Fantastic thread… proper obsession that Andy, well done!
A few random thoughts/memories from me: I had a 2nd hand PowerBook 100 when I went off to University in 1995 - with the external floppy drive! I was always using the university connection to ftp into Apple servers and downloading stuff from ftp://mirror.apple.com
This eventually got upgraded to a PowerBook 180 - a proper beast with 68030 processor and beauti full active matrix greyscale display. My essays had never looked so good. I was still permanently skint, buying up old bits of Apple kit from various academics across Bristol university and trying to re-sell them to make some money. Usually losing money though as I’d spot a bit of kit I couldn’t resist… eg monochrome Apple Portrait Display.
I skipped over the 520/540 generation, which was a shame as these are possibly the most beautiful PBS ever to my eyes. I got an LC475 instead which gave me 040 power.
Post-university, I had a bit more cash coming in and finally got myself a PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet) 233MHz which I managed to find a 300MHz daughter card for. One of the best computers I ever owned, it ran 9.2.2 and MS Office, Internet Explorer 5 (best web browser at the time), BBEdit and was the sweetest web dev rig ever. That glorious 14” screen in 1024x768, which felt like so much under MacOS 9!
That was the PowerBook high point. Around that time the transition to MacOS X started and it really felt like a backward step until the TiBook came out (still does in some ways!). I had a 2nd gen Ti Book with the DVI port and the slightly higher res. That felt like a whole generation on from any PC laptop. Still a nice machine today.
For me PowerBooks will always be about classic MacOS. I don’t think X was a good experience until Apple moved to Intel and the MacBook Pro. With an SSD, a 15” chassis and the Core2 Duo chip X finally made sense.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane Andy
Yeah. Not embarrassed at the number of PBs at all. Nope!
I don't have a 100, but the Duo 230 is similar, and I would absolutely love it if the keyboard weren't totally awful. Still, these systems I have do I think represent the golden age of portables, even if just the Apple variety. By today's standards they're slow, clunky and terribly limited, but that's only because we've grown accustomed to complexity, notifications, a constancy of systems demanding attention for themselves, and a mistaken belief that power is what matters, when in reality, what matters is truly talented programmers giving users what they need, in tightly efficient software.
I was lucky that by the time I got into Macs, which was 1986, my employer was sitting me down at one, and kept feeding me new ones. As a support manager in HE, Apple had groups of us working on projects such as network integration, and they fed me systems from time to time to experiment with. I didn't have to spend too much of my own money - just as well since tech support in universities didn't pay that well! I did have an SE for a few years, then a 475, and later a clone. PowerBooks were not at all my thing though.
It does seem I'm making up for it now, though the only time I've done that deliberately was the 12, 15 and 17-inch G4 PowerBooks - having one of each was a goal I set myself just for the sake of it.
I didn't get into OS X until my TiBook, which is another laptop I never really liked, but bought new in 2002. I much prefer classic Mac OS even though it lacks sophistication by today's standards. Or actually,
because it does! The TiBook needs to be mended, but I have no idea what is actually wrong with it, or where to start fixing it.
Rather wish I'd encountered the 5300 sooner... I might not have so many other PBs if I had! Except the Wallstreet and PDQ are superb too, only marginally improved by having SSDs.
68kmla.org
Yours look really nice!
