GOOD OL' WALL STREET POWERBOOK G3

In recent days, I played around with some old computers I have in my attic and elsewhere.  Today I spent some time with my first Mac computer, a Macintosh Powerbook G3, aka Wall Street.  I re-learned so many things I need to write this down somewhere easily accessible, maybe the general public can find some useful info, too.

I got the old Powerbook with Mac OS 9.x and now it runs some early version of OS X.  I found the preference setting to reboot into OS 9 but then it seems to be stuck when I tried to locate the equivalent option to reboot into OS X.  Second time around booting into OS 9 I gave Startup Disk some extra time to crunch the hard drive to present the OS X boot folder.  Whew!  Not that I plan to do anything useful with it.

How did we get by back in those dark days!?  A laptop with no WiFi?!  No freedom of movement, just tied to whatever desk that has an Ethernet cord connected to the router!  The optical drive was just a CD-R, I thought it was DVD!  No wonder there was no DVD Player application in the computer.  Still, when I inserted a regular music CD nothing happened.  No icon for the disc, iTunes didn't see it as a source.  Maybe back then OS X or 9 didn't support importing of music?  Who knows, but I am not going to sweat it, for now.

It was my first Mac and I spent much time and energy to expand it. I think it came with a removable battery and a removable optical drive.  A little knob at the front left and right corners is used to eject the whole unit.  On the left bay I added a SuperDisk removable drive from VST Technologies, with capacity of 120 MB!  The battle between Iomega Zip and Bernoulli whatever-its-name was still going on and the max capacity at the time was 100 MB.  So VST outdid those guys by 20 MB, except that it never caught on.  I have just one of those 120 MB disk.  The drive is capable of reading 3.5" floppy disks, woohoo!  I just test wrote a file to some random floppy that I still have.  I have this crazy idea that someday someone important will offer me a huge sum of money to get something off a floppy disk.  With this laptop, I can read the disk but then what?  It has a PCMCIA slot and I have a PC-card adapter to add two high-speed USB 2.0 ports, alas when I connected a 128 MB flash to it nothing happened.  (I was mindful to not use some flash drive with capacity of GBs in case the old OS doesn't recognize such high capacity.)  Maybe I would need additional driver.  Maybe the USB ports are for mice and such only.  I suppose worst-case scenario I can connect the laptop to an Ethernet network and transfer files via the network.

What a trip down memory lane!

Heartbreak Hardware - My First Mac, A Picture Gallery

My first Mac, a PowerBook G3 "Wall Street", shown with a CD for size comparison. When closed and facing the user, the Apple logo on the case is right-side up, but when the user opens it up for use, the logo is upside down. Later generations of the PB and MacBooks have the logo upside down when not in use but right-side up when in use.

The many ports available for the Mac back then - audio, ADB, Ethernet, SCSI, VGA, S-Video. I remember buying a $100 specialized printer cable so I could use the PB G3 with an HP LaserJet 4L, which back then only had parallel port.

Side view of the PB G3 opened at about 45 degrees.

The PB G3 opened at past 90 degrees.

The PB G3 can lie flat on its back. I remember laying in bed using the computer in this position. It was not comfortable.

The PB G3 up close. "Macintosh PowerBook G3", with the rainbow Apple logo, too.

Compared to today's unibody Macbook, the touchpad is so tiny. A U.S. penny takes up most of the center of the pad!

Like a first child, the PB G3 was showered with expansions. Shown here are USB and FireWire expansion PCMIA cards plus the VST Superdrive, which can read both its own 120-MB disks and standard floppy disks. Slow, but usable.

For nostalgia purpose, the phone jack is also shown. How did I get anything done back then without broadband access?

The PowerBook G3 still boots up as long as it is connected to AC power. The original battery then the replacement one both died.

It was able to run OS X but it was painful. I didn't upgrade it much.

PowerBook G3 "Wall Street"

As a Mac geek, it makes perfect sense for me to write about my first Mac computer as the first entry in the Heartbreak Hardware series. It was 1997 or 1998, I was recently married and living with the in-laws in Brooklyn, space was tight. I had a 486 Packard Bell running on Windoze 95, but I had no place in my room to keep it so it was put in the basement. It was accessible but I just had to make the trip from my room from the second floor to the basement. It did not help that the PeeCee, like the typical machine back then, and even now, took forever to boot up. I am sure there were instances when just as the PeeCee was ready for use, it was dinner time and I had to turn off the computer then made the trip back upstair. I also had an Amiga 3000 but without the ability to get online I left it at my parents' home in Queens. Perhaps the A3000 can be written about in a future Heartbreak Hardware article.

Twelve years ago, I had no problem recalling the specs on the PowerBook G3. These days, I only remember that it is a Wall Street model. It still works so I now know that it runs at 266 MHz. It has 530 MB of RAM but I know that is not the original. I do remember dropping it off at Tekserv to have the memory upgraded. When the hard drive died, I got a 12-GB replacement drive from Other World Computing and did the change myself. I love how the keyboard comes off easily to grant access to the hard drive. Hot-swapping was, and still is, a great feature on the PB G3. The default hot-swappable items are the battery on the left and the CD-ROM drive on the right. The Removable Media War at the time involved everyone trying to unseat Iomega's Zip drive. I sided with "everyone" and bought the hot-swappable 120-MB SuperDisk from Imation. (On the drive itself, the maker is identified as VST Technologies). One major selling point for the SuperDisk was the it could do double duty as a floppy disk drive. It was a slooow disk drive but it got the job done. Eventually, I ended up with a Zip 250 USB external drive.

Like having a first child, I bought many extra hardware for the PB G3. In no particular order, they included: a PC Card USB adapter; a PC Card Firewire adapter; a Firewire CD-RW burner that was half the size of the PB G3 itself; a $99 special cable to connect the PB G3's ADB printer port to the parallel port on an HP LJ 4L; a $50 SCSI cable, bought from DataVision (Fifth Ave. and 39th Street) so I could use the 1-GB Jaz drive I originally bought for use with the 486 Packard Bell PeeCee. The battery had to be replaced then even the second battery died.

On the software front, I upgraded the OS once to 9.2.2 and a few times in OS X. Eudora Light was my email client, Roxio burnt backup CDs or CD-RWs for me, and I tried out many web browsers, including Netscape Navigator and Camino.

Some time in 2001, possibly with great influence by OS X's ever-greater demands, I got a domed iMac and the PowerBook G3 finally got retired. Four years of life is a long duration in computer time.