NTFS isn't a single bit better than HFS+ in terms of checksums.
Also, HFS wasn't used on the original Macintosh 128K -- that used a simpler filesystem called MFS. HFS was introduced with the Mac Plus a couple of years later.
I've experienced silent corruption on NTFS. And it still modifies data in-place, so an unlucky power failure or reboot could still cause data loss. Thankfully Microsoft already have an answer, ReFS: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh84...
Silent corruption can hit NTFS just as well. The only protection is to have a good hardware with ECC RAM, raid with redundancy and a FS that checks data on every read like zfs,btrfs,ReFS,... and backups.
Also, HFS wasn't used on the original Macintosh 128K -- that used a simpler filesystem called MFS. HFS was introduced with the Mac Plus a couple of years later.