Every couple of months I drag out my old Mac laptops and run some juice through them to keep the capacitors as fresh as possible.
This is a fairly involved operation due to these antiques not supporting anything resembling modern networks, wifi, or even web pages. So I have to set up work-arounds for them to actually communicate with anything…
Today we start out with my old PowerBook 165c from Christmas of 1993…
This is still running the System Software 7.1 that it came with, though the ram was upgraded from 4 megs to 8 megs in late 1994, and it’s still running on the original 60 meg internal HD which shows the file system being created at 6:44am on January 19th, 1993.
Not sure how many miles the platter in the HD has on it at this point, but it’s pretty extreme… But the only thing that’s stopped working (so far) is the battery – and there are no replacements for it – so this only runs when plugged in.
I mostly use the 165c to “dial” into various local BBSs and a couple of MUCK/MUDs via a serial to wifi adapter – which you can see sitting next to the laptop. What that thing does is emulate a Hayes command set (the old AT modem stuff) and uses that to bridge the serial port to an ESP8266.
To illustrate just how far we’ve come since the 165c was an incredibly powerful machine – the ESP8266 I’m using as a serial to wifi widget can manage about 30 DMIPS (Dhrystone Millions of Instructions Per Second), and the 33Mhz 68030 in the laptop can hit about… 12.
Basically the “modem” I’m using to relive the BBS era is about 2.5 times more powerful than the laptop connected to it.
Next up is my old PowerBook G3 “Pismo” I ordered on my birthday in 2000…
This is running System 9.2.2 – the fully updated version of System 9 that it came with. This is the 500Mhz version, with a gig of ram and the ATi Rage Mobility 128 video in it.
Basically this was the pinnacle portable computer at the turn of the century, and it could run circles around pretty much any Intel desktop of the era.
Over the years I’ve replaced the 20G mechanical HD with a 120G SSD, and I added a new old-stock AirPort card to it – the one upgrade I didn’t have back in the day. Over the years / moves I’ve lost the expansion bay Iomega “Zip drive”, the floppy drive, and the expansion battery – but still have the CD rom which is in it. Like the 165c, there are no batteries for this laptop anymore, so it only runs when plugged in.
To get this (and my G4) on the network requires a special access point because the old cardbus AirPort cards won’t use any security better than WEP – and nothing uses WEP anymore. So I use my old AirPort Express (next to the screen behind the laptop) and have it MAC-locked to the two laptops. This lets them see the local network wirelessly while keeping the neighbors at bay.
The last laptop for the day is my 17″ PowerBook G4 from 2004…
Here’s the biggest laptop Apple ever made, and while it came with OSX 10.2.7, it’s currently running OSX 10.3.9. This is the 1.33Ghz G4 specimen with a gig of ram, a 120G SSD, and the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 video card in it.
Oh, and the battery still works!
This, like the G3 Pismo above, needs an old AirPort Express to use its wifi card.
A few years ago I did a complete teardown of this laptop and replaced pretty much everything in it with new old-stock parts… It’s essentially a new 2004 laptop.
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