This morning’s bit of computer wizardry was bringing an Apple Powerbook 165c back to life.
The interesting thing with the 165c is it was the very first laptop with a 256 color display, and said display is a 9 inch 640×400 passive LCD.
As an aside, making a laptop with bezels this large here in 2020 would be a war crime.
This 165c has 8MB of ram and a 120MB HD (That’s megabytes — the average photo out of a modern iPhone is a bit less than 5MB, so you can fit about 25 photos on this drive). And the HD still works, which is kind of amazing for being a 27 year old moving part.
In 1993 when these came out they were around $3400, which is roughly $6000 in today’s money — and that’s pretty expensive no matter what era you’re from.
This one needed a diode replaced on the mainboard, which with equipment this old is an easy fix… Said diode is actually visible without a magnifying glass and can be reworked with a standard soldering iron.
Once it was working I fired up Crystal Caliburn on it for fun…
