xdaniel

So, this place is pretty dead. However, I feel like writing about a machine I've spent a lot of time with over the last week or so, and Twitter isn't exactly the place for walls of text. And no, I don't want the character limit removed there. Anyway, the machine in question is an Apple PowerBook 3400c, a 1997/1998 vintage PowerPC-based Macintosh laptop. This particular specimen is one I got at a flea market some seven or so years ago, and for quite cheap at that - I think it was 10€, maybe? It was much less than I would've expected, at least. I got it, messed around with it a bit, with Mac OS 9, with networking it to my PC back then, and then promptly lost interest again. In part because I didn't really have much software for it, and in part because OS 9 just wasn't very enjoyable and ran rather sluggish on this system. Fast forward to late December 2015. I am not sure what exactly came over me, but I felt like just doing something with my couple of Macs, the iMac G3 and the PowerBook in particular. So, about a week ago, I fished the PowerBook out of storage and looked at what I had: Apple PowerBook 3400c 200 MHz PowerPC 603ev 32 MB RAM (16 MB on-board + 16 MB expansion) 20 GB Toshiba HDD 20x CD-ROM drive 12.1" LCD (800x600, 32k colors) Mac OS 9.0.4 (International English) Plus various issues, none of which I have fixed yet, such as wobbly hinges (kinda like they aren't properly screwed down in the bottom half of the case) and a dead PRAM battery (think CMOS on PCs, i.e. for date/time and other settings), as well as the usual scratches, dead or stuck pixels and the like. To start out, I backed up the few files I wanted to back up, before getting ready to format the HDD. Now, the only real link to the outside world that the PowerBook has on its own is the standard RJ45 ethernet connector, but without extra software, Mac OS isn't capable of ex. accessing Windows' shared folders, nor is the opposite true. So what was my lazy man's solution? Hack together a file upload script in PHP, start XAMPP (meaning, Apache and PHP) on my PC, and use the Mac's Internet Explorer 5 to "upload" the files one by one to the PC! That worked fairly well, although had I wanted to save more than just these couple of files, I probably would've rather got some sort of FTP client for the Mac and used my PC as an FTP server... Well, files are backed up, so I started collecting software for the system from the internet - including a bunch of stuff that's technically pirated, but I can't really see anyone care about me downloading ex. an ISO of the 15+ years old, unsupported Mac OS 8.5 for my also 15+ years old and equally unsupported PowerBook. Once I had the basics, such as OS 8.5 in German, I went ahead and booted the system from the OS CD, formatted the HDD and installed OS 8.5. Another hour or so later, I had the OS running, installed the update to OS 8.6, as well as some additional software to allow the Mac to access the aforementioned Windows shares. Then came more software, general tools, some things I wanted to try out, etc. And here comes the point where this old machine genuinely impressed me - for the first time, that is. I got SoundJam MP, a media player that was later purchased by Apple and apparently served as the base for iTunes. I had seen someone on Twitter (fail0verflow's marcan, I think) use this program on a 20th Anniversary Macintosh, which was a 1997 limited edition system roughly comparable to my PowerBook in terms of specs but ex. with a 50 MHz faster CPU, to stream AnimeNFO Radio over the internet, and I wanted to try that, too. Imagine that! Streaming 192kbps MP3 from the internet, over a 10 MBit ethernet connection, to an ancient 200 MHz laptop! Such a dumb idea! And it worked. It worked almost flawlessly. The sound occasionally cuts out for half a second, but that doesn't happen very often and is something I'll just ascribe to Classic Mac OS' kinda crappy, cooperative multitasking. Not sure if that's actually the reason, but it certainly seems that way to me. I also tried the same with 320kbps MP3 files stored on my PC and accessed via the local network, and this worked just as well. Maybe I'm exaggerating this achievement, maybe a 200 MHz Windows PC would be just as capable of playing back streamed MP3s at these bitrates, but these days it seems like to me that, say, anything below 1 GHz isn't capable of doing anything media-related anymore. Anyway, after that I went looking for more software, especially games, although I actually haven't yet tried out very many of them. I found a lot - in fact, much of the software I'm using, freeware and otherwise, came from the same place (tho I'm not sure if I should name or link to it here) - but so far only played two, both ports from other systems: Warcraft II and Puyo Puyo 2. Both of them work quite well on this laptop, although they would both benefit from better input devices than what I have. The keyboard configuration Puyo Puyo 2 uses is awkward if you're used to either an SNES controller or reconfigurable emulator keymaps, and a working mouse would be nice for Warcraft instead of having to use the touchpad. As for the second time the system impressed me, it was when I unplugged the power supply to see how much juice the battery has left. I started SoundJam MP and the AnimeNFO Radio stream and just let it run, periodically glancing over at the screen to check what Mac OS reported regarding the battery. Slowly but surely the battery indicators dropped; the bars showing the charge level and the timer showing the approximate remaining runtime... And, well, slowly is the keyword here. I ended up plugging the power back in when the system reported one minute of charge left, which happened 73 minutes after starting playback. On a stock Apple battery, presumably also from 1997, or maybe a few years younger. But even if the battery is from, say, 2000, this machine still lasts a whole lot longer than my current, temporary PC laptop does (Dell Latitude C640 from 2003 or thereabouts; less than 10 minutes) and than my sadly broken 2009 laptop did (Asus X5DAB-SX070V; battery dead by mid-/late 2014). And this was while doing the whole streaming radio spiel. This was the point where this ancient laptop impressed me more than it should've had any right to. Now, what am I going to do with the PowerBook going forward? I'll keep it, that's for sure. I found an Orinoco 16-bit PCMCIA wireless LAN card for rather cheap on eBay, which should work in this machine and other, older ones I have (ex. IBM ThinkPad 380ED) or might come across, so I'll certainly try to one-up the streaming radio stuff by making it all wireless. I also want to fix some of the issues it has, such as the dead PRAM battery (found some advice online on how to use replacement CMOS battery packs for PC laptops in this one) and I want to check what exactly is causing these irritatingly floppy hinges (which has to wait until I got the proper Torx screwdrivers or bits). Another interesting thing would be trying to rebuild the original system battery, despite it still holding out for over an hour. This is a low-priority thing at best tho, exactly because the battery still lasts as long as it does. Well, I guess that's about it for the 3400c and for the moment!