Must have come out of a time capsule

[mac-cellar]

Took a trip to my local thrift store a few months ago as I usually do a couple of Saturdays a month.  Their electronics section usually good for something interesting, though not as much these days as that they no longer accept computers.  On this particular day, the shelves were pretty bare except for a rack of vintage-looking Sansui and Kenwood stereo receivers sitting on a lone rack at the end of one of the aisles.  As I was walking away toward their book section, I happened to look back at that rack of stereo receivers and notice a black laptop bag shoved into the bottom shelf.  I was in need of one at the time, and since the store usually sells them for between $3 and $10, I doubled back.  I pulled the bag out from the bottom shelf and quickly realized that it had something in it.

When I pulled open the zippers, I was floored to find a Powerbook 1400cs is beautiful shape complete with the AC adapter, power cable, floppy drive, CD drive (with an intact plastic drive door, no less), the clear plastic bookcover, disk tools floppy and the original manuals/paperwork.  The price?  $25 with the case.  I practically ran to the register to pay.

When I got it home and fired it up, I quickly surmised that this old gent was VERY lightly used.  It looked like it had come out of a time capsule.  The case and screen were in pristine condition, there was no wear or even shine on the keyboard, and the AC adapter didn't even have scratches on it!  Over the next few hours I discovered that while it was a stock configuration of RAM and HD, both the PRAM battery and the rechargeable battery still worked!  After a few hours of charging, I booted without AC power and happily clicked around (I even watched the Powerbook 1400 demo video) for about 45 minutes before the low battery warning popped up. 

In the months since my discovery, I've been scanning eBay madly for parts and upgrades.  I've added a 10GB IBM Travelstar hard drive (yes, 10GB is a bit of overkill, but the drive was only $6).  I found someone selling a dead 1400 for a song that had the internal ethernet card installed and included the drivers on floppy!  The internal card has been a disappointment, but I've gathered that these things are somewhat rare, so I'll keep it. 

So what am I doing with this Powerbook?  Well, I've used it to introduce my 10 year old son to Civilization II.  One of my favorites, and still stands up to any later version of the game.  My son loves history and I thought the game might interest him, but I wasn't sure how he would react to an old game played on old hardware, especially when he's used to the Wii, XBOX, Nintendo DS and Minecraft.  Long story short - he absolutely loved it.

So there you have it.

 

[westcoastech]

Civ 2, that's awesome, I always think games back that just had something else, I suppose more intense and intricate isn't all necessarily better. I have always thought I would want my kids to play some of those old games, but worried they would think they are trash. The funny thing is with the advent of iPad and tablet gaming etc, people have been designing games that are more similar to old school games than Xbox games etc. 

Great find!

 

[J English Smith]

Good deal! Treasure that battery, all of my 1400 batteries are long dead, can't even get through a boot. They are wonderful, solid machines. I was never able to get mine to hook to ethernet, but was able to get a wireless connection with an Orinoco Silver card.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

Wow, awesome find! Especially in a thrift store that doesn't take computers... wonder how this gem slipped through?

 

[mac-cellar]

Good deal! Treasure that battery, all of my 1400 batteries are long dead, can't even get through a boot. They are wonderful, solid machines. I was never able to get mine to hook to ethernet, but was able to get a wireless connection with an Orinoco Silver card.

Thank you!  The battery really surprised me, and I'm trying to keep it going as best I can.  Ethernet has been easy, and surprisingly snappy, with a Global Village modem/ethernet combo card.  I had the Global Fax software and the ethernet driver squirreled away on a ZIP disk somwhere and got the whole thing up and running in less time than I thought.  I've used the Orinoco cards in the past, but I don't have any at the moment.  Found a Farallon Skyline card that I might try at some point.

 

[trag]

So what am I doing with this Powerbook?  Well, I've used it to introduce my 10 year old son to Civilization II.  One of my favorites, and still stands up to any later version of the game.  My son loves history and I thought the game might interest him, but I wasn't sure how he would react to an old game played on old hardware, especially when he's used to the Wii, XBOX, Nintendo DS and Minecraft.  Long story short - he absolutely loved it.

So there you have it.

gog.com, good old games, is a great place to visit if you want to introduce someone to some old games without needed to have old hardware on hand.    I gather that they package up the old games with DOSBOX or similar already wrapped around the old game in the installer.   The installations they sell, at very reasonable prices, are compatible with Win7 or 8 and usually with 10.6 or later.   I suspect that they would also work with 10.5 as long as it's running on Intel hardware.   By specifying 10.6 they can guarantee it's an Intel CPU.

If you subscribe to their weekly newsletter, you'll get some excellent deals, like old Civ versions for less than $3 each.

The only caveat to my gushing, is that the games are sometimes older DOS versions with poorer graphics than newer windows releases might have.   At least, I've seen folks complain about this in the comments.  If in doubt, read the user comments, but also keep in mind that if the comments are old, the game may have been "updated" (missing expansions added, version changed from DOS to Windows) since then.   And, I guess it's never the Mac version of the game, for those games that had nice Mac versions.