Having just discovered this forum I confess that I am still in love with my Powerbook 170. Although its original body is kaput to the point that the screen hinges are held together with shipping tape and the keys are so bare and shiny that my qwerty skills are put to the test, my PB 170 still lives on today as a hard drive transplant into a nearly mint body found recently on ebay. It is as if my highschool sweetheart is back in my arms!
For those of you wondering what that crappy smell is, I confess that I am currently typing on a Dell M90 Notebook. It is a lot like putting up with a snotty kid in poopy pants, because it frequently throws temper tamtrums and leaves me wondering why the little bugger has to make things so difficult! However, it is my primary work machine because in my line of work it is a PC world out there. You know the drill.
I still use my PB 170 partly because it is fun and elegant. It boots up in less than a minute and it never goes wandering off and simply ignoring me when I ask it to do things. I love the rhythym of of the flowing menus, the elegance of the big, smooth-gliding trackball, and the simplicity of the 7.5.3 interface. But after all this time, I use it mainly because in certain CAD applications that I come up against I find that the programs I first used on my 170 Powerbook 18 years ago are still more efficent than on any version of AutoCAD up to 2010.
Some of my favorite macros were marooned on the 68k platform when the Mac program I used no longer supported macros for its PPC upgrades and beyond. So here I am, stuck in the stone age, still pulling out my beloved 170 notebook from time to time and doing in a few minutes what would take an AutoCad operator days to do. And recalling once again how joyous I was to be using my Mac instead of hammering nails with my forehead over a DOS computer like my poor collegues. The Powerbook 170 gave me freedom and liberation from the mundane and tedious, and actually made computing fun! At $5000 it also liberated me from a large wad of cash! But she was-- and is today-- worth that and more to me. So I will try to keep you backed-up and in spare parts darlin', so that we can grow old together!
For those of you wondering what that crappy smell is, I confess that I am currently typing on a Dell M90 Notebook. It is a lot like putting up with a snotty kid in poopy pants, because it frequently throws temper tamtrums and leaves me wondering why the little bugger has to make things so difficult! However, it is my primary work machine because in my line of work it is a PC world out there. You know the drill.
I still use my PB 170 partly because it is fun and elegant. It boots up in less than a minute and it never goes wandering off and simply ignoring me when I ask it to do things. I love the rhythym of of the flowing menus, the elegance of the big, smooth-gliding trackball, and the simplicity of the 7.5.3 interface. But after all this time, I use it mainly because in certain CAD applications that I come up against I find that the programs I first used on my 170 Powerbook 18 years ago are still more efficent than on any version of AutoCAD up to 2010.
Some of my favorite macros were marooned on the 68k platform when the Mac program I used no longer supported macros for its PPC upgrades and beyond. So here I am, stuck in the stone age, still pulling out my beloved 170 notebook from time to time and doing in a few minutes what would take an AutoCad operator days to do. And recalling once again how joyous I was to be using my Mac instead of hammering nails with my forehead over a DOS computer like my poor collegues. The Powerbook 170 gave me freedom and liberation from the mundane and tedious, and actually made computing fun! At $5000 it also liberated me from a large wad of cash! But she was-- and is today-- worth that and more to me. So I will try to keep you backed-up and in spare parts darlin', so that we can grow old together!
