Four decades of Apple laptop in one photo, which also covers all of the major hardware versions; 68k, PPC, x86, and M1.
What a long strange trip it’s been.
Category: Retro Computing
My adventures with old hardware
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1990 – 2020
1990’s PowerBook 165c, 2000’s PowerBook G4, 2010’s MacBook, 2020’s MacBook Air -
Historypeats…
Can you even imagine Apple computers without Intel CPUs in them? We’re definitely living in the future or something.
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MacBook 7,1
Being as I traded in my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro on the new 2020 27″ iMac, meaning it needed to go back to Apple, I’m running on an old 13″ MacBook for work this week.
Apple MacBook “Core 2 Duo” 2.4 13″ (Mid-2010) running 10.13.6 Like the rest of my Mac Stuff, this 2010 white polycarbonate MacBook is both a fully working system and is in excellent condition. It’s been upgraded to 8Gigs of ram (the max it will use), and has a new 120G SSD and battery in it — both from Newer Tech.
With the zombies and all I have a lot of videoconferences to attend of a day, and the MacBook Pro used to be my go-to for daily operations here at work. I’m happy to say the decade-old MacBook, while a bit more sedate, works just as well.
A half dozen VPNs for remote operations on servers, running both wired and wireless networks, monitoring email, video chats, working on documentation, running iTunes, cruising the web… I’ve not found anything it won’t do.
So, even though I only need this machine for a few days before the new laptop gets here, it’s performing admirably.
Oh, that’s right! I ordered one of the new M1 laptops on Tuesday. I got the notice from Apple that it’s leaving Shanghai today and will be delivered Monday.
When it gets here and I get it set up, I’ll be sure to comment on the performance of the new “Apple Silicon” — as well as post a photo of a 68000-based Apple laptop, a PPC-based Apple laptop, an x86-based Apple laptop, and an M1-based Apple laptop all running at the same time… 30 years of architecture changes, and I have mint examples for all of it.
It’s a hobby.
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Xserve 2,1
A few weeks ago I was successful in re-acquiring my old pre-y2k rihahn.com domain, and decided I should put some sort of service on it. Said service would have to be suitably archaic though, so I spent some time pondering it…
Last week I settled on using an old Mac, and briefly had my dual G4 “MDD” tower running a web server – but going alllll the way back to PowerPC was a bit too archaic. So I decided to fire up my old Apple Xserve 2,1 from early 2008 and put it back into service as my personal web server.
The Xserve is archaic enough to be worthy of my old domain name, yet new enough that putting it on the modern Internet isn’t a war-crime.
After some fiddling, which included locating eight 2Gig sticks of DDR2 FB dimms in an old box in the storeroom and three 1TB HDs that would actually run in the Xserve (they’re notoriously picky about HDs) – it lives!
The site is being served from OS X Server 10.6.8 using the built-in web services, and will probably end up as just a curious collection of old road signs pointing in various directions down equally old dirt roads to ghost towns of bygone eras.
Welcome to an unmarked exit off of the information superhighway in the middle of nowhere.
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PowerBook 5,3 (The Special Project)
Back in early 2004 I moved from my home / unicorn sanctuary in Avon Colorado back to Fredericksburg Virginia for a potential teaching gig. This move was fairly spur of the moment and ultimately entailed getting rid of pretty much everything I owned that wouldn’t fit into a couple of suitcases. This included my fairly bleeding-edge PC that I’d built, but part of the deal with accepting the position was getting a new laptop to replace the PC.
Now, I’ve always been fairly agnostic when it comes to computers — I’ll use anything really. But having gotten my start in the early 80’s on machines with a lot of … let’s say idiosyncrasies … I’ve always been into the underdog systems like Amiga, Apple, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, etc. I’m also an official old-school pointy-hat Unix wizard, so I tend to prefer Unix-like systems whenever I get an option.
So that all said, the laptop I requested was a brand new hot off the press 17″ Apple Powerbook G4. At the time in early 2004, the 1.33Ghz model was the tippy-top of the Apple line – $3200 of brushed aluminum and PowerPC architecture — and that’s what I was bribed with. The day I picked it up from CompUSA, I also picked up another gig of ram for it. That 1 gig stick was about $250.
I pretty much lived off of that laptop until shortly after I started at my current place of employment. I had to sell it to finance a PC being as all of the work I was doing at work was Windows-based and I needed a comparable system… And PC gaming was a big deal at a place that tested PC games for some weird reason…
But, I’ve always missed that laptop; it’s still the best laptop ever made in my not-so-humble opinion:
- It’s from back when thermal performance was more important than being thin. So it’s huge, heavy, and built like a tank.
- It has a screen that’s large enough you can actually see things from a few feet away.
- It has every kind of port you could ever want built-in, versus today’s penchant for two generic ports and a bag full of dongles.
- There’s an actual CD/DVD burner in it!
- It has an amazing keyboard with actual keyboard sized keys and keyboard-like travel.
- And it runs OS X, which is really BSD Unix with a candy-coated interface.
All that said, over the years I’ve on-again, off-again thought about acquiring another of these laptops just to have one again. But I had some criteria to meet if I was to purchase one just for “old time’s sake”… It needed to be a 17” 1.33Ghz model in absolutely mint condition — preferably still in the original box — and not cost a thousand dollars. I wanted to be able to pretend that I was the first owner, but I also know the G4 is just a curious footnote in computer history and really isn’t useful for much these days — so it’s not worth anything outside of sentimental value.
Well, all of my criteria was finally met a few weeks ago, and yesterday a virtually new 1.33Ghz 17″ G4 arrived.
About an acre of aluminum with an apple logo right in the middle. 
A couple of rub marks around the bezel, but otherwise in pristine condition. 
Usually the first question is “How big is that thing!?” Well, each palm-rest is the size of a CD case for a size comparison. This is a ‘low miles’ PowerBook5,3 which has an 80G IDE HD and 1GB of ram. And while that’s nicely stock for this machine — I can do better.
I ordered 2 gigs of ram for the machine, which is the max it will hold and should be here later today. I also decided to add an SSD to it.
SSDs for PATA (IDE) systems were around in 2003, but were prohibitively expensive ($1000+ for about 60GB) — so I never put one in the laptop. But here we are in the future, so I was able to secure a 120GB mSATA drive and a 2.5″ mSATA to IDE adapter for about a hundred bucks.
Now to install it…
About 10,000 screws later and welcome to the internals of a G4 PowerBook. The mSATA and adapter are on top. It’s nice to see the inside of the laptop is just as pristine as the outside. There was some evidence of use like a little bit of lint around the fans, which I took care of while I was in there, but otherwise nice and clean. Even the kapton tape Apple used to hold everything in place was still sticky and holding everything in place.
After about two hours of hardware and software install, here we are:
The laptop still needs its memory upgrade (this evening some time) and a new battery — which will happen as soon as I find one for under a hundred bucks. But otherwise, is actually really usable.
Safari works (mostly) and iTunes works (mostly), so I’ll restore one of my backups to the machine some time this weekend and play around with antique photoshop. 🙂
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PowerBook 165c (Back in the 90’s…)
This morning’s bit of computer wizardry was bringing an Apple Powerbook 165c back to life.
System 7.1, circa 1992… The first Macintosh OS you actually had to purchase. The interesting thing with the 165c is it was the very first laptop with a 256 color display, and said display is a 9 inch 640×400 passive LCD.
As an aside, making a laptop with bezels this large here in 2020 would be a war crime.
This 165c has 8MB of ram and a 120MB HD (That’s megabytes — the average photo out of a modern iPhone is a bit less than 5MB, so you can fit about 25 photos on this drive). And the HD still works, which is kind of amazing for being a 27 year old moving part.
In 1993 when these came out they were around $3400, which is roughly $6000 in today’s money — and that’s pretty expensive no matter what era you’re from.
This one needed a diode replaced on the mainboard, which with equipment this old is an easy fix… Said diode is actually visible without a magnifying glass and can be reworked with a standard soldering iron.
Once it was working I fired up Crystal Caliburn on it for fun…
Mmmm… Electronic Pinball. -
PowerMac 3,6
Today’s ‘nothing better to do’ project was reviving an old dual-G4 tower.
Absolutely original dual 867Mhz G4 with the Nvidia GeForce4 MX video, 2Gigs of ram, and 60Gig HD it came with. Running OS X 10.3.2. It’s always interesting to me just how small and snappy old operating systems were. This machine is basically a pocket calculator with less storage space than a $20 USB key, and OS-wise it feels a lot faster than my bleeding-edge MacBook Pro…
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Special Project…
I’ve got a bit of a special project coming up in the next week or two. Nothing work related, this one is a personal project and it requires these:
OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5. 
I have another boxed 10.5 set with the “New Version 10.5.4” sticker on the front. You could say I’ve been doing the Mac thing for a while… I have actual boxed copies of operating systems going back to System 7, which was early 90’s and ran on my Quadra 800…
10.3 is what came on the Special Project.
10.4 is notable for still being able to run OS9 and associated applications, which was lost in 10.5.
10.5 is the last official version of OS X that will run on my Special Project.
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VBox is a time machine…
On and off for a week now I’ve been attempting to create a Virtual Box VDI from an old set of Norton Ghost CDs I created back in 2003 — mostly for the entertainment value of it.
Tonight, I was successful.
Right where I left it on August 7th, 2003. It’s interesting to have a fully functional “moment in time” of an evening seventeen years ago… So much of my online life back then was MP3s, MSN Messenger, and Alfandria/FurryMuck.
A few things didn’t work quite right:
- Norton SystemWorks 2003 was mad because my subscription apparently ended in 2004.
- The MSN Messenger service simply doesn’t exist anymore so the client was convinced there was a firewall preventing it from reaching the servers.
- My SimpleMU bookmarks no longer work because the servers have moved.
- And Outlook tried to check my email at Comcast and got notification that my account didn’t exist.
But some things still surprisingly worked like a champ… Like, eMule fired right up, found servers, and wanted to resume the torrent of an album I didn’t finish 17 years ago. Ad-Aware 6 automatically did a scan on boot. And Mad At Gravity started playing when I clicked play on WinAmp…
There’s also all of the odd bits of data; old roleplaying game plot lines and hastily jotted story notes, half finished artwork in the ‘recent’ section of Photoshop 7, and pieces of websites I was working on in NetObjects Fusion.
Ahh reminicence.
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rihahn.com
My first “personal” website went online in January of 1996, and was hosted by dimensional.com here in Denver. It was really just a tech demo and advertisement for my web design services…
Having a mix of programming and artistic skill back then was actually hard to find and turned out to be pretty marketable, and I sort of fell into the trade by accident. Between 1994 and 1996 I’d done several site designs for companies around the Denver Metro area and was pondering making a full-time job of it.
The Internet in the 90’s was all about bevels and drop shadows. In March of ’97 I created my first non-business related personal site using my Ri’Hahn moniker. It was pretty basic as I’ve never been one for tooting my own horn, and was still hosted at dimensional.com…
I had to censor my actual name… The Internet used to be pretty innocent just like we used to have phonebooks. Later, after moving to Virginia in 1997 I fired up my first personal domain, rihahn.com, in 1999. It was more or less done for the grins and giggles as I had a T1 running into my bedroom, lots of hardware laying around, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.
The earliest version of the site code that I still have. This is the 4th version of the site from March 2000. This page is actually pretty complicated for the day; it’s made of a dozen images very precisely positioned to create what looks like a single image. This was to make the page look ‘active’ on a 28.8kbps modem while it was loading… A static image this size would result in a blank page for however long it took to download the entire image — around 10-15 seconds. But all of the smaller images would start loading at once and at least show that something was happening.
The JavaScript I wrote to run this page no longer runs in modern browsers for some reason, but there are mouseover effects and click animations on the buttons as well — also impossible to do on a static image.
The boxes on the lower right are from the non-existent visitor counter that has long since gone the way of the dodo. It would normally be horizontal numbers and the site was apparently in the 6-digits of visitors by early 2000.
Anyways, I used rihahn.com as both a personal website and a toy to play with rapidly evolving web technologies through 2002 when, due to a series of unfortunate complications with “real life”, the registration for the domain was dropped.
rihahn.com was quickly picked up by another registrar and was handed off from owner to owner over the next eighteen years.
I would periodically check and see if it was available again just for old time’s sake, but a six-letter domain with a clean registration history from before the Y2K bug is a pretty hot commodity.
In September I noticed that the current owner in Germany hadn’t updated their site in a long time, and decided to check on the domain registration. rihahn.com was in an expired hold for 30 days, after which if the owner didn’t pay for it it would go into a pending delete status for 5-6 days, and then would become available again.
I whipped up a script that would check the domain status once per minute and if the status changed would then run an Automator script in Safari on the GoDaddy site to register the domain… I kicked off the script in the 4th day of the pending delete status, and five days ago I became the owner of my old domain once again. 🙂
Currently the domain is just receiving emails, but eventually I’ll set up a web server and put up another personal website on it.
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PowerMac 8,1 (The things I do to recover old email…)
For my mono-no aware project I’ve been sifting though terabytes of archived data, searching for times and dates to try and build a timeline of the past.
Part of this has been looking through old emails — some of which date back to the invention of email and usually require data conversion as the app that created them hasn’t existed for a decade or more…
Once such application is Microsoft’s “Entourage”, an email app that came with office:mac back in the early 2000’s and which uses a no longer supported database to store email.
I used Entourage ages ago and archived the databases with my routine backups, but nothing will open them these days.
Luckily, I have a lot of antique hardware and software sitting around for just such situations:
A 1.8Ghz G5 iMac installing Office:Mac 2008. Yesterday I set up a 1.8Ghz G5 iMac with OS X 10.5 so that I could install Office:Mac 2008. See, the 2008 version of Entourage will both read the old Entourage 2001 databases and export them as universal .mbox format. So now I have easily importable archives of email from twenty years ago.
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It’s birthday computer time!
Just got back from Microcenter, and the computer this time is made with:
- A Corsair Carbide 400C white case
- Asus Z270 Max IX Code MB
- I7-7700K
- Corsair Hydro H100i V2 AIO liquid cooling
- Samsung 512G 960Pro NVME M.2 SSD
The rest of the parts used will be transplants from my old gaming rig – like the Titan-X and the Corsiar ram.
Should be awesome!
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The Nvidia Titan-X was released…
About $1300 later and I have the world’s fastest (this week) video card on the way…
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The Command Center
As they do every year, the folks in chat were showing off pictures of their computers and desks in a “rate my space” sort of thing – and I played along…
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Game testing…
I’ve made mention a few times here on ye olde journal that I used to be fairly big in the games arena. We dont really do much with the games industry these days here at work, mostly because there isn’t as much testing anymore… No need to hit QA really hard before gold master when you can just push a patch for the game they downloaded anyway.
Anyway, have some history!
Some X-Box debug and dev kits, and some Game Cube dev boxes. 
A big pile of Nintendo DS handhelds and some Nintendo Wii debug and dev kits. There’s a “Nitro” DS emulator there on the bottom shelf. 
A herd of PS2 test kits and some PSP dev kits. 
PS3 test kits. Fun fact: Poorly optimized PS3 games can cause the dev kit to pull about 12 amps – we popped a lot of breakers way back when… 
Xbox 360 test and dev kits. -
Merry Christmas to me…
Just got back from Microcenter with the parts to build myself a PC-based gaming rig…
- Corsair case and dual 140mm AIO liquid cooler
- i7 – 5820K on a MSI X99S Gaming 7 System Board
- 4x 4G Corsair DDR4-2666 DIMMS
- 250GB SSD
- 2TB 7200 RPM HD
- Blu-ray / DVD±R / ±RW Drive
- AMD R9-290X card
- and a 1000 Watt Corsair RM1000 PSU
- Some Corsair purple 140mm fans
$2400 in parts… But I plan to run Second Life at 30fps come hell or high water!
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This year’s birthday Mac is…
I tend to buy a new Mac on my birthday, and this year is no different… Though this year it came from Microcenter versus the Apple Store.
17″ MacBook Pro, 2.3Ghz I7, 4Gigs of ram, 750G HD.
While I was at Microcenter I picked up 16Gigs of ram and a 256G Samsung 840 SSD to put into the new laptop. Apple ram and drives are simply too expensive and I can get better parts cheaper and just install them myself.
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My office…
Everyone in chat was showing off their computer space, and I played along.
Here’s where I run the universe for all of the Roanoak players.
Ahh, my trusty iMac. And on the left end of the desk is all of the 501(c)3 paperwork I’m working on.
My one year lease here was up on the first, but I’m only extending it for two months because I’ve got a new place lined up that will be pretty special – but it won’t be ready until the end of next month…
Oh, and Zeze will be moving in with me, as will Fury from Luskwood on SL (who is also an employee at work). Kalira is moving to Longmont with her harem and I think Zeze will finally be moving on from that sordid tale…
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More Apple Tomfoolery
I’ve always been a big fan of Apple machines – probably my constant desire to root for the underdog mixed with a love for Unix.
Anyway, with my birthday fast approaching, today I drove over to the Apple Store in Park Meadows and picked up a new 27″ iMac. 3.4Ghz quad-core CPU, 8gigs of ram, a 1TB “Fusion Drive” (256G SSD, 750G HD), and a GTX 680MX video card.
It’s huge on my desk – but I really like it.
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Apples and Unicorns
As a bit of a belated birthday present to myself, this afternoon I jumped back into the Apple realm with the purchase of a brand new 15.4″ Macbook Pro. It’s the 2.2Ghz i7 with 4Gigs of ram and a 750G HD.
It’s pretty slick, and will work well for road trips!
I picked it up at the Apple Store in Park Meadows, which is kind of an interesting shopping experience.