Vintage Apple laptop in 2024 - The PowerBook 145B

[@dmug]

Such chonk, such computer. I didn't know the difference between active matrix and passive matrix.

[@QuinsTechCorner]

Yeah he’s a chonk!!! The passive matrix display looks god-awful. So happy we don’t have to put up with that these days.

[@dmug]

@@QuinsTechCorner I've barely seen them as they were phasing out by the time I really saw Mac laptops in person besides at stores from the early 90s. I think my HS computer teacher had Apple PowerBook G3 250 Kanga and a Apple PowerBook 5300. That's about when laptops really started to seem like they were cool, mid-late 90s. These earlier guys are weren't quite there. The Kanga was the first G3 I ever saw in person, and I think that's why I ended buying a Pismo 500 MHz which was completely a stupid purchase when I had G3 450 and I realized that rather quickly.

[@QuinsTechCorner]

@dmug Ohh yeah Kangas are very nice. Good riddance to these machines.

[@kirishima638]

Oh and yes, it’s been called ‘Finder’ since 1984

[@AndyO-f7k]

In comparison to what came after, and even the contemporary up-market computers of the day, of course this is limited and poor. However, in its day, the 145B was a very capable, popular and widely used laptop. Certainly Word 6.0.1 is dated too, but a very capable word processor which lacks modern bloat, but not much else. You could (and I did) run a business off a 145B, with just 4Mb RAM, because that was what you got then, and just about every software title was written to run on this kind of hardware. In 2024, this makes for an excellent distraction free platform - great keyboard, easily transferred data via floppy, and just the frills you need, not the ones you don't. Oh, and the LibreOffice suite can directly open Word 6 files and formatting.

[@QuinsTechCorner]

Thanks so much for sharing how you used a 145b to run your business. I do agree, it’s a great distraction-free platform! I’ve been using Clarisworks a bit on here, but my files keep getting corrupted. Time to swap out the SCSI for a blueSCSI I think.

[@kineticnotion]

Is the mouse easy to use?

[@QuinsTechCorner]

Not on my model 😂 I’m sure it was better from factory, probably need to clean it.

[@kirishima638]

This wasn’t a good computer even for the day. It was the cheapest, budget model. For comparison, this shipped the same month as the PowerBook 180c which had a beautiful display, video out, and a faster CPU.

[@QuinsTechCorner]

Thanks for the info! Yeah, I thought this was pretty poor, even for the time.