well as a group of Apple Australia executives.

While TAMs in good condition usually go for about $1,000, the bidding price as of the time this post was written was $1,205 -- probably due to the publicity that the auction of this rare Mac has received. Although the eBay listing shows this as being "unopened," there are photos of the inside of the box.

We have video of Jony Ive (noted as Jon Ive in the video!) describing his design on the next page. Enjoy -- and then go make your bid for this rare piece of Apple history.

(Photo from the All About Apple Official Website, licensed under Creative Commons)

[via Electronista]