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Tag: PowerBookG4

  • The Apple “G-Machine” trifecta

    Earlier today I posted some photos of my G5 iMac, so I figured I should show off the rest of my “G” collection…

    Before the G5 there was the aptly named G4…

    PowerBook G4 17″ 1.33Ghz – CD case for scale

    I’ve actually had three of these over the years… The first I picked up off the shelf at the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner Virginia on February 25th, 2004 for about $3500. Unfortunately the first one had a screen defect, so Apple swapped it out for me and that became number 2.

    I used the second one until October 1st, 2004 – shortly after I started at where I currently work and needed a PC to do PC things with. I sold it to finance the PC, and a few months later bought the G5 iMac.

    The above G4 PowerBook I picked up in October of 2020 just to have one again. Shortly after I got it I replaced everything in it with new old-stock parts, swapped the HD for an SSD, and maxed out the ram.

    I fire it up a couple of times a month to do writing, old use old PhotoShop, or putter around in Garage Band – just like I used to.

    Before the G4 was the similarly named “G3”, and I have one of those too…

    PowerBook G3 “Pismo” 400Mhz

    I’ve had two of these over the years…

    The first was a G3 “Wallstreet” I picked up in 1998, about a year after moving to Virginia the first time. The Wallstreet was essentially my primary computer until I replaced it with the G3 “Pismo” in February of 2000.

    The Pismo these days is maxed on ram, 1 whole gigabyte, and runs an SSD that holds OS 9.2.2 in one partition, and the OSX public beta in the other… I imaged the drive as I had it right after installing the OSX public beta, and that’s what I put back on it when needed.

    The Pismo is essentially a time machine I use to transport myself back to the better days of the late 90’s. For example, it connects to a BBS I’ve been using since 1993…

    bbs.eotd.com / 303-679-0161

    As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m very into self-contained machines and I generally have the bleeding-edge laptop for {current year}… I think it’s a function of moving so much over the years; it’s just easier to toss a laptop into a case and go when required.

    Prior to the G3 Wallstreet I used a PowerMac 6500/225 which a PowerPC 603e machine – or a “G2”, and I had an 8100/100 back in 1995, which is a PowerPC 601 – or a “G1”. I don’t currently have an either of those because they’re towers and require a separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor – and a lot of space.

    And before the 8100/100 I had a PowerBook 165c which I posted about a few days ago. And while it’s not a “G” machine, it was the machine that started it all for me back in 1994.

    Listening to "Neon Blood" by Kalax

  • G4

    Purely for the entertainment value, today I’m installing weird operating systems on my 17-inch 1.33Ghz PowerBook G4.

    I briefly had MorphOS, the AmigaOS-alike offering, installed. I installed MorphOS via the last burnable DVD I had handy, so it was pretty easy to install; insert DVD, reboot, hold down alt, choose DVD, boot.

    MorphOS looks nice, but doesn’t run well enough to warrant spending the money for a license.

    Anyway, not having any more 5.25″ coasters handy everything else would need to be installed via USB – which on older hardware can require some deep magic… But fear not, I happen to have been there when the deep magic was created.

    For example, you have to know that any USB stick you use has to be USB2. USB3 sticks simply won’t work. You also need to know your way around Open Firmware, which is the unix-esque boot environment on stranger hardware.

    The next OS to be installed was Adélie Linux, which professes to be both PowerPC native and lightweight enough for a twenty year old machine.

    To get Adélie Linux onto USB was a bit of an adventure in itself, mostly because my desktop is a bleeding edge Apple M1 running “Monterey”, the latest Apple OS… An OS where Apple seems to have decided no one needs to burn ISOs anymore.

    So, after some experimentation here’s the method for booting a G4 off of an ISO burned to USB…

    1. Format the USB as FAT (not 32) with a GUID partition map.
    2. Get a copy of Balena Etcher and use it to spool the ISO to the USB stick.
    3. Stick the USB into the G4 (USB port closest to the user on the right side) and turn it on
    4. Hold down cmd-option-O-F to boot into open firmware.

    Open Firmware harkens back to days when you needed to know things like hardware addresses for things you stuck into your computer, so it’s a bit archaic – but that makes it interesting!

    1. Type dev usb0 ls – you’ve just told Open Firmware that you would like to look at USB0, and then asked for a listing of the stuff attached to USB0.
    2. This should return /disk@1 – so there’s a disk residing on the USB0 bus – neat!
    3. Now type dev disk@1 – now you told Open Firmware that you would like to look at the disk residing at USB0.
    4. Now type pwd – this asks Open Firmware to display the Path Within Device-tree to the thing you’re looking at.
    5. This should return: /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1 – this is the literal hardware path, so the PCI bus residing at f2000000 has a USB bus with a few ports, and USB port 1B has a disk image attached to it. Simple, right?
    6. Now for the moment of truth. Type boot /pci@f2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1:,\\:tbxi and hit enter – “\\:tbxi” basically tells Open Firmware that whatever bootable volume is at this address is ‘blessed’ and can be loaded.
    7. The system will attempt to boot the image on the USB stick.

    Now this information is probably useful to all of about a dozen people on the planet, but you never know. And it’s good mental exercise for me to dredge up all of this old useless information on occasion. 🙂

    Anyway, Adélie Linux never ran quite right; the desktop appeared, but interacting with it just resulted in the flickers of menus and it was pretty much unusuable.

    I went through the installs of a few other *nix distros that had a PPC variant, and eventually landed on MintPPC which seems to run well enough to be worth my time fixing all of the little driver issues.

    It’s a hobby…

    Listening to "The Touch" by Stan Bush

  • PowerBook 5,3 (Special Project Update)

    My PowerBook G4 has been under the proverbial knife getting all of the worn parts replaced with new old-stock parts — which is a nice thing about the older laptops; user serviceable parts inside.

    The G4 now has a new DC-in and left-side USB board, a new NVRAM battery and right-side USB board, a new bluetooth module, new battery to charge controller harness, a new battery, new 65w charger brick, and a new 8x “superdrive”.

    Older 4x superdrive removed (the empty spot with the writing on it)

    NOS 8x drive foreground and original 4x drive. The new M1 MacBook Air is in the background.

    NOS NVRAM battery and USB board installed. There’s two Panasonic lithium coin cells under the plastic.

    Old DC-in board removed – check out the scoring on the barrel connector. The ambient light sensor is in the clear plastic at the top of the board.

    NOS DC-in board in place, as well as the NOS bluetooth module (small board on top of the speaker housing)

    Once everything was done I buttoned her back up, ran the hardware checks to make sure everything was functional, and then re-installed OS X 10.5.8 to test the new drive.

    Everything seems to be working fine.

    The new charging system works — the light on the DC in from the wall wart now works and the battery took a full charge and tested to a 2.5 hour run time (back in the early aughts 2 hours was pretty good for a desktop replacement machine). And the system keeps time now when it’s unplugged… Bonus.

    All in all, I’m fairly happy with how it all went. And the G4 is now pretty much new. 🙂

  • 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.

  • Historypeats…

    Can you even imagine Apple computers without Intel CPUs in them? We’re definitely living in the future or something.

  • 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. 🙂

  • Movies and Macs

    Just got back from seeing “Hellboy”… It’s a pretty fun romp with all of the prerequisites for a good SciFi flick including some really nice special effects

    We, Zeze and I, went to a new theater up in Woodbridge at the Potomac Mills Mall which was really nice. It’s actually unusual to find a theater anymore that has both a nice screen and a working sound system… Of course the reason we were there is a tale in and of itself…

    See, last night I set up my laptop and got this white line though the screen which is usually indicative of a blown transistor… Something that is expensive to fix requiring the replacement of the screen.

    After backing up all of my data and booting off of the OSX install CD, the line went away and stayed gone for the rest of the night. (odd)

    So, thinking that my mystery line might have been caused by OS corruption, I reloaded everything… Today at work it popped back up for a few seconds and vanished again. Ok, so it’s time to get the laptop swapped out…

    Of course it does this exactly four days after the CompUSA warranty ends, but Apple has a great warranty system and it’s not a big deal… Except that I have to send the laptop to Cupertino California for 3-4 weeks…

    Well, Apple also has these big stores all over the US and there just happen to be two of them here in Virginia; so off we go to the mall-city of Tyson’s Corner.

    Now, you hear me go on and on about the number of people living here these days, but nothing I say can prepare a person for the sheer numbers of folks you will run into both on the highway and in a mall. Getting from here to Tyson’s Corner took nearly two hours of creeping though bumper to bumper traffic, then once we made it to the mall it was bumper to bumper people.

    Well, the folks at the Apple Store weren’t exactly sure what the problem is either as it’s sporadic at best, and simply refused to manifest itself again in the presence of a technician, but they logged it and recommended that I remove the 512 megs of RAM that I added. I’m also going to snap a photo of the problem for them…

    And – presto:

    So I guess I’ll close up for the night, I’m heading over to the local theater to see “Home on the Range” tomorrow.

    Hmm, it’s midnight now so I suppose I’ll head off to bed. G’Night out there…

    Nik Kershaw – Wouldn’t It Be Good

  • Wanna go for a drive?

    Flint looks around, “Ummm, where exactly are we?”

    Well, I made it back to Virginia after swearing that I’d never set foot back on this side of the Mississippi River again.

    The new laptop, which replaced the desktop computer that Wolf is now using, is pretty slick: A top-of-the-line Apple G4 Powerbook; the huge one with the 17-inch screen and the 1.33Ghz processor. It rocks.

    And it really is huge… You could entertain all of first class on an airplane with this thing,

    So far it has exceeded all of my expectations both hardware and OS wise, but unfortunately there isn’t much of a standard yet for software companies and that makes installing each piece of software an adventure.

    Speaking of OS, OS-X is really, really cool if you’re a nerd at heart as its BSD flavored unix with a very useable interface placed on it.

    Ok, enough about the laptop.

    Let’s see, what else? Oh, the debacle regarding my driver’s license is pretty harrowing…

    See, seven years ago in Alexandria Virginia (the association center of the universe) I was driving a borrowed car and got pulled over by a bored officer that was guarding a school cross walk because the inspection on the car was expired. During this it was discovered that my Colorado driver’s license had also expired by three days and that I was technically driving without a license, so Mr. Irate “I’ve been busted to guarding a crosswalk” doesn’t bother with a warning, seeing as I’d just moved to Virginia a mere week prior, and writes me up for “Driving without an operator’s license.”

    Ok, three days later I’m in possession of a brand new seven year Virginia driver’s license and a week later I take a vacation day and go to court to pay the fine. Everything seems ok right? Wrong…

    About three months later I get pulled over in Rhoadesville because I have a friend’s kids in the car and they’re going ape in the back seat. The officer was just making sure everything was ok, and I come up as having a bench warrant for the violation in Alexandria… He’s pretty cool about it all, stating that they see this sort of thing from Alexandria all the time. He let’s me drop off the kids and drive over to the Rhoadesville police station where we try to sort this out. Apparently Alexandria wants me sent immediately to the station up there (for a traffic violation) and the Rhoadesville officer thinks this is ridiculous and lets me go with my promise that I’ll show up for a new court date.

    Two weeks later I’m back at the Alexandria court house, taking an unpaid day off, to figure out why I’ve been saddled with a $300 fine for “failure to appear” when I have a receipt showing that I had already paid the $200 “NOL” fine. They determine that they cannot verify the signature on the receipt I have and that I need to pay both the $300 FTA charge and the $200 NOL charge again. So I pay the fines again, get all the receipts, and get back to Rhoadesville to get back to work.

    Several months later I get a letter in the mail stating that my license has been suspended due to unpaid fines in Alexandria. This was right before I moved to Baltimore and I decided to ignore it for the immediate future as I had bigger things to worry about. Some length of time later I moved to Connecticut and it was there that I contacted Alexandria in regards to my license. I’m told by the Alexandria police that they cannot find anything regarding me in their database and that I should contact the District Attorney’s office “just in case”.

    The DA’s office tells me that I still had an outstanding $200 fine for NOL and a $300 fine for FTA and that to take care of it I needed to come to the Alexandria courthouse. So once again I take time off from work and drive from Connecticut to Virginia.

    I eventually end up in front of the judge and he starts to look over the paperwork in regards to these charges. He has to call the DA to the stand to try and decipher the ball of worms that my paperwork has become. Eventually he tells me that they’ll have to figure out what happened and re-schedules for a date two weeks in the future… For me that date is just as classes resume at the school I teach at and there is no way I can take those days off. I’m told that it’s basically “my problem” and I can call the day of my court appointment and tell them that I can’t make it, and just take whatever ruling the judge comes up with.

    I call, they decide they can’t tell me anything over the phone, I get pissed off, and decide to just ignore the situation till I get back to Colorado. See, Colorado couldn’t care less what Virginia thinks.

    Well, here I am back in Virginia and I’ve decided to get back into the fight for my driver’s license before it expires at the end of February:

    Monday I went over to the DMV here and was told that I had an unpaid fine of $288.14 and that I couldn’t get my driver’s license renewed till I paid it. So I called Alexandria, used a credit card, and paid it.

    Yesterday I went back to the DMV and was told that I needed a receipt for the payment before I could get my driver’s license.

    Today, Wednesday, I drove up to Alexandria (a 45 minute drive btw) and got a receipt for the payment I made Monday and took that receipt to a DMV office in Alexandria. Once I got though the line there I was told that Because the Social Security Office has my SSN associated with “Bill” and my driver’s license says “William” that I had to drive back to Fredericksburg to the Social Security Office here and have them update my information.

    I get back here and get the Social Security folks to update my entry in the national SSN database and I’m told that it’ll take 10-14 days for it to happen. I tell them that I need it before the end of the month and the nice lady there expedites it for me as well as giving me a typed and signed form to take across the street to the Fredericksburg DMV.

    I run back over to the DMV office where I’m told that the new software that hooks the DMV, Police, SSN, and other government databases together simply will not allow them to go forward with my driver’s license until the SSN database is updated…

    So I’ll have to go back over to the DMV Friday and hope that things have been updated.

    This is what it takes to get a driver’s license in Virginia. And people live here voluntarily.