I recently acquired a beautiful Macintosh PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard) via Craiglist. Known better by it’s nickname of “Lombard,” it features the smooth curvy lines and black case plastics that characterized Apple’s stylish portables from 1998-2000. As the third generation of the G3 PowerBook, this unit has a quirky combination of new and old features. This is the first portable Mac with a “new world ROM” – and the last with a built-in SCSI port. For the first time in the Apple portable line USB replaces ADB for connecting mice and keyboards, and the multicolored Apple logo is replaced by a white one.
According to Low End Mac this model will support versions of the Mac OS all the way from 8.6 to 10.4 (the latter using XPostFacto). I think I am going to try partitioning the internal 5 GB drive into three volumes, with one devoted to 8.6, one to 9.2.2, and one to 10.4.11.
Meanwhile, I am getting to relearn all of my classic Mac troubleshooting skills that have been dormant since the release of Mac OS X way back in March of 2001. I am fortunate to have a couple of handy PC cards that I hope will allow me to use firewire devices and connect to wireless networks since neither of those capabilities are built in.
The firewire card is a generic one with three ports, the wireless card is a Farallon 11MB Skyline model. I was able to find classic drivers for it at the Proxim web site, and an open source version that is reportedly compatible with Mac OS X.
- Farallon v.3.1 wireless driver/firmware updater/manual for Skyline 11MB PC Card (October 2001)
- Open Source wireless driver 1.0b6 for Mac OS X via MacUpdate for Skyline 11MB PC card (June 2005)
When I purchased it the G3 booted to a flashing folder with a question mark, even when I tried using an original Mac OS 9 installer CD. Replacing the optical drive with another one I had in my parts drawer allowed the computer to start up with the CD. I repaired the hard disk with Disk First Aid and now it starts up fine from the internal drive which has Mac OS 9.0.4 installed. I’ll keep you posted on my progress towards restoring this beauty to a computer that works well in the 21st Century and retains the ability to show curious onlookers what life was like using Mac OS 8 and 9 on an Apple portable.
So after thinking about this a bit I have realized that fitting 3 different operating systems on the hard drive is sure to exceed the capacity of the current 4.5G HDD. Mac OS X 10.4 demands 3G by itself. Tiger also wants a minimum of 256 MB of RAM (but realistically needs 512) so it look like a couple of upgrades are in order to realize the plan of a triple-booting Lombard. Fortunately MacWorld has some tips on these exact tasks: http://www.macworld.com/article/1719/2003/01/upgrade.html