His Missile Command is a prototype and originally had the vertical topper that was CPU controlled (lights only?)... I think there is a marketing pic of the prototype cabinet but nobody actually has one?  Dave Sherman's is missing the vertical topper but his cabinet has all the holes and harness I believe.  He said that Dave Theuer has the one with the vertical topper and he thought that was the only one.  His game did not have any serial numbers on it.  It had lots of mods interior to the cabinet, with the AR moved above the game PCB instead of on the other side of cabinet.

I think in reality what Dave Sherman has there is either:

1. The cabinet that was originally a prototype with the topper, that had the topper cut off to see what it looked like in the flesh before pulling the trigger on production.  Mike Jang designed the original cabinet with the topper, and was then asked to redesign it without the topper, after the negative feedback when put out to test.  The topper was literally sawed off.  The original proto with the topper was a single piece design (the topper wasn't placed on top of the cut down cabinet - the timeline is the chopped down cabinet came after the topper proto).

2. MORE LIKELY - the poster makes reference to the cabinet "having all the holes".  I'll speculate and suggest that this might be a proto of the canopy design that was originally going to be the sit-down (cockpit) version of Missile Command.  This was similar to other cockpit cabinets like Radarscope where a regular upright cab could be converted into a cockpit by adding a canopy.

Or of course it could the final result of both scenarios above... Sherman's cabinet is just a proto cab that was butchered around with as these ideas came and went.

Below is a picture of that Missile Command canopy cabinet from my book, Missile Commander, taken at a trade show in 1980.  You can see that the canopy was literally bolted onto a regular Missile Command upright cabinet.  I wonder if Dave Sherman's cabinet was worked on as a prototype of this canopy idea.  There's a hand written instruction manual for operators that I have a scan of that described how to bolt the two part together.  The intention was to offer the canopy as an add on to ops, but before it was released, a decision was made to drop the canopy idea and build the bespoke cockpit cabinet that you'll be familiar with.  My suspicion is someone realized that having a two player game where players leave and swap places in the cockpit wasn't going to work well - this is why the cockpit that was released only has a 1P start button.  I do go into all this in my book, along with pics of the topper cabinet, the design process and what happened when it was out on field test