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Which laptop has a floppy that I can use to make 800k disks?
- Thread starter ioncehadamac
- Start date
bunnspecial
Well-known member
I'd vote for a Wallstreet or PDQ. As said, you must have an internal floppy drive, and these were the last laptops with this option.
Both of them are at least semi-useable in the modern world with a bunch of RAM(I think 384 in the Wallstreet and 512mb in the PDQ) and have the advantage of having RAM that can actually be readily purchased. Plug in an ethernet cable or an appropriate Cardbus WiFi card and you can browse the web at least well enough to get on Macintosh Garden and download files.
Connectivity wise, these are king. They have serial ports built in so can communicate with older computers via Appletalk. With the serial port along with SCSI and ADB, you can connect any classic peripherals you want. With Cardbus, you can get USB and Firewire. In addition, there were aftermarket ZIP-100 and LS-120 drives made that will fit the right hand bay so you can use those(as a warning, the internal LS120 has the same limitations as the external ones-they can only do 1.44mb disks and not 800K).
If you don't require a laptop, though, I still always suggest a beige G3 or an x600 series Mac as ideal. These are even faster than their laptop counterparts, plus are even easier to add USB and FW since you can use readily available PCI cards. You get both a CD-ROM and floppy built in, plus ZIP drives were common BTO items. In the G3s, these use the ATA/ATAPI interface so you can easily upgrade to a DVD-ROM, CD-RW, or DVD-RW if you would like. The 7300, 8600, and 9600 can hold more RAM than the G3s(1gb in the 7300 and 8600, 1.5gb in the 9600, vs. 768mb) BUT it takes a bit of hunting and costs a small pile of money to max one of the x600 computers(let's not go there on how much I spent on RAM to do that on both my 8600 and 9600). Do a bit of hunting on Ebay for low density 256mb PC-66 or faster SD-RAM(PC-100 and 133 are a lot more common) and you can probably max one for $10-20.
Both of them are at least semi-useable in the modern world with a bunch of RAM(I think 384 in the Wallstreet and 512mb in the PDQ) and have the advantage of having RAM that can actually be readily purchased. Plug in an ethernet cable or an appropriate Cardbus WiFi card and you can browse the web at least well enough to get on Macintosh Garden and download files.
Connectivity wise, these are king. They have serial ports built in so can communicate with older computers via Appletalk. With the serial port along with SCSI and ADB, you can connect any classic peripherals you want. With Cardbus, you can get USB and Firewire. In addition, there were aftermarket ZIP-100 and LS-120 drives made that will fit the right hand bay so you can use those(as a warning, the internal LS120 has the same limitations as the external ones-they can only do 1.44mb disks and not 800K).
If you don't require a laptop, though, I still always suggest a beige G3 or an x600 series Mac as ideal. These are even faster than their laptop counterparts, plus are even easier to add USB and FW since you can use readily available PCI cards. You get both a CD-ROM and floppy built in, plus ZIP drives were common BTO items. In the G3s, these use the ATA/ATAPI interface so you can easily upgrade to a DVD-ROM, CD-RW, or DVD-RW if you would like. The 7300, 8600, and 9600 can hold more RAM than the G3s(1gb in the 7300 and 8600, 1.5gb in the 9600, vs. 768mb) BUT it takes a bit of hunting and costs a small pile of money to max one of the x600 computers(let's not go there on how much I spent on RAM to do that on both my 8600 and 9600). Do a bit of hunting on Ebay for low density 256mb PC-66 or faster SD-RAM(PC-100 and 133 are a lot more common) and you can probably max one for $10-20.
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