PowerBook 180 - cleaning, restoration, and lots of testing

[m1420owner]

Got my first ever 68K PowerBook, the greyscale 180 with 14MB RAM, 68030-33 w/ 68882 FPU (integrated) and working floppy drive.

Presently, it has no hard drive and the trackball needs a deep cleaning since it's not 100% perfect. I got the system from shopgoodwill.com which came with the charger and the guide book. When I first powered it on, I noticed the display was acting weird at first before the flashing floppy icon screen appeared. After spraying the connectors with electrical contact cleaner, the display is working without issues and it's not dying. Also, there is no tunnel vision, which is a good sign, yet it has one dead pixel as outlined on the photo below:



In any event, here it is with the Disk Tools diskette inserted with the system summary (RAM, OS version, et al).



There is corrosion where the Nickel-Leakium main battery was at, yet I didn't see any on the board at all, which is a good sign.

My plan is to get a BlueSCSI V2 with Wi-Fi for this thing, install the original OS on it, and do some web browsing on it along with dialing into BBS and sending/receiving faxes since this baby has an integrated RJ-11 modem.

The system, charger, and guide itself was $61.68 after sales tax (6% in Michigan) and S&H and for the price I paid, I cannot complain since it works.

The million dollar question is: can this get a color swap? Only one way to find out.

jk

 

[croissantking]

Also, there is no tunnel vision, which is a good sign,

I cannot complain

You do realise how lucky you are, right? It’s almost impossible to find a 180 that’s not affected by tunnel vision.

Fully loaded, fully working, only $60, fantastic.

 

[croissantking]

And you’re planning to swap in a colour screen and stick the working LCD in a cupboard

 

[beachycove]

The PB180 screen is jewel-like in its clarity, and as has been noted, a working one is a rarity. It is as easy on the eyes as any screen that has ever existed. Try it out in the sun — you’ll see that it is also just as good outdoors as indoors, and in fact in some ways it works better there, as outdoors, it requires no backlighting (dramatically improving battery life). That again makes it a rare thing, a computer screen that is actually usable sitting out on the patio while typing. I would not replace a PB180 greyscale screen for a colour screen under any conceivable circumstances, including with the one that went on the 180c, since it basically ate batteries. AND you’ve got maximum RAM. That is quite an early 90s PowerBook you’ve got there.

There was a guy on here from Europe (Denmark?) a couple of years ago who still uses a PB170, the earlier iteration of your high end model, and finds it still meets his needs for most things. It was inspiring. See if you can find those posts.

Every tool has its niche, and this one was made for applications from spreadsheets to word processors to something like Claris CAD, all of which a PB180 with that glorious greyscale screen will run superbly. It was, however, not designed for the internet. It will be 99.99% crap at doing that.

 

[Shaddam IV]

I use a 170 with a good screen (no tunnel vision, no dead pixels) on a daily basis (mainly to write in ClarisWorks 4). It's working great. I also use a 180 with an almost good screen (no tunnel vision, 1 dead pixel) on an almost daily basis, again using CW4.
No internet, no email, no Xitter, no distraction On the other hand, spreadsheets really don't work well - given the 640x400 resolution, there's just too much scrolling involved.

 

[croissantking]

I use a 170 with a good screen (no tunnel vision, no dead pixels) on a daily basis (mainly to write in ClarisWorks 4). It's working great. I also use a 180 with an almost good screen (no tunnel vision, 1 dead pixel) on an almost daily basis, again using CW4.
No internet, no email, no Xitter, no distraction On the other hand, spreadsheets really don't work well - given the 640x400 resolution, there's just too much scrolling involved.

It’s funny, and this is totally anecdotal, but it feels like people who have a tunnel-free 180 always have a dead pixel or two.

 

[m1420owner]

Well, the display does have the tunnelvision issues after running it for about 20 minutes, give or take. I replaced the one cap on the inverter board, the cap on the trackball, all but one in the charger (3A model), and the floppy drive's upper board cap since they were old and one of them had a bit of corrosion on it (the PSU cap). The floppy drive operates fine still and I've yet to get a BlueSCSI V2 with Wi-Fi for it and find a way to make a modern replacement of the display or at least find one that's not dead and a 3-D printed bezel since two standoffs broke out for holding the bezel on the hinges.

 

[luRaichu]

and find a way to make a modern replacement of the display or at least find one that's not dead

Don't replace it!!! Even if you could it'd eat battery like you wouldn't believe. From one 180 owner to another

 

[croissantking]

Yeah, tunnel vision severity does vary so you pretty much need to run it for two hours before assessing.

Baking the LCD is an option, I was happy with how mine turned out.

 

[m1420owner]

Don't replace it!!! Even if you could it'd eat battery like you wouldn't believe. From one 180 owner to another

My system doesn't have a main battery installed (thankfully). The only one that's there is the PRAM battery. Speaking of which, is that type of battery rechargeable or a standard one?

 

[m1420owner]

Does anyone know where I can find the PowerBook 180 diskettes? I'd like to use images of the diskettes on Basilisk II and do the install on a hard drive image and copy that over to my 2GB SD card for the BlueSCSI V2 w/ Wi-Fi I'm planning on getting in the future.

 

[demik]

My system doesn't have a main battery installed (thankfully). The only one that's there is the PRAM battery. Speaking of which, is that type of battery rechargeable or a standard one?

It's rechargeable. Panasonic VL2330-1HFE is a compatible replacement IIRC. I'm waiting for mine to test that

 

[croissantking]

It's rechargeable. Panasonic VL2330-1HFE is a compatible replacement IIRC. I'm waiting for mine to test that

Yeah, you can get them on eBay - I’ve fitted a couple and they work great.

 

[luRaichu]

I got mine from DigiKey. They're cheap and they work

 

[luRaichu]

Does anyone know where I can find the PowerBook 180 diskettes? I'd like to use images of the diskettes on Basilisk II and do the install on a hard drive image and copy that over to my 2GB SD card for the BlueSCSI V2 w/ Wi-Fi I'm planning on getting in the future.

I would use the Apple Legacy Software Recovery CD. It has Disk Copy images of any System Software version you'll want (I use 7.1.1 on my 180). Be sure to select your PowerBook utils. & System Enablers in the installer.
You'll also want to install System 7 Tuneup (available on the CD). It fixes some bugs & makes applications use slightly less memory.
RAM Doubler works great. It can double the amount of memory available to applications.
If you're running anything below System 7.5.5 you'll want to install Thread Manager + Macintosh Drag & Drop.
I use Netscape 2.02 to view WWW pages on my PowerBook 180. It's pretty fast for all the features you get. You can setup a Web Rendering Proxy server to surf the modern Web on vintage computers like this one.
Wallops is a good IRC client as well. Macintosh Garden hosts a bridge you can use to access some popular instant messaging products (like Discord) via IRC.

 

[m1420owner]

I eventually found the diskette images and used Basilisk II to install the OS on there and I wrote a modem diskette.