PowerBook 100 comes to life after 14 years
I recently acquired a beautiful example of Apple’s first notebook computer, the diminutive PowerBook 100. Introduced in October, 1991 at a base price of $2,500 it weighs just 5.1 pounds, a fraction of the Mac Portable that preceded it. That computer weighed in at 16 pounds, earning it the nickname “Mac Luggable.”
Codenamed Derringer, Rosebud, Classic, and Asahi according to Mac history legend, the PowerBook 100 was designed in collaboration with and built by Sony. It was introduced simultaneously with the more powerful and full-featured PowerBook 140 and PowerBook 170. Unlike those models, the 100 lacks a floppy drive – it was a $200 accessory.
Upon receipt of the PowerBook 100 I plugged it in and was quickly reminded of two unique features of this computer. It has a hard switch on the back to completely disconnect the battery from the logic board to prevent draining it during storage, and there’s no power switch. Pressing any key on the keyboard starts it up.
The PB100 I acquired (serial number SS2370MV506) looks beautiful, lacking only its rear port cover and two of the three rubber screw covers on the bottom. It’s hard drive clunks repeatedly and refuses to mount, but it happily chimes and starts up from an external floppy disk, revealing a bright screen. “About the Finder” shows it has 4MB of RAM.
Kudos to Paul Brierly whose article Creating Classic Mac Boot Floppies in OS X allowed to me create a System 6.08L Startup disk on my 2009 MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard using just a SmartDisk external floppy drive and a 1.4 MB blank floppy (that was even formatted for MS-DOS!)
I’ve cleaned the rollers inside the trackball assembly to get the mouse pointer to move freely again. Next up is disassembly to see if the HDD can be resuscitated from it’s stiction.
Fun fact from Owen Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential: The Connor internal hard disks for the PowerBook 100 were codenamed Jake (20MB) and Elwood (40MB),
UPDATE: A quick take apart aided by the Service Source guide revealed that the Connor drive inside the PB100 is a Jake (20MB model). Taking it out and giving it a few sharp thwacks, then reinstalling and reassembling the PowerBook had happy results: the internal HDD mounted fine and the unit booted from it to reveal it has System 7.1 installed. The last file date is 1996 so it looks like this computer has been dormant for 14 years.
Meet Jake, he weighs in at 20 megs
