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Powerbook 230 Duo, SE and Printer

I posted an AD a while ago for an old 68k mac to play with.

I got a call tonight and this guy has an old Duo (did not specify which one) and an SE with an old Stylewriter printer. He is going to drop it off sometime this week.

Can't wait for it.

 
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Also, if anyone is interested and is local. I can get you in contact with this person if you want PPC and 68k machines...and lots of them.

 
You might want to edit your topic heading, or start a new one, so the local Canoodlians notice it.

 
I got everything just now and booted up the duo.

It is a Duo 230 with 24mb ram and ~110mb HD. Came with the mini dock and floppy too.

Have not booted the SE yet but it was a old dual with a HD installed to replace one floppy. Apparently the floppy drive is a dud though.

Also included were a bunch of floppies and a stylewriter printer.

All for free and delivered is a bonus.

 
Wow. Nice little setup, but

free and delivered
is just the icing on the cake [:D] ]'>
It's good that you scored a reasonably large amount of RAM in that Duo. If you ever decide to upgrade to a faster model, you can transfer the RAM. Duo RAM is all but impossible to find.

Even better, if it's a single stick, you can stack another one on top of it.

A Duo, an SE and a printer is an awesome retro rig.

 
If the StyleWriter doesn't work, I know one potential fix for it. There's a fuse in the AC adapter which sometimes blows out. Fix is to saw it open and replace fuse, or bypass it. Mine is currently by-passed. This can be easily tested with any multi-meter or continuity tester.

 
It is pretty sweet. I booted up the SE and it had 4MB RAM and a 500MB HD.

The unfortunate part is the Floppy on the Duo was also a dud. Its takes the disk in, but it does not read at all, and then asks to initialize. Tried multiple disks (guy gave me a paper box full of them).

I think its going to be fairly easy to find a replacement for the SE floppy, but the Duo is going to be a bit of a pain.

My alternative I think is to try and find a CD drive so at least I can put stuff onto the Duo and SE. I have a lead on that however its a CDRW...we will see if it will work (its only 15$).

 
Great haul, two very nice machines, in very nice configurations. If you just need to transfer files between the two systems, you can get an Apple System/8 Peripheral cable, which is Apple's fancy marketing way to say "serial cable." I just happen to think it's a cool name. You can then connect the machines with localtalk, there's plenty of threads on here about it, and you can ask us too.

Replacement SE floppy should be pretty easy, Duos may be easy to find an HDI24 (I think that's what it was) external floppy for, should hook right up to the minidock.

*Edit: Forgot to mention that the cable attatching the StyleWriter to the Mac is the correct type of serial cable for two-mac networking. If you had phonenet stuff you could hook the stylewriter to both systems at the same time, and do filesharing on them over it.

 
The unfortunate part is the Floppy on the Duo was also a dud. Its takes the disk in, but it does not read at all, and then asks to initialize.
The drive mechanism would most likely just be that of the standard powerbook floppy from that era. It may just need to be cleaned and lubricated. I have two fully functional Duos and a DuoDock, but have never seen the external floppy or minidock. Can the drive be disassembled for cleaning/ lubrication? If it can be, there are instructions around concerning how to go about rehabilitating ye olde floppy drives.

 
If it's the same drive as the powerbook 100, then I believe it can be disassembled. the connector on the inside is similar to the connector from desktop superdrives, but I don't know if one would work, because it may require a specific low power drive.

 
The drive mechanism would most likely just be that of the standard powerbook floppy from that era. It may just need to be cleaned and lubricated. I have two fully functional Duos and a DuoDock, but have never seen the external floppy or minidock. Can the drive be disassembled for cleaning/ lubrication? If it can be, there are instructions around concerning how to go about rehabilitating ye olde floppy drives.
I had a look at it earlier and it has no screws anywhere that i can see. I may have to pry it apart if I cannot convince it to work. I think both units were kept in a cold workshop as the guy powered it up before it brought it over. Apparently the screen was a little weird on the duo. I'm sure the cold may have done something to the floppy so I am waiting a few days to try it out again.

 
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