Apple Powerbook Duo 230

Preamble

eBay history shows I got this laptop back in 2022; it is crazy to think this tiny computer was made back in ‘92.

Managed to obtain floppy drive with extension module separately; turns out it is quite a pain to have a computer with absolutely no means to transfer any data in or out. Sadly I don’t have any extension/dock station to hook it with the internet via PCMCIA lan module, would be fun, since this laptop works perfectly nice in every regard.

Hardware

┌─────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ CPU         │ Motorola 68030 @ 33 MHz                 │
│ GPU         │ yes                                     │
│ RAM         │ 16 Mb                                   │
│ Display     │ 9.1" grayscale (16 grays) 640x400       │
│ Storage     │ 80Mb hard drive, external floppy drive  │
└─────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────┘

3 years after I got it the power adapter quite literally went up in flames; it is my fault for not recapping a 35 years old device. Thankfully the iBook G3 I got uses the same plug so I was able to verify it is alive and kicking.

Software

Operating system: Macintosh System Software 7.6.1

I’m fairly sure it was preinstalled when I just got this laptop, and I didn’t touch anything because I got my hands on working floppy drive only much later, when dust settled and my attention as usual went to something else entirely.

Screenshots

The screen capture keyboard shortcut was the very same that is still being used today on macos and it was easy to transfer the screenshots to my main rig with a floppy. Linux file(1) reports screenshots as

Macintosh QuickDraw PICT, version 2, 640 x 400, at 528 0xffff, at 552 second opcode 0x0001

Interestingly enough imagemagick was able to convert them to PNG only after I added a .pict extension to those files:

Also the OS X 10.5 on my G4 laptop was able to open and process those files flawlessly, very nice that Apple kept so much of old compatibility in their OS back then.

Photos