Haynie was gracious enough to shed some more light on this find:
"It looks fairly reasonable. It's clearly not the early prototypes...
the, based on the "Zorro" motherboard, were in black steel cases with
5.25" floppy and expansion "chimney", though the top of the board. This
was the state of the protoype shortly after Commodore bought Amiga.
The plastic here all looks correct, but it's clearly not the final
plastic -- it say "Commodore" not "Amiga", and there are no signatures
in the lid.
I'm not disturbed by the laser-printer label. I didn't see this sort
before, but assuming this is using early plastic and all, it was
probably a unit sent to developers. There's some date code, 6/28...
presumably, June 28, 1985, which would reinforce that idea. These would
have been fairly small in number, and yeah, for this kind of thing, we
often just printed up labels in the lab, or even hand-labelled them.
Chip-wise, it has the 6526, which was the predecessor of the 8520. The
8520 is basically a MOS HMOS-III version of the 6526, with a few tweaks
requested by the Amiga software team. You can see the 8362 Denise, 8364
Paula, and 8361 Agnus chips, all of which are the right vintage for a
pre-production Amiga... all with mid-early 1985 datecodes.
Curiously, it's a Hitachi 68000, but that's possible... Commodore went
shopping. We were paying $2.50 for a 68000 while Apple was paying over
$8.00 for the same chip."
"My guess, this is one of the units that went to developers. So,
basically a pre-production unit, not an engineering prototype. You can
see that kickstart is in ROM, two 8-bit EPROMs rather than the WCS board
used in A1000 production. That also makes some sense.. the WCS was a
late idea."
Hope this helps any potential bidders assess its true value.
