IIfx
Well-known member
First conquest in a while. I go through random waves of acquisitions despite having piles of projects. I'm at the point where I have enough things to work on for what would probably be a decade.
Apple's Triumph of early 1997: 3400c/180
This one was as-is, $75. I lucked out, it's mint and has 80mb RAM, Ethernet, and the 12x CD-ROM Apple touted in the ad. This is a really nice machine and it sums up the Amelio era of rapid fixes to right the sinking ship pretty well. In terms of physical quality, it's what the 5300 should have been build wise. The speakers are really good for a 1997 laptop and the TFT display is crisp. The original IBM 1.3GB HDD is quiet and works well! As soon as I applied power, the system booted into an excruciatingly slow 8.6 install, with some typical Mac software of the era - ClarisWorks, PhotoShop, and Word. My plan for this system is to have a penultimate portable System 7 box. Repairs needed? Just a battery rebuild. No Ni-CAD PRAM leak damage!
Specs
This one might be in fact the rarest computer I own, with a serial number of 0566. The RDI PowerLite 170 is a SPARC-based laptop, a refactored SPARCStation 5 into a large battlestation of a laptop. Powered by the Fujitsu TurboSPARC 170, this absolute unit of a laptop would absolutely have been near the top of the performance heap at the start of 1997, perhaps beaten out by the even rarer AlphaBook. This was also an eBay find, but somewhat local. The seller elected to hand deliver it to me due to the rarity of the item. Ergonomics are fantastic on the RDI. The keyboard is a true mechanical keyboard with real key travel. A small Dell-like trackball moves swiftly, and the mouse buttons click with confidence. It does need a little bit of work - no 2.5 inch SCSI hard drive, flat NVRAM battery, flat main battery, and a single blown cap on one of the power rails. Despite said blown cap, the system operates fine, probably due to there being 2 other identical capacitors on that rail. My plan for the RDI is to build a portable Solaris 2.6 battlestation, with current GNU utilities, Apple MAE, and Sun WABI for true multi-platform compatibility.
There is no other way to put it, the PowerLite is insanely cool.
Specs
Apple's Triumph of early 1997: 3400c/180
This one was as-is, $75. I lucked out, it's mint and has 80mb RAM, Ethernet, and the 12x CD-ROM Apple touted in the ad. This is a really nice machine and it sums up the Amelio era of rapid fixes to right the sinking ship pretty well. In terms of physical quality, it's what the 5300 should have been build wise. The speakers are really good for a 1997 laptop and the TFT display is crisp. The original IBM 1.3GB HDD is quiet and works well! As soon as I applied power, the system booted into an excruciatingly slow 8.6 install, with some typical Mac software of the era - ClarisWorks, PhotoShop, and Word. My plan for this system is to have a penultimate portable System 7 box. Repairs needed? Just a battery rebuild. No Ni-CAD PRAM leak damage!
Specs
- Motorola PowerPC 603ev 180mhz with 512k L2 Cache
- 80mb RAM
- 1.3gb IDE IBM HDD
- C&T PCI Video
- Apple 12x CD ROM
- Apple Ethernet/Modem Combo Card
- 800x600 TFT 12 Inch LCD
This one might be in fact the rarest computer I own, with a serial number of 0566. The RDI PowerLite 170 is a SPARC-based laptop, a refactored SPARCStation 5 into a large battlestation of a laptop. Powered by the Fujitsu TurboSPARC 170, this absolute unit of a laptop would absolutely have been near the top of the performance heap at the start of 1997, perhaps beaten out by the even rarer AlphaBook. This was also an eBay find, but somewhat local. The seller elected to hand deliver it to me due to the rarity of the item. Ergonomics are fantastic on the RDI. The keyboard is a true mechanical keyboard with real key travel. A small Dell-like trackball moves swiftly, and the mouse buttons click with confidence. It does need a little bit of work - no 2.5 inch SCSI hard drive, flat NVRAM battery, flat main battery, and a single blown cap on one of the power rails. Despite said blown cap, the system operates fine, probably due to there being 2 other identical capacitors on that rail. My plan for the RDI is to build a portable Solaris 2.6 battlestation, with current GNU utilities, Apple MAE, and Sun WABI for true multi-platform compatibility.
There is no other way to put it, the PowerLite is insanely cool.
Specs
- 170mhz Fujitsu TurboSPARC
- Sun TGX Framebuffer
- 128mb RAM (factory)
- 1024x768 TFT 12 inch LCD
- Mechanical KB + Trackball
- 10BaseT Sun Ethernet + 33kbps Serial Modem
- Dual 2.5 inch SCSI hard drive bays
- A downright gigantic battery pack