A package arrived today…
I’ve been searching for the Apple branded wifi card for my circa 2000 PowerBook G3 “Pismo” on and off for quite some time, and while they tend to be readily available, the ones that are readily available tend to be in pretty sketchy shape.
Anyway, last week I found someone selling one still in the box for $20 – so I jumped on it.
Once I’d deflowered the virgin seal on the box and extricated the card, manual, and CD, it was time to install it in the laptop…
The PowerBook “Pismo” was the last truly user upgradable laptop Apple ever made, so it’s a simple matter of pulling the two keyboard release clips with a fingernail, flipping the keyboard back, and exposing the guts of the machine.
In the above picture you can get a glimpse of an alternate timeline Apple Computer where the customer wasn’t assumed to be an idiot and was allowed to do things with the hardware they purchased.
The upper left is the new airport card in its new home above the PCMCIA card slot and the CPU heat pipe and heat sink is right under it. The cover in the middle that is held down with two plain old Phillips screws is the CPU daughter card which also has the two ram slots on it – and has a pull-tab because it just clips into place, and on the right is the 2.5″ drive bay with another pull tab to make it easy to remove.
The battery and DVD-rom are under the palm rest and are removable by simply moving a lever on either side of the palm rest to eject them from the body of the laptop – this was so that you could decide what peripherals you needed… Want a second battery for ten hours of portable runtime? Go for it! Want a zip dive instead of a DVD? No problem!
There’s a reason this laptop is viewed by many as peak Apple hardware design…
Back in 2000, when this laptop came out, it was the undisputed king of portable power; it could computationally annihilate every other laptop on the market and sported two 400Mbit Firewire ports that were insanely fast for an era where bleeding edge USB was a whopping 12Mbit.
The machine above has the top of the line 500Mhz PowerPC G3 CPU on a 100Mhz bus and a gig of PC-100 ram – the most it will address. And the old mechanical ultra-ATA HD has been replaced with a 128G SSD – also the most it will address.
All told, this is probably my favorite bit of Apple hardware I’ve owned over the years just because it’s so different from modern Apple ideals.
Anyway, card installed and the antenna connected it was time to fire up the laptop and make sure it all worked…
It took a bit more work to pull this off though. See, retail wifi in general was only about six months old when the Pismo was introduced, so it’s a really primitive implementation of 802.11b and simply won’t talk to modern security-conscious wifi…
Luckily I have an old “Airport Express” that can talk to the Airport card in the laptop, but I can’t run any security on the connection – so the Airport Express is MAC locked to the card in the laptop. But it does work!
After all of this I spent the remainder of the afternoon cruising old websites on my old laptop and pretending I was back in the early 2000’s when the Internet was still cool…
Listening to "Beta Girl Lost in Forever" by SelloRekt LA Dreams