The Great Old PowerBook 100 and the Death of the PowerBook Name
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We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
My first portable computer was a PowerBook 100. Coincidentally, it was
Apple's first true laptop as well - the PB 100 ties for honors as
the first ever PowerBook along with the PowerBook 140 and 170, all introduced on October 21,
1991.
I'm writing about my PB 100 today because Apple is retiring the
PowerBook name. They supposedly changed the name because the
MacBook Pro is not powered
by a PowerPC chip - but early PowerBooks weren't either. My
PB 100 has a Motorola 68HC000 CPU running at 16 MHz.
The PowerBook 100 replaced the Macintosh Portable which was too big
to carry around and really didn't look like any of today's laptops.
It was one of the first computers anywhere to not have a built-in
floppy drive (like the
iMac).
I also miss the trackballs that Apple used to build into
PowerBooks.
The story
behind my PB 100 is a common one. I got my PowerBook 100 back in
1996, when I traded a Sony Portable CD player, a set of Aiwa
headphones, and $100 to a girl who attended my middle school. My
PowerBook 100 has a 20 MB hard drive, a non-working battery, and a
power brick.
The battery was a fairly heavy lead-acid battery, similar to the
one you have in your car, and I eventually threw mine out.
I would transfer files to my PB 100 using AppleTalk. A few years
later I got a SCSI adapter so I could connect an external hard
drive to it.
Once I got my PB 100, I felt like I was at the top of the world.
I do admit that it was a slow machine and crashed with almost
anything. The only really good thing was that it was maxed out in
RAM, and I ran a few games in Mac OS 7.1.
I upgraded to a PowerBook 145
in 1998 and really didn't use the PB 100 very much after that.
My PB 100 eventually died when the back and white display
started to have problems. I recently tried to get it working again
in order to turn it into a Web server, because I have never heard
of anyone using one as a Web server. But I couldn't get it to boot,
so it just sits on my bookshelf. I'm including a picture of it next
to my TiBook.
Stick With It
In my opinion, Apple should not do away with the PowerBook name.
The word "power" inspires even slow machines to think they can do
anything. "PowerBook" will keep going strong forever in my world.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
The story
behind my PB 100 is a common one. I got my PowerBook 100 back in
1996, when I traded a Sony Portable CD player, a set of Aiwa
headphones, and $100 to a girl who attended my middle school. My
PowerBook 100 has a 20 MB hard drive, a non-working battery, and a
power brick.