Bronze PowerBooks

[jmgk]

Hallo everybody!

I don't think these will excite anybody as much as the likes of hap's collection or, indeed, anyone else's; but I am pretty excited with what I've got.

So I found a few old CD-ROMs at a charity shop that won't run on os-x; they're for classic or windows pre-xp only and as my only machine was a series-1 MacBook (fairly vintage too, right?) so I messed around with Basilisk for a bit before asking my uncle if he still had his old PowerBook....which I thought was a y2k FireWire. It took him so long to find it that I had already bought and received a badly described but beautifully kept FireWire/Pismo from your favourite auction site before he dropped it 'round.

The auction Pismo works fine, all original spec but with an extra 256 of RAM (400MHz/6GB HDD), yoyo charger and everything works. even the battery works after being charged over night, I can use it for a couple of hours on battery, no probs.

I bought a cheap 32GB SSD and some extra RAM from china (the RAM still hasn't arrived), installed 9.2.2 and it does everything you'd ever want to do! other than anything relating to the internet. But this must have been an awesome powerhouse in 2000.

And I finally got the PowerBook from my uncle; It's a Macintosh PowerBook G3, therefore not a firewire, but the 1999 Bronze Keyboard Lombard. The keyboard is stuffed, possibly liquid damage, but otherwise works fine. Good software on it. 

Any tips on repairing the keyboard?

And I picked up a reatil boxed set of OS X 10.3

I wish i had the original OS9 discs!

I'll post some photos, not that they are any different from normal!

 

[CC_333]

Nice find!

The Pismo (Firewire PowerBook G3) is a very nice machine, especially with 1 GB of RAM on a 500 MHz CPU card (while the faster CPU won't hurt anything, 400 MHz is plenty for classic; it's really more advantageous having the faster CPU if you're trying to run Mac OS X.)

As for your uncle's PowerBook, it's probably easier to replace the keyboard.

That being said, if it's a Lombard (the codename for the 1999 PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard)), I might have a spare keyboard for you. Please PM me if you're interested.

c

 

[jmgk]

Hi c

Thanks for your reply. Looks like I have a Lombard from my uncle and a Pismo. A fine combination! What I find most amusing about them is that they are (according to the base sticker) identical spec. 400MHz/1MB cache/64MB/6GB HD/8MB Video/DVD and apart from both having a bit more RAM they were as standard when I got them. Really nice to use! OS 9 is lovely on them. Also I have re-kindled my use of a negative-film scanner that doesn't work on X 10.6 so am finding it very useful to have a machine running 9. The amount and quality of software for these systems is unbelievable! 

I'd certainly be interested in a keyboard for Lombard...it would be a lot more rewarding to have it fully working than trailing vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv into everything it can if not connected to a USB keyboard. What would you want for that? Perhaps I should PM you!

Does anyone know what the Z in Mac OS Z 9.2 means? It's only on one of the machines.

Thanks

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

The 400MHz Lombard was the top end model and usually had a special DVD decoder card and drive. The 400MHz Pismo was the base model.

 

[jmgk]

Photos as promised

 

[CC_333]

I PM'ed you instead.

Please let me know what you think.

c

 

[galgot]

Lombard was my first laptop. A 333Mhz, completely forgot there was some 400Mhz Lombards.

Nice score, Pismo/Lombard are nice machines, and you can install a lot of things on these, OS9, OSX, linux...