My PowerBook 145B

Nov 14, 2011 · 2 minute read · Comments
AppleMacintoshPowerBook

I’m not sure what to do with my old Apple Macintosh PowerBook 145B laptop. It still boots, but is obviously not of much use to me any more.

Here it is booting System 7:

The machine had crashed years ago before I booted it:

Finally, boot is complete:

Some personal history and observations:

This PowerBook 145B was the second laptop I owned; the first was a PowerBook Duo that I bought used, found problematic, and sold. I also bought the 145B used. I didn’t splurge and buy a new Mac till the Power Macintosh 6100 in 1995.

With only 2 MB (that’s no typo; these days computers come with one thousand times as much RAM, more like 2 GB typically), it was necessary to monitor memory usage and quit unused applications. It was a mistake upgrading to System 7.5 on this machine, I have to admit. And with a 40 MB hard drive, I was always having to put stuff onto floppies. I bought software like RAM Doubler and Disk Doubler and Speed Doubler, but they were obviously not a panacea.

Still, I got stuff done with this laptop.

Eventually, the battery refused to hold any more real charge, and since the adapter connection got flaky, that is why the last time I used the laptop, it suddenly just lost power and shut down uncleanly.

I already threw away all my floppies years ago, and there is no network card for the laptop, so it really is useless now. I have a cute ADB-based 28.8k modem that I used with the laptop for many years. I even browsed the Web, having Mosaic installed, although I preferred using MacWeb.

I haven’t seriously used this laptop since 1998, when I was still taking it with me on travel.

Conclusion

My PowerBook 145B is such a museum piece now. What should I do with it? Wipe the hard drive and donate it somewhere, or keep around myself to amuse the millennial generation who are now babies playing with iPads?