I was in middle school, but even then I understood that the initial 68K Powerbooks were revolutionary. Especially the 170 with its active matrix display. You've gotta remember that they were released at a time when laptops looked like this...
I think the GeoPort telephony stuff made use of the DSP as well. The only other thing I remember seeing was a fractal application that (I believe) came with the DSP development tools - it had all the source code with it too. Interesting stuff, but I remember it being well beyond my meager...
My Quadra 700 feels *substantially* faster than my 50MHz IIci. The benchmarks confirm this, especially when it comes to FP. The '040 is simply a much faster chip on a clock for clock basis.
That said, there are few things in vintage computing more satisfying than running System 6.x at 50MHz. :)
I have a Houdini II that I've always wanted to get running in my Quadra 700, but misplaced the cable during a move. I'd love to have a replacement - if you build some adapters I'd be happy to buy one from you.
When I was young my Dad’s best friend bought an 840av with the 14” AudioVision display, and it was a pretty impressive piece of hardware for the time. The speakers were high quality, a mic was built in (speech recognition!) , and of course Sony’s Trinitron technology was highly regarded. I...
I don’t have the technical knowledge to be any help, but I thought I’d mention that it’s been really interesting reading your posts as you work through this.
Good stuff!
I assume the crystal provides timing for other stuff on the motherboard...is there a way to isolate any of it such that you can increase the clock for the CPU without affecting anything else?
Back in my collecting days I had an LC with the 12” display, and it’s surprising how compact it is. I ran it with dual floppy drives, making it essentially silent (this was before SCSI2SD!). It was a cute little setup, and if people dragged their compact Macs around in bags - I suppose this...
Growing up I used WriteNow, but these days I use Word 5.1a on my vintage hardware - mainly to make it easier to integrate with the current stuff. Although most ‘writing’ I do on my 68k machines these days is code or simple html, and for that I use BBEdit Lite.
I like this idea too - I used to enjoy programming under both HyperCard and Director, so this would be a fun excuse to get back into it. Someone else would need to do the art - I’d be useless there!
Wow - that's ugly! I didn't see any obvious broken traces on mine, although I didn't desolder the power contacts to check underneath. My 180c doesn't seem to have any obvious issues beyond a little ghosting of the screen (likely due to failing caps), so I left well enough alone. It doesn't run...
I think my issue is that I'm not as confident with a soldering iron as you guys are. I feel like I have a better than even chance of taking a currently working display and making a mess of it if I were to attempt a recap, at least as my skills sit now. Reinforcing the hinge mounts is something...