kenleewrites in 日本

We were spring cleaning our lab and I chanced upon this sweet box! It was from a time when the Apple logo had colors. By the way, anyone know why the Apple logo has a byte taken out of it? ^^. I was pretty excited when I found this. Does it even still work?

It had better! If not, I know not of any other way to eject the PowerBook Duo.

So, I plugged it in and viola! “DONG” and it ejected. Somethings never change. ^^.

The PowerBook Duo was a line of small subnotebooks manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from 1992 until 1997. This had a 33Mhz PowerPC processor! And it ran System 7! Anyone reminiscing?

From the horse’s mouth at wikipedia.

Weighing in at a mere 4.1 pounds and slightly smaller at 10.9″ x 8.5″ than a sheet of paper, only 1.4″ thick, it was the lightest and smallest of all of Apple’s PowerBooks and MacBooks. Only the MacBook Air weighs less, though wider and deeper, but considerably thinner making it the second smallest subnotebook overall. In fact the Duo has the most in common with the MacBook Air which only includes one USB 2.0 port, one video port (requiring an adapter) and one speaker port, but no ability for expansion.

This baby isn’t that thin, but it’s sure small. The only thing I had handy to compare sizes were an Office:Mac 2008 box. Ironic isn’t it. So how does it stack up? It’s twice as long as the width of the Office box. The Duo’s width is just as long as the box’s length.

How about thickness? Just a tad bit thicker than the box.

Opening it up, it kinda reminds me of an eeepc.

It’s a PowerBook Duo 270c. C for color.

That’s the dock connecter right there with the power button.

Ports were hidden behind that rotating handle. See that little triangle next to the fax/telephone/modem logo? How about a look into the dock?

Nothing much there. It has a pretty neat mechanism whereby you just push it in and the machine takes over and docks the Duo. No jamming it in like Nintendo cartridges.

Ports ports ports.

Another piece of history I found was the PowerBook 170.

Has the same footprint as the Duo, but alot thicker. Anyone used to carry either of these to work?

Battery built right in. I wonder if people complained about that back in 1992~1997.

This mouse is relatively speaking, new. I remember my dad had one of these with his old mac. I found older mice, but forgot to take a photo. Keyboards too. ^^.

Unibody MacBook and PowerBook Duo 270c side by side. I invited Alex in for a look too. ^^. That’s him in the Macbook right there.

We have come a long way haven’t we. Plastic to aluminum, ball to multitouch glass trackpad etc… Anyone owned a Duo? Has one lying around at home? I found an old ad on youtube.

This Duo will go to the dumps next week. I’m amazed it managed to stay around this long in university storage. ^^. 16 years is a long long time for any computer. Unless, someone wants to give it a home? ^^.