Retrocomputing Enthusiast Explores 28-Year-Old Powerbook G3: 'Apple's Hope For Redemption'

Long-time Slashdot reader Shayde once restored a 1986 DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, and even ran Turbo Pascal on a 40-year-old Apple II clone.

Now he's exploring a 27-year-old Macintosh PowerBook G3 — with 64 megabytes memory and 4 gigabytes of disk space. 'The year is 1997, and Apple is in big trouble.' (Apple's market share had dropped from 16% in 1980 to somewhere below 4%...)

Turns out this was one of the first machines able to run OS X, and was built during the transition period for Apple after Steve Jobs came back in to rescue the company from bankruptcy.

It's clearly old technology. There's even a SCSI connector, PCMCIA sockets, a modem port for your phone/landline cable, and a CD-ROM drive. There's also Apple's proprietary ports for LocalTalk and an Apple Desktop Bus port ('used for keyboards, mice, and stuff like that'). And its lithium-ion batteries 'were meant to be replaced and moved around, so you could carry spare batteries with you.'

So what's it like using a 27-year-old laptop? 'The first thing I had to note was this thing weighs a ton! This thing could be used as a projectile weapon! I can't imagine hauling these things around doing business...' And it's a good thing it had vents, because 'This thing runs hot!' (The moment he plugs it in he can hear its ancient fan running...) It seems to take more than two minutes to boot up. ('The drive is rattling away...') But soon he's looking at a glorious desktop from 1998 desktop. ('Applications installed... Oh look! Adobe Acrobat Reader! I betcha that's going to need an update...')

After plugging in a network cable, a pop-up prompts him to 'Set up your.Mac membership.' ('I have so little interest in doing this.') He does find an old version of Safari, but it refuses to launch-- though 'While puttering around in the application folder, I did notice that we had Internet Explorer installed. But that pretty much went as well as expected.' In the end it seems like he ends up 'on the network, but we have no browser.' Although at least he does find a Terminal program — and successfully pings Google.

The thing that would drive me crazy is when opening the laptop, Apple's logo is upside-down!

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