My first laptop! Watching this video on an 11" Macbook Air is surreal. Did a lot of cool stuff with HyperCard and DoubleHelix, and had a 14.4k internal modem in it for CompuServe, GEnie, and AOL (which was Mac-only back then). Forget what I paid for it new (well over $2000, I'm sure). If I spent that money instead on Apple stock at that time, I'd be sitting pretty right now...
My dad still has this computer - he only stopped using it about a year ago - I used to practice typing on it when I was a kid! It's still downstairs! When he bought this computer back in '92 he got a free bicycle with it which I later inherited about 6 years ago.
Sorry, but it annoys me how much in that video is just plain out wrong or not researched... 8MB harddrive? No hide function until OS X? Don't know what ClarisWorks is? Printer port is the mouse port? SCSI pronounced S.C.S.I. which noone does...
I agree, to many errors for a demonstration video. The harddisk size-haha! The missing hide function I've heard before. Weird how many think that Mac OS X brought everything. In my opinion, the pronunciation of the abbreviation isn’t actually wrong just because hardly no one pronounces it that way, but it’s odd to hear.
the video output in colour you said was mediocre but for back then that was high resolution considering most computers were 640x480 and maxed out at 800x600, at that time
The Mac Portable's battery was not nearly as bad as people seem to think. Yeah you couldn't use the thing while it was charging but this is 1989. It had an insane battery life for the time.
My SO brought one of these home for a couple of months from his Navy contractor job at the time while I was going to architecture school and slogged through Macdraw to produce my first CAD drawings of projects I was working on at the time - I also was in an AutoCAD class. It was primitive af, I had a IICi desktop I was also learning computing on. Still working on MACs doing high-end 3D modeling and rendering for my projects as an architect today.
Found one of these in a car scrap yard and it was in really good condition apart from it missing the ball. My brothers mate decided to ditch it at the floor and smash it completely. Still kills my soul today
First laptop I ever played with - Mom's work PC. Hers still ticks along just fine! Loved playing games on this thing. The constant need to adjust the contrast was a bit maddening though, and I did manage to accidentally delete ClarisWorks from it, sorry mom!
Apple fact: The interrupt button on was a button to press to interrupt the boot up. Also people have some fun with it because when you interrupt the boot up it makes a apple crash sound (depending on which version of Mac OS your using it makes a different sound)
Claris were actually an Apple-aligned software company. They got spun off from Apple with original MacPaint/MacWrite/etc. programs. Roughly the time that Clarisworks 5.0 came out most of their product line (IIRC everything except Filemaker, and they actually changed their name to Filemaker) was reabsorbed so that product is generally known as Appleworks 5.0. It made it to 6.0, then Apple replaced it with the iWork suite.
ClarisWorks was an office suite originally called Appleworks. First came out for the Apple 2 series. Apple sold it to Claris as well as FileMaker Pro. Apple brought it back later and it is considered the precursor to iWork.
Richard Koerper ClarisWorks was the original name, Claris was the company that developed it, it was later taken over by Apple which is when it became AppleWorks... I remember selling these and the PowerBook 100's that came before it back in the early 90's when I worked for an Apple dealer
The interrupt button generates a Non-Maskable-Interrupt (NMI) causing the machine to drop into MacsBug if the extension was installed. MacsBug was a Motorola machine language debugger/inspector. It stands for "Motorola Advanced Computer Systems Debugger". Look it up. It was a very low-lever debugger that was essentials to us developers back in those days.
I had one of these that I used as my primary computer for seven years. You could do an amazing amount of work with these things. I did my note taking and essay writing for a good seven years through college and graduate school. Developed Excel macros and spreadsheets which were painfully slow. To the point where you wondered why Apple even bothered to provide it. There were many hours ($.99 an hour charge from AOL) for playing on what was then a fairly picture free internet. I even managed to make it into a duo dock of sorts, by plugging in an external monitor and keyboard to it once the grey screen started to lose it's reliability. So long as you kept only one program going, you were fine. Two or more? Trouble. It was also worth the while to save your files on a floppy disk just in case the computer decided to perform it's own version of hari-kari midway through your dissertation. After one too many crashes, I literally shelved it as one of the bookends for what was then a small library. The Gateway2000 that replaced it was a true POS in comparison.
8mb was standard for a hard drive in 1992? Don't think so. About 80 to 200MB was standard in 1992. Most of these came with a 120MB hard drive. These did ship with 4MB of ram but most were upgraded to 8.
This was my first laptop and the first computer that was mine alone. For the time it had everything I could hope for except battery life and the screen was hard to read outdoors even at max brightness.
The interrupt button would trigger MacsBug if you were a developer. If not there was a dialog box with a prompt where you could type things like SM A78 3F3C 0002 A895 [Enter] G A78, which would restart the computer a bit more gracefully than resetting the machine.
Claris works was what the second version of Appleworks was called (the first AppleWorks was an unrelated program on the Apple II) it was an integrated office suite, its name was changed after Apple bought Claris
OMG - I just found this laptop in mint condition in my garage! I had to watch this video to remember how to turn it on!! It was my first computer when I was interning back in the day! Who wants it??? Make offer!!!
Pretty good review for someone too young to have actually used machines like these. I did, and I remember when this model came out. The video out was the biggest deal ever. Also, the unit has an 80MB HD, not 8MB, lol. But that was pretty decent those days, esp. for a portable.
The first computer I ever had. It cost about three thousand dollars with 4MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. I upgraded the RAM to 8 MB and in those days RAM cost about $100 a MB, so upgrading cost me 400 dollars. I loved the rollerball, which was better than any input device they've ever put on a laptop since, but I guess it made the computer too thick. I used to plug it into a color monitor, as stated here. I still have it but haven't turned it on in years. I wonder if it still works.
the first apple portable was the apple IIc. it came with a 7 inch lcd screen and an external battery which came in its travel bag. it was heavy. bought it new in the 80's. the first apple tables was the newton. you could write on it using a stylus and the circle what you wrote and it would convert it to typed text. it also had a modem option. maybe you could do some research or ask someone like me who owned these products from '79
Don't worry about the hinge too much. The one on my '94 PowerBook (first one with Trackpad) is the same way, I open it the same as well. Contrast issues are the same too. About ClarisWorks, it later became AppleWorks, and the puzzle ends up being an Apple logo. That display out is literally just called "Video port" in my manual.
ClarisWorks was developed by Apple. As was FileMaker Pro. These PowerBooks were good sellers. Like today, when desktop Macs didn't sell well Apple relied on PowerBook sales. They generally offered a lot of hardware extras that Windows laptops didn't have. PC users bought these too just like today. Btw, I had a PowerBook Duo (the MacBook Air of its time) in college and was the only person walking around campus with a laptop. Yeah, it was a conversation piece for sure.
I just picked up a powerbook 150 today for $20, the hinge on mine was so stiff that the lid did break off but just the plastic tabs and screw holes. Other than that the computer seems to run great.
That other button is the open firmware button. Before OS X macs dident have a command line program so you had to boot holding that button to get to a command line.
You forgot to mention the built in modem, on my 145 did email, and text based web browsing. And of course fax software. It had quite good sharp greyscale graphics. And unlike most pc notebook HD’s that made godawful noises this one was quite quiet. It had LAN networking (Apple talk) when that just didn’t exist in the pc world, and connecting a printer was a nice tiny little jack and slim cable, not the massive industrial parallel port connections of a pc. Was an extremely useful machine.
This video shows how far resilience, hard work and aiming for perfection can go. Quinn is a high-profile RU-vidr now, but 10 years ago - he started like probably any youtuber-wannabe. But I was here strictly for PowerBook 160, and I'll forgive of course some small errors (like confusing 8MB of RAM with hard drive size) - a perfect laptop for the era, could do so much back then!
His vocal delivery has not improved in TEN YEARS. He still sounds like a pasty-mouthed, arrogant person. I’m truly shocked to hear that he sounded like this even when he was a nobody. Says something about him. He’s only “gotten somewhere” in terms of subscribers. He doesn’t seem to have grown as a person.
The 'programmer interrupt button' sends a hardware interrupt request (an IRQ tells the CPU to JMP to wherever its pointer is set). In the Macintosh SS it jumps into the debugger (such as MacsBug), if it's loaded, otherwise it may crash, or just do nothing. ClarisWorks was made by Claris (duh), which is now known as File Maker, Inc and is an Apple subsidiary.
I don't know if someone told you, but the button you didn't know what it did is the "Open firmware button", you can still find them on Macs till PowerMac G4. Open Firmware was Apple's BIOS alternative, so to say. There architecture was completely different, with PPC and all that, so the system software must've been different aswell ;) If you hold down that button while booting, you can access the Open Firmware Terminal, where you have system-level access. You could even fake CPU speeds *lol*.
They were great computers back then I had a 145B. They ran like a desktop and had all the same features. The Powerbook 100 series design was made by Sony. I do miss that laptop as it was really nice.
Wow! Just seeing how the 2011 MacBook Pro is so different to the 2017 super-slim MacBook Pro is incredible enough, I actually saw something my parents would use IN COLLEGE!! (Of course, if there was a way they could :p)
That computer was US$3,870 to start, or about $6,500 today vs 1,250 for a Mac desktop. Laptops used to be way more expensive than desktops and students would be pretty unlikely to have them.
The only issue I ever had with windows is after one update, my user became corrupt, I just restored it and it worked fine. in mac os, my G3 never seem to recognize the third 40gb hard drive... it'll work one time and ask me to format it the next time...
Haha, as you were talking about it being one of the first portable Macs, I remembered when I saw a teacher at my school casually carrying a 27" iMac under his arm, so he could use it in another class. :D
for example, 2 of my macs had their video cards fail (both g3s... odd), my powerbook g4 had the "narcolepsy" issue, and the 180c's logic board failed. by contrast, my oldest PC got dusty and became slow until I used canned air.
@ThatSnazzyiPhoneGuy That 'Interrupt' button next to the 'Reset' button enabled you (or the programmer) to get kicked out from your GUI and enter the 'Shell' or 'Terminal' or 'Console' for Debugging purposes... I used it in order to isolate an application task that caused the OS to crash - IF it crashed - by means of typing in a special command line tag... It was about the ONLY time I felt like working with MS-DOS on a Mac... ;) The Apps under the -menu were called DA's = Desktop Applications
Documents, software, soundfiles...The same as you do today. Remember, though the machine and its memory is simple, the software and files back then were equally simple :)
