A Mystery Box.

[iMac600]

So, I have this box here. I'll spare you the full back story but in a nutshell, I gave some old 2.5" IDE hard drives to my co-worker in the Service Department for use as Apple Diagnostics drives. Today I came in here and saw this on my desk.

Now, i'm still at work. I'll open this up when I get home. I have an idea what it could be, but i'll leave this here and see if anyone wants to take a guess. All I know is that my co-worker used to work as a service technician for a now defunct Adelaide-based Apple repair center, and this was something from their service department.

 

[macgreg]

Is it ticking?

 

[Concorde1993]

It's the iBox of doom!

 

[Strimkind]

A Laptop replacement logic board?

 

[Temetka]

The box contains a box, with another box, and another box, and another one and another and so on.

Inside is a tiny cat.

 

[iMac600]

So, at the end of the day we opened the box.

PowerBook G3 Series II

233MHz PowerPC G3 Processor

512k L2 Cache

160MB RAM

2GB Hard Disk

ATI Rage LT 4MB Graphics

14.1" Active Matrix Display

Dual Booting Mac OS X Jaguar and Mac OS 9.2.1

It currently lacks a power adapter, a battery and an optical drive. We're currently working on locating the optical drive and i'm working on finding a power adapter for it. The battery will be sourced from elsewhere i'd imagine. I have spare 30GB and 40GB drives which will both work in this machine, with possibly a 512MB RAM kit around here as well. The keyboard also has a row of keys that don't work correctly, but I think we've probably resolved that issue with some reseating of ribbon cables.

After some fiddling around with equipment that we have in the shop, it started up. The store manager went into the store room for a moment and returned with his PowerBook G3, a Lombard. It too was running Mac OS 9.2 and after running through some of the features of pre-2000 Apple OSes (which drew the attention of the entire store staff), a photo was in order.

I'm told that in our store, every christmas season the old Macs come out to play. This week we've had four iMac G3s and two PowerBook G4 Titaniums in for service. Some of our Intel Macs joined the spirit of the season, running Mac OS 9 via architecture emulation which the customers found both entertaining and impressive.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Very cool! :approve:

I still haven't got the G3 series nomenclature figured out yet. Is that the 333 MHz version w/ADB? :?:

 

[ClassicHasClass]

It's a Wally II, yes (a/k/a "PDQ").

 

[Strimkind]

Very cool! :approve:
I still haven't got the G3 series nomenclature figured out yet. Is that the 333 MHz version w/ADB? :?:

Wallstreet & PDQ have ADB/SCSI and go from 233mhz to 300mhz.

Lombard has no ADB but does have USB and SCSI and is either 333mhz or 400mhz (400 has a hardware DVD decoder).

Pismo is 400-500mhz with firewire.

Hope that makes it easier!

 

[jongleur]

Very nice! I just picked up a PDQ when I went to Brisbane a couple of weeks ago. The battery is flat as, so I'm going to have a go at repacking it with new cells (just finished doing a couple of repacks for my 18v drill)

I've always thought the Wallstreet was the best looking PowerBook.

 

[beachycove]

A very simple upgrade is to pop in a 266MHz processor. These are very common and also have 1MB of L2 cache, as opposed the the 233's anemic 512k. As most of the G3's gains over the 604e relate to onboard cache, you want as much of it as you can get. 300MHz processors are also available that plug right in, but they were and still are sort of rare.

The nice thing about that unit is that it has the 14" screen, which ought to mean that it also has 4MB vram. The Wallstreets are a bit bewildering. Some of the 233MHz machines were not only processor-hobbled, but had a lower-end logic board, a truly crappy passive matrix screen, and only 2MB vram. Some had different bus speeds with unusual processor speeds (e.g. 292MHz). One of the early models had a screen that regularly failed, whereas the later ones were excellent. The different models had somewhat different ports (to svideo or not to svideo, that is the question).So it's not just any Wallstreet that you want.

My own Wallstreet 266 is, after all these years, still going strong and is still used much more regularly than most of my older gear.

 

[jsarchibald]

Awesome, love the Wallstreet! I came across one last month and it is a great little laptop. It came with the original box, battery, CD drive, floppy drive, charger, everything. The only fault is the battery holds no charge. Good work!

 

[Unknown_K]

The original 233 had no cache at all (I have one with the 12" DS LCD, fugly).

You also had 250's and 292 speeds on the original Wallstreets (83 FSB capable) and the optional 13" LCD had issues with failure at the cable end. The Second series PDQ got rid of the 13" LCD for the 14" and they modified the top cover so it fits (you get a cliff instead of the tapered top that matches the bottom). They also got rid of the 83 FSB (just like later Beige G3's did) so you had 233/266/300. The 233 being the low end had 512K cache while the others were 1MB.

My best Wallstreet is a 13" LCD 292 G3 with 1MB cache, should be faster then the PDQ 300 because of the FSB and it uses PC100 RAM.

All in all nice laptops except for the 12" DS option and the shitty hinge design that would break and rip up the LCD cable in the process. If the hinge didn't break it would get so loose that the display will not stand up alone anymore.

You can pretty much use the Wallstreet as a media converter, the drive modules unclude CD, DVD, floppy, LS-120, and Zip 100 and anything else (tape, MO, etc) can be connected to the SCSI port.