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Tag: PowerBook165c

  • BBSing

    For the sheer Back-To-The-Future-Ness of it, I’ve spent some time over the last few days working out how to get 20th century analog to work with 21st century digital.

    See, back in the 80’s and 90’s pretty much everything was analog – especially the way we talked to other people. Radio, TV, the telephone, and even our computer modems used analog signals. But these days there’s pretty much no such thing as analog anything, let alone a phone line, which makes using a 90’s modem a bit of an exercise in haxx0ring reality…

    For example, here at work my phone system uses a VOIP-based digital PBX to route calls around internally, and both the phones and the voice transport are digital. If someone places a call outside the building, the call is routed over a fiber connection to CenturyLink using what is essentially a sub-channel of the several gigabit connection into the building. From there the call is routed over the Internet to some other provider before being converted back to analog voice at someone else’s phone.

    This works great for people, who have limited perceptual acoustic capability, but modems use a lot more of the audible spectrum to do their thing… Which is what all of that electronic screeching is about when modems and fax machines connect to each other; they are working out how bad the phone line is and how much acoustic space they have to talk to each other.

    So, given all of this I’ve been teaching my PBX that analog isn’t a bad thing by working out a custom codec (basically an analog to digital sound converter) and some special rules for the timings and encapsulation used to turn modem screeching into 1s and 0s for the Internet.

    And today I was successful in making an end-to-end modem connection to a friend’s BBS using ‘period’ hardware…

    Said BBS has been running since 1992, I’ve had an account on it since 1993, and I still have hardware that I used in 1994 – so as something of a 30th anniversary thing I set my wayback machine to the early 90’s and made a phone call.

    To do this took a surprising amount of work…

    First, I had to get my circa 1994 Powerbook 165c working, which required replacing some capacitors in the backlight assembly. Then I had to bodge a serial cable that converted from 1994 Apple 8-pin to regular 25-pin. Then I had to get a decent BBS terminal application onto the 165c.

    This software installation required two additional computers of various ages and several operating systems to move data from the present-day internet back in time to 1994…

    See, the 165c uses antiquated file systems based on what density and how many sides the 3.5″ floppy you stuck in it happens to have – while my M1 Max laptop has no idea what a floppy is, let alone what MFS or HFS is.

    So, the solution was to use my recently repaired G5 iMac as the intermediary, as it can read USB2 flash storage as well as operate a USB floppy drive, and it can still run OS9, which can read and write HFS on 1.44M floppies.

    So the process is simple:

    1. on the M1 laptop go to an internet archive of ancient Motorola 68K Apple software
    2. download “Black Night” (an ancient ANSI BBS terminal application) as a .SIT (Stuffit) archive
    3. put that onto a USB2 flash drive via a thunderbolt-to-USB adapter
    4. plug USB2 flash drive into the G5
    5. move the stuffit archive to the desktop
    6. fire up the OS9 compatibility layer in OSX 10.3.6
    7. decompress the .SIT archive
    8. copy resultant installer to a floppy I formatted in the 165c
    9. put floppy into the 165c
    10. and install software.

    See? Simple.

    How2Install stuff on a 165c in 2022… The process goes right to left.

    From here it was just a matter of configuring Black Night to use my old USR V.everything modem, which is using the DB-25 to Apple cable and the modified modem-friendly port on my PBX to call a BBS across town…

    Connecting at 12,000 baud over several back and forth A/D-D/A conversions – not bad!

    Pardon the HVAC noise in the background; my office has some impressive forced ventilation because I routinely let the magic smoke out of things as part of my day-to-day duties. 🙂

    And a photo for posterity

    I’d not been on EOTD in a couple of years, so it took some time to catch up on my ‘e-mail’ and the forums, but it’s nice to see that the system still gets some use… I replied to a bunch of folks going back a year or so, and now I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get a reply. 🙂

    Listening to "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies" by Gunship

  • 165c

    A long time ago, in the before-times of early 1994, I bought myself a laptop that would change everything…

    The Apple Macintosh PowerBook 165c had come out in February 1993 and was the first laptop to have a 256 color display. It looked like nothing else on the market; it was simultaneously very 80’s and very 21st century – and was something of a dream machine for computer nerds.

    I really, really wanted one… But they were about $3400 in 1993, or almost $7000 in today’s money.

    In early ’94 I was using some generic 486DX-33 PC as my home computer and I had a Toshiba “Satellite” T1800 that I used when I was away from home – but what I really wanted was that PowerBook.

    So, for my birthday in 1994 I managed to find a 165c for the low, low price of $2400 and after selling the Toshiba acquired it. It had 4 megs of ram, an 80meg SCSI HD, a 33Mhz 68030 CPU, and that amazing 8.9″ 640×400 color LCD all housed in a remarkably tiny box – and I was over the moon to have it!

    And, as another testament to just how long Apple stuff will last – it looks a bit like this:

    The 165c in all of its grey plastic and rainbow apple glory

    Mmmm – trackball. And two buttons! (a rarity for Apple products)

    The 165c currently runs Apple’s System 7.1 from the built-in 80meg SCSI HD…

    Back in the day I primarily used the 165c as a writing tool, so it had things like Office 3.0 and Norton Utilities on it. But I also had a few games on it, like the amazing pinball simulation “Crystal Caliburn”…

    The 165c was the first Mac I personally owned (I’d used a Macintosh Plus for a year or so back in ’87, but it wasn’t mine), and it was a big part of my life-long appreciation of the brand and its “Think Different” moniker.

    About a year after acquiring the 165c I picked up a PowerMac 8100/100 which was instrumental in my graphic design work at the time, and somewhat cemented my use of the Macintosh platform to this very day…

    1993 68030 on the left, 2022 M1 Max on the right – and almost 30 years between them.

    Listening to "I Still Believe" by The Call

  • 1990 – 2020

    1990’s PowerBook 165c, 2000’s PowerBook G4, 2010’s MacBook, 2020’s MacBook Air

    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.

  • 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.