Slashdot Mirror
How the PowerBook was Born
Sabah Arif writes "Apple had no presence in the portables market prior to 1992. Its attempt at creating a laptop Macintosh, the Macintosh Portable, weighed almost 15 lbs and failed to sell. On the personal behest of John Sculley, Apple contracted with Sony to create Asahi, a smaller Portable. Apple developed two high end models in company. After 1992 and until the disastrous 5300, Apple was the leading notebook maker."
rumours suggest intel powerbooks will be 25% thinner... if that is even possible.
And now we make up for it with Intels, which mean Windows (someone will try it), which means we're back with the heavy garbage we started with.
PowerBook was born while on Safari. The child enjoyed sitting on Pa Apple's laptop, and had a run in with a Tiger at age X. Surviving a SCSI childhood in the mean streets of Motorola, PowerBook grew up to play with Firewire.
...also affectionately referred to as the luggable
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
I was at a conference, a week ago, where the presenters were using powerbooks. I think you can tell a lot about a product by how people use it. These things looked really smooth and after all my fits with a WinXP laptop, I desperately want one. Problem is we're a Windoze shop. :p
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I just wish they'd use a better screen. Comparing Mac laptops to Windows laptops is like night and day, literally. The Mac laptops have such dim screens compared to the laptops that are available for Windows.
I suppose it keeps the cost down, but if there is one area that really ought not be skimped on (especially for machines meant to be used by graphic designers), the LCD monitor is it, in my opinion.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Was the key to the strategy glancingly mentioned in the article as "...Sculley started a semiautonomous division to produce a successful portable computer"
It seems that big chunks of autonomy are necessary to developing really high quality products that are significantly different from the main corporate line. IIRC the IBM AS/400 line was the end result of a similar process: almost a separate computer company, it is said.
It would be interesting to test the hypothesis by comparing the failed development of the Apple Portable to the successful development of the Powerbook.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
How? Presumably when Daddy Apple impregnated Mommy Apple.
I just wish they'd use a better screen. Comparing Mac laptops to Windows laptops is like night and day, literally. The Mac laptops have such dim screens compared to the laptops that are available for Windows.
I didn't realize brightness == quality?
That said, this new iBook I'm using right now (not mine) seems plenty bright. . . I can't imagine the higher-end PowerBook could be worse.
Sony ha
"After 1992 and until the disastrous 5300, Apple was the leading notebook maker."
Man this guy is really good at confusing things. He sounds like a political writer. It would have been easier to say "For 2 years, 1993 and 1994, until the Apple Powerbook 5300 was released, Apple was the leading seller of portable computers"
2 years? 2 years. Seriously. I had to do research to find that the powerbook 5300 was released in 1995. Taken at face value, without knowing what the 5300 is, someone could interpret Apple's position to actually have been "dominant", where it wasn't.
Gosh. 1992. Man. The internet was barely even around! that's like stonage.
birth of the P-P-P-Powerbook
See, the original PowerBook was smaller than the competing portables. It set the standard for what a good notebook is. People liked the size and weight. Now most people are buying these big computers again. It's stupid! I'd much rather have my 12 inch iBook. If you want a big computer with more power, get a desktop for less that would have much better specs. One of the new G5 iMacs would be an excellent choice! It's dumb how so many companies are un-protablizing their notebooks. Come on, get back to what a notebook computers should really be like, because bigger isn't always better.
She went to college in 1996 and got the 5300 on super sale. Hmm wonder why?
The keyboard is missing lots of keys on it and the software is very unstable. She had alot of nerdy friends in college so I assumed they bad mouthed the mac to her like most geeks did back then. But she went on and on about problems with it and slow performance. Yes I know about the macOS upgrade and suggested it but she didn't want to hear it. She used it for one year before she left it in the closet and gave it to her mother when she decided to go back to school herself.
Today my gf is a photographer and even though her colleagues uses macs she is persistant on using photoshop with windows as a result. Amazing what one bad product experience can do. I bought an ipod a few months ago and she didn't like it because it had the apple brand on it. I educated her that is ran on windows and now she is somewhat considering purchasing one.
I suppose every company has its lemons. I heard stories of a few bad honda's as well even though they make one of the most reliable cars on the market.
But the 5300 was like a castrated emachine of its time and not something you think about when you think of apple.
http://saveie6.com/
I was 14 when it was released. I didn't get my first real computer 'til 1995...
Thanks.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I'll call BS on that!
I'll admit it is somewhat a matter of personal preference, but I liked having a trackball on the right-side of the unit much more than in the center of the unit. Being near the edge of the unit allows you to bend your hand around it, making it almost feel like a normal thumb-operated trackball.
The center-mounted trackball necessitated the same terrible hand contortions you're familiar with due to notebook touchpads. I can certainly imagine it was a real pain for left-handed users, but you can't always make everything ambidexterous, and comfortable.
I'd pay thousands of dollars if I could get a modern notebook with a fairly normal keyboard and side-mounted trackball, like I had on my old 20MHz Compaq notebook.
Sometimes progress, isn't...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I have an ancient powerbook 500, running an equally ancient build of debian. Its used as an nfs share and as an ssh frontend to a router's console port. It has an uptime measured in years. Luggable? ..sure, Undying? Oh yes.
Apple had no presence in the portables market prior to 1992
Where's the historical perspective? It may come as a surprise to some, but Apple actually made computers *before* the Macintosh. The Apple IIc was compact and roughly portable; although i couldn't tell you for sure (i was a C64 hacker at the time) we all assumed the Apple IIc was a portable because we see it being used on a beach in the movie "2010". Although looking back now, one has to wonder where the battery is in that compact little case.
Honestly, I still miss the trackballs of the 1xx Powerbooks, as well as the recessed trackballs of the Duos.
They had the best ergonomic experience of any laptop pointing devices ever. The size and mass of the ball, the position of the buttons...Just outstanding.
Asahi being the Powerbook 100. It came out in October, 1991. I remember many people having Powerbooks (100,140,170) at that time.
So Apple had part of 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, and even a lot of 1995 because the 5300 didn't come out until August and people didn't realize the PB5300 sucked immediately.
That's enough time that the way the writer described it is reasonable. It's about 1/3rd of the total time that laptops have even existed.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Is that a time period or a body condition?
I know I'm immediately showing my age here, but Apple's first portable computer was not the Powerbook. It was the Apple //c (circa 1983), complete with an 80 column LCD monitor, a battery pack. Reference at http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/appleiic/
.
Popular? No. It was too expensive, the LCD screen was poor, battery life was awful, and regular visits with a chiropractor for the battery pack were not out the question. But it was the first Apple "laptop."
Starting next week, all passwords will be entered in Morse code
...for the original Powerbook model. I remember thinking "there's no way they can pull this off." Boy was I wrong!
Huuum, beeru!
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
There's a nice equivalent to "luggable" in german, it's the "Schlepptop" (to pronounce add "sh" prefix to "laptop"), stemming from "schleppen"=="hauling", I thought some of the Blinkenlichten (wrong, BTW, it's "Blinklichter") Ubergeeks (wrong as well, the first letter should be "Ü"=="Ü") might enjoy adding it to their vocabulary :-P
...They were shown in 1991 at WWDC. I was there.
The presentation was actually very well done, I thought--almost as good as a SteveNote. Back then, without Steve Jobs and his ego, essentially every group (desktop hardware, imaging, system software, etc.) gave a keynote on a different subject. Sculley gave the Monday keynote where he usually talked about the business side. Pretty boring stuff and Sculley wasn't that great a speaker anyway. Hell, even Bill Gates did a better presentation than Sculley (he was also there).
So we got this keynote from some VP of "Portable Computing." He started off talking about the Macintosh Portable and how they had finally identified the market for this device.
Cut to a shot of the space shuttle taking off.
Yup. The Macintosh Portable was the first personal computer in space (and I can hear the HP41c fans sharpening their knives). They showed it floating around the cabin of the shuttle, as light as a feather. They even showed something that everyone had wanted to see since the first Macintosh: A disk being ejected across the room.
Amusing.
The VP then showed off Apple Remote Access. One odd thing about his presentation, though, was that the computer he was using had no video-out. Thus, there was a guy standing behind him with a portable camera zoomed in on the screen. But if you paid attention--and I didn't until somebody mentioned it after the presentation--you could see the the edges around the screen were dark and a Macintosh Portable was sort of a light Macintosh SE grey. So ARA was being demoed on a PowerBook--we just couldn't see the whole thing.
Anyway, they were finally ready to unveil the replacement for the Macintosh Portable. They wheeled this table out onto the stage with a cloth covering a device. The VP whipped off the cloth to show us: A LaserWriter. Various chuckles from the audience. "Well, it's pretty portable..." the VP quipped as he tried to lift the LaserWriter (Apple LaserWriters weighed about 50 pounds). Suddenly, a disembodied voice from the booth called out: "Look in the paper tray." The VP reached into the paper tray and pulled out a PowerBook! And the audience went wild.
Definitely one of the better Apple presentations.
fairly cheap, small, has a fullsize keyboard, and uses a touchpad.
I have a 12" powerbook, and it has all those features. Well, I'm not sure if you'd class it as cheap really, but it certainly isn't expensive. If you wanted a cheaper one you could choose the iBook instead.
I would suggest one of the following:
Currently, The thinkpads and the power/iBooks IMO are the best notebooks on the market at the moment, nothing quite matches them, ESPECIALLY in the smaller sizes. I've seen a lot of the laptops from other manufacturers and they look OK, but if I'm spending that much money on something, it's sure as hell going to have look like it's worth that much.
.sigs are for losers
My Toshiba M1's dims in response to the ambient lighting, and it's been around for at least 2-3 years.
See, the original PowerBook was smaller than the competing portables. It set the standard for what a good notebook is
There have always been machines considerably smaller and lighter than PowerBooks throughout Apple's history. The NEC Ultralite, released in 1989, was 4.5 pounds. The Toshiba T100 was a different design, but even lighter and so successful that people swear by it even today.
But while PowerBooks didn't "set the standard" for anything, they were nicely designed notebooks and deservedly became very popular.
Today, it's the same thing: Powerbooks don't really set the standard for anything. There are other laptops that are lighter, have better screens, longer battery life, are faster, etc. But Powerbooks are all around nice designs that you can't really go wrong with.
It will be nice when Apple starts releasing x86 laptops: first of all, it will mean that they can make their machines smaller and lighter, and secondly, it will mean that users won't be forced to use Mac OS X in order to use the hardware.
Personally, I've never had a problem with accidental activation of a touchpad. I have an IBM laptop with the nipple in the middle of the keyboard and I hate it, using the touchpad exclusively. The nipple is very hard on the finger that's using it since you're putting a lot of lateral stress on your joints.
You use whatever you feel comfortable with. Many people I know lug a bluetooth or wireless mouse with the laptop because they just don't like the built in pointing devices.
(You know, out of context this discussion could be pretty funny.)
If the lan is setup properly it should be able to securly provide access to (possibly) a limited amount of functions for untrusted devices. I could see not wanting to grant more than internet and pop3 access to untrusted machines. File shares, databases, and other things I probably wouldn't feel comfortable with.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
No, if the LAN is setup properly it should be able to set of flashing lights and klaxons in the machine room whilst simultaneously disconnecting the offending network port at the router, whenever an untrusted device is connected, causing the network administrator(s) to burst through your office door brandishing a very big stick.
are you hiring?
The history of the Powerbook is just another instance, like OS X, of a narcissistic company, detracted with irrelevant issues like wether employees can keep their dog in their cubicle, having to reach outside the company to bring in innovation. Apple, for their mythological 'wunderkid' roots, is and has been just another company full of arrogant self-aggrandizing braggarts.
Heck, they had to 'outsource' development of the Mac to a skunkworks because the regular Apple corporate culture wasn't working. The lap-busting boat anchor called the 'Portable' was a running joke until Apple hired in outsiders to build the PowerBook line.
I still have a really nice (needs more memory, though) Powerbook 165c.
resigned
Thanks Bill for your input. We're all glad when you take time out of your busy schedule to provide us such valuable insight into today's IT issues.
mmm mmm FUD! Get yours today!
what's it got to do with windows? the issue is idiots advising bringing external devices into company networks and connecting them. i'd be just as pissed off if someone brought a linux laptop, or a windows laptop running a non-corporate client in. twat.
Why, no... no... has someone said something? Who told you this?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Of course, the Outbound, a Mac clone that used semi-legal SE ROM chips, was the first true Mac laptop...or something to that effect. I LOVED mine, and their customer support was the absolute BEST...which may explain why they're now kaput.
http://www.jagshouse.com/outbound.html
and
http://www.lowendmac.com/clones/outbound.html
Finally, I've found another touchpoint (the more common name for the "nipple") fan.
My main machine is a Toshiba Tecra M3, which has both a touchpoint and a touchpad. I don't know if I'd be able to stand using a notebook without a touchpoint, and I certainly wouldn't be able to stand using it as my main machine. I use the touchpoint almost exclusively, and I only use the touchpad for three things:
1) Scrolling (iPod-style circular scrolling is wonderful)
2) Middle-click (the upper right corner of the touchpad is mapped to middle-click, as there's no middle button on the laptop)
3) UT2K4 (I move with WASD, I look and turn with the touchpad)
I'll be a bit sad when my desktop is in working condition again--I'm too used to using a touchpoint to be able to stand most desktop pointing devices (I had a Logitech TrackMan Marble Wheel, which I loved, but mine is dead, and the TMMW has been discontinued). Well, I won't be too sad--I miss the contents of my hard drives and the high-resolution dual-head setup.
Oh, and all the names people come up with for touchpoints are funny. My best friend calls it "the keyboard clit", which has been my favourite (sadly, he doesn't like it, as he says he doesn't want to make the keyboard aroused...).
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
people outside Apple caught wind of it and ran with the story trying to take shots at Apple's actually decent market share or portables. the name about it burning up is kind of stupid considering how many other companies actually have to recall batteries, power supplies etc from customers to replace them from overheating. just in the last year or two we heard about "risky" laptop batteries and game system power supplies out in the public. Apple caught it before they were released, so nobody outside Apple ever actually experienced the flaw.
the machine itself had some other design bugs, but the flaming powerbook one was what people used to scare Apple customers. "the machine may set your lap on fire" sounds a lot more threatening than "this portable has a crappy hinge".
the comment above linked to LowEndMac.com's page for the 5300. that site has a whole section dedicated to Road Apples (Macs that failed to live up to their potential). it's a pro-Apple site so it's interesting to see what they consider stinkers. they also have their Best Buys page for the best of older Apple hardware. neither of those has anything from the last few years, so keep that in mind if you only know more current Apple hardware. i think the newest stinker is from around 2000 and the last best buy is older than that.
It's not the quality that matters, it's what a company is willing to do when there is a problem. Apple released a dud with the 5300. That is forgivable.
But the fact that Apple completely left customers high and dry (a six month wait before a recall was issued that didn't even fix the problems, and no option for the customer to simply return the machine for the full purchase price) is unforgivable.
I hadn't bought another piece of Apple hardware since the 5300 until I bought an iPod shuffle. The credibility lost from leaving your customers high and dry takes a long time to make up.
Amazing magic tricks
Every 12" PowerBook, from the first model released in January 2003 on, can accommodate at least 1,152 MB (128 MB built-in + 1 GB expansion) of RAM.
www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/
I'm right handed but I broke my wrist a while back (8+ months) and I had to switch to using the mouse with my left hand. After a while you get used to it ... I actually haven't switched back yet. Partially because of the stress it adds to my wrist but also because I've gotten so used to it I haven't desired to go back.
:)
Now writting OTOH is another matter
I would still have used my PB 170 today, if it only had had a way of comfortably transfer data to modern computers. This was before standard ethernet, firewire, USB and even CD-readers.
I had plenty of space left on that 80M harddrive. I have had seven other iBooks and PowerBooks since then, most of them good, but none of them as groovy.
I was at the WWDC where the PowerBooks were introduced.
The intro was amazing. We suspected that new portables were coming, but someone brought out a LaserWriter on stage instead. Everyone was wondering what they were up to and then a voice came over the sound system, "Check the paper tray".
The paper tray was removed to reveal a PowerBook inside. Too cool.
I paid a ton of money - even with the developer discount - for my PowerBook 170, but it was one of those leaps in technology (Betamax, Tivo, original Mac, etc) that you only see a few times in your life. Great piece of hardware. Great Ergonomics. Every developer knew Apple would sell a ton of them even though upper management did not.
* as long as it is Black & white
The 520/540 had built-in ethernet and modem. But when it came out, ethernet wasn't all that common.
The 5300 did not have built-in ethernet. But about the time it came out, ethernet became very common.
So people had to buy PCMCIA cards with ethernet on them (often modem too). These cards were very expensive ($400 wasn't uncommon). Additionally often the drivers stunk and the cards had external dongles (which were easily lost).
Plus, as the poster above mentioned, the speed of the 5300 was poor. It didn't run PowerPC software very fast, and the 68K emulator on the machine was an interpretive one (as opposed to dynamic recompiling) and so it ran 68K code very slowly. Most of the Mac OS was 68K code at that time!
The 5300 stunk. PowerPC Powerbooks were not really sought after until the G3-based PB 3400 came out (which also had built-in ethernet!).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
While Intel users were getting 300MB hard drives for $80, the Powerbook needed $250 SCSI hard drives. Powerbook RAM was super expensive, some $100 for 4 MB. The trackball never worked. It always slipped and had to be constantly cleaned. The sound could play stereo 8 bit but only record mono 8 bit.
On the other side, the Powerbook's monochrome screen had much better contrast than other notebooks. They got a lot of mileage out of that monochrome screen, eventually doing sophisticated dithering and background tiling to make it display photo realistic images.
That was my last notebook which could run 3 hours on battery power, without the hard drive.
You're right--mea culpa.
The first e-mail from space was sent from a Macintosh Portable, but it was not the first "portable computer" in space.
My mistake.
Thinking about this also reminded me of another funny Portable/PowerBook story. A friend of mine's sister went out and bought a Macintosh Portable after seeing the PowerBooks. She preferred the Portable because, living in New York City, she wanted a heavy machine that would be less easy to steal. She'd had her purse snatched once or twice and could see someone coming up, giving her a shove and running off with this nice and light PowerBook.
No one was going "run" while lugging a 25 pound Macintosh Portable.
(I had this great mental image of some guy running up, shoving her, grabbing the portable and--wham!--he's stuck in one place like he was attached to an anchor.)
I remember using a kingston 2 button trackball with my centris 650, circa 1993. That would be with some version of System 7 on it.
Do you mean Kensington? I also remember 3rd party multibutton mouse from "back in the day". You had to install drivers for them to work. I think Apple added support for multibutton mice around Mac OS 8.5 or 9.
On the IIc, the control key is where Ghawd intended it to be, to the left of the A key. See it here: http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/appleiic/ These days, only the Japanese Macs have the control key in the right place. Caps lock is even less useful for a script where all characters are the same size than it is for roman scripts. The iBooks and the 12" pb still have goofy ABD kbds that send release AND press signals when you hit them, making remaps difficult. To swap control and caps lock on an iBook running linux requires a kernel patch.
I'm kinda looking forward to the Mac equivalents of MathCAD, Solidworks, Nastran and ADAMS.
Oh, you didn't mean real software you meant typewriting and pretty pictures. That's nice, dear.
Do you mean "bright", or do you mean "glossy"? I don't think Mac screens are less bright (I hardly ever turn my all the way up), but they're definitely less glossy than some PC laptops' screens. Gruber at fireball.net wrote about this recently:
Gee that was a GREAT story!
What are we supposed to do now - talk about it?
At the time the 12" PowerBook was introduced, the highest-capacity SO-DIMM on the market that fit the (single) RAM expansion slot was only 512 MB. Just a couple months later, though, manufacturers began producing compatible 1GB SO-DIMMs.
I'm doing my best not to remember the whole situation with extensions pre-OS X, but it keeps coming up in different places.
Being an old fart who so desperately wants to be hip, I'm always checking out "what the young people are up to". Well, the latest craze among some of my young friends is this thing called Firefox. I think it's a browser, whatever that means.
And one of the coolest things about this Firefox thing is that you can install all these really great extensions, that, get this, EXTEND the capabilities of the browser. For instance, I can install a mozilla calendar extension. Now my browser is a CALENDAR!! And there's a google toolbar extension for, uh, using google tools.
Now, remembering my previous experience with system extensions, I took the cautious approach and only installed about nine or ten of these great extensions. It's like. . . drugs? . . . candy? . . . potato chips? You can't install just one! Of course I want to control iTunes from my browser. It's become such a pain to switch applications that honestly, I'd given up listening to music. OK, so I need to install Foxytunes. Oh, and now there are so many toolbars, that I need to install a toolbar manager extension. And so on.
I pray that Cassidy and Greene will come back from the dead with a Conflict Catcher for Firefox.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
In 1991 all the other portables had the keyboard at the edge closes to the user. The few machines that were running the primative versions of Windows used a trackball that clipped to the side of the keyboard area and hung out on like an outrigger. They connected to the serial port by cable. If this sounds like and accident in progress, it was.
By pushing the keyboard forward toward the display, Apple created space for the trackball and provided a wrist rest as a side effect. Good industrial design all around.