Retro laptopping

Had a look through the stack of old laptops I seem to have accumulated and had a play with some of them and set aside others for scrapping.

First was a PowerBook 540. Now this was a truly kickass machine in it's time - 68040 processors, stereo speakers, built-in Ethernet, and they were also the first ever laptops with trackpads. They also looked good with a curvy swooping case. Mine has 12mb RAM, a 250mb hard drive, a mono TFT screen and runs Mac OS 8.1. It still works fine, but the screen has a fault where it'll start to fade from the corners inward, which is really weird. After about an hour or so, it's basically unusable. With the built in Ethernet, it can browse the Internet, but it is really very slow. My blog took about a minute to load and looked a bit weird.

After that, I hacked up a Toshiba power supply and used it to fire up an old Tadpole SPARCbook 2. Now this truly is an orphaned machine, I've never seen another one except in a museum. Tadpole built laptop equivalents of high-end Sun Unix workstations in the 90's, and this is one of the very earliest. It has a 40mhz SPARC processor, 32mb RAM, a colour TFT screen and I'm guessing a 250mb SCSI hard drive and probably cost a vast sum when it was new. While it does still power up and drops into the ROM monitor, it won't boot and the display constantly rolls, as though it's lost vertical hold. I did discover after a bit of research that it needs 18v rather than the 15v from the Toshiba PSU, but a brief test with a 19v Fujitsu PSU did the same thing.

There is very little useful information about this machine on the Internet, and the chances of getting it running again are slim. It needs a special version of SunOS to install and boot from and the SCSI connector is non-standard. Theoretically it would be possible to install it via a network boot, but with the display problem, it's not worth trying to hunt down the necessary software. Shame really, it's built like a tank, and it's certainly something different and it would be fun to play with old-school Unix. But it's just too different from a normal SPARC machine - the later SPARCbook 3 was much more like a normal Sun machine and is therefore easier to get running.

Finally I tried my PowerBook 180, an older machine than the 540. I've always had a soft spot for the 1x0 PowerBooks, being big and square. This one has the maximum 14mb RAM and a 33mhz 68030. But this time it wouldn't start for some reason. It showed a cursor which moved, but didn't want to load the OS. Annoying. I'd like to get it running as is pretty clean and has the weirdness of a SCSI-Ethernet adaptor.

I once again admired the sleek beauty of an early titanium PowerBook G4 and lamented the dead motherboard which prevents it being used. It is otherwise intact, although I stole the keytops for my iBook, and the hard drive is long gone. But the motherboard is truly fried and I can't find a cheap enough replacement to justify it, especially as the 512mb RAM in it is fried too.

I nearly started stripping the Proliant today, but I just couldn't be arsed. It's so big and heavy. It needs to go though and so does a lot of other crap. There's a big all-in-one Power Mac 5500/275 which I'd bin, except it's the black model which is apparently rare. There's a LOT of other crap that can go though.