A recent acquisition from a fellow who owns a store on Austin’s legendary Sixth Street is the PowerBook 160 pictured above. The unit is in great shape, but unfortunately booted to a solid illuminated gray screen at startup. Booting from a known good floppy disk, resetting the Power Manager, and adjusting the contrast and brightness switches didn’t make any difference, so it was time to crack it open and explore the internals.
With the aid of an Apple Service Manual for the 160/165c/180 I carefully removed the screws the keep the bottom and top case together and reseated all of the cable connections. Still no working video, so it was time to start replacing parts. After much trial and error I finally got the display working with a replacement LCD panel I scavenged from a box of 160 parts I was fortunate to have on hand.
The 160 was Apple’s first grayscale model but its passive matrix screen requires a lot of adjustment to get an image with minimal ghosting. This PowerBook has a 120MB SCSI drive (the highest capacity hard drive that was available from Apple – 80 MB and 40 MB were other options), and is maxed out at 14 MB of RAM with a third party PSRAM card from Lifetime Memory Products, Inc.
The 160 is significant in Apple’s history as the first PowerBook that could drive an external color monitor, at up to 8 bit color at 832 x 624 resolution. I’ve not had an opportunity to test that feature yet since I have to locate the necessary video adapter. Other notable features include a built-in microphone, SCSI disk mode, and a choice of video mirroring or dual video mode – what we nowadays call “extended desktop.” Pretty amazing stuff for 1992.
Bringing this PowerBook back to life was a fun exercise and has encouraged me to seek out more of the early generation units for the collection.
PowerBook 160 wiki at 68kmla.org
Macintosh PowerBook 160/180 Developer Note
PowerBook 160 profile at Vectronic’s Apple World
