The power cord was quite the opposite of half-assed as you put it. The idea was that the flat power connector acts as a stand, or foot, and the power supply can be situated either on the desk or floor with its disc and logo upright, allowing it to be both aesthetically pleasing and tidy.
Target disk mode is what hook me up as a computer technician to Macs. That and being able to boot your Mac drive onto any Mac. Made my life so much easier.
It's a bit of a shame to hear so much generic Apple disdain in this video, when really these PowerBooks are really nicely made machines. As you said, the plastics are well chosen so that they haven't degraded over the 20 years they've been around (and compare to other laptops of that era!). They're also incredibly serviceable, and they still generally work fine (beyond battery issues). The two bays are a fantastic idea - you can mix and match them according to your needs. You can also get a wifi card which fits in the upper left section. Overall, they're fantastic laptops of that era. A total remnant of the time when Apple was very consumer friendly.
That machine (the G3 Pismo) was my last Macintosh purchase. I didn't realize at the time that it was at the tail end of Apple designing for humans, compatibility, and maintainability. The rounded front was a pleasant place to put your wrists while you worked, unlike modern MacBooks with their knife-edge aluminum cases that look so cool but dig right into your wrist. It had every major port of the era built right in along with the PCMCIA port for expandability. Inside there was a space for an AirPort card that used an integrated antenna built around the display for excellent range and reception. The whole keyboard-pop-out to get to RAM, HD, CPU, and clock battery was fantastic. The side ports could hold batteries or drives-two batteries meant a huge runtime, and the option for Zip disks, SuperDisks, DVD readers and burners, and even IDE hard drives was great.
This is probably the most serviceable Apple laptop ever -- and while not that serviceable compared to contemporaries, compared to machines today by Apple, it's an entirely different world.
@@Wortex300 On newer macbook you can't even recover data if something goes wrong, ssd is solder to the motherboard and can't work outside cause it's encrypted and linked to the cpu. No ram upgrade, it's solder too, keyboard is riveted and die shortly, the only things that can be changed are battery and screen.
I restored one not so long ago, it was my dad's old pismo, the screen was pink, very dim (like yours), with a dead main battery and a whole lot of other problems, its also the 500mhz model, now it works flawlessly, first i replaced the cfl backlight tube with a newer one, but i was not satisfied because i had a brighter strip on the bottom edge of the display and it was quite obnoxious really, i replaced the entire panel with a tft panel out of a broken thinkpad (dead ramslots, the thinkpad sometimes would boot, but most of the time it just beeps), and since that thinkpad wasn't used much, the display is as good as new, now, my Pismo is fully working, the only thing i need to do is change the hinges, and thats it, i even replaced all the dead cells in the main battery pack with brand new lg ones, and its working flawlessly ever since! I use this Pismo to type text on, i am currently writing a book on it :)
The Pismo G3 PowerBook G3 I had replaced a mediocre (sometimes terrible) PowerBook 3400c; the Pismo was a HUGE(!!) improvement. The Pismo I had was reliable, in use by family members up to 2011 when it was replaced by a MacBook Pro. Yes, you could really get yourself in trouble with OS9.x extensions. Extension troubleshooting was a pain.
The Pismo (that model) is actually one of the best of the era. You can remove the optical drive, and plug in a second battery in the other side for extra time. Under the keyboard on the left side is also a place to plug in the optional Apple AirPort card... the same one used through the G4 Powerbook Titanium models, iBook G3, and iMacs of that era as well. :D
I bought one of these (only a 400 MHz) in 2000 to run MacOS X Beta. Loved it. In 2005 I turned it to a Linux laptop - worked great that way too. The AC cord was designed to be on the floor/table
Being a 500MHz unit identifies it as the highest end "Pismo" model (the last of the G3 powerbooks) - which also tended to be referred to as "Firewire". Whilst it, too, had a bronze coloured keyboard, I have a a recollection that the term "Bronze Keyboard" tended to refer to the previous revision "Lombard"
Jason Musgrove you can also tell Lombard and Pismo apart from just the screen - Lombard/Bronze Keyboard says "Macintosh PowerBook G3", whereas Pismo just says "PowerBook"
I recently acquired a Lombard 400 and restored it for fun. Couldn’t believe it but the battery is OEM and still holds a charge. I had it in battery for hours and it still had life. I maxed out the ram and loaded a dual boot of OS X 10.3 and 9.2.2. It plays vintage games nicely and the lcd hasn’t dimmed yet. Nice machine for the time.
2 things I remember from those G3/G4 days: when the computer takes a lot of time to boot up (i.e. stays with the happy mac at switching on or slowly performs checks of disk while booting) it's almost 100% hard drive failure and the included utility Disk First Aid was known for reporting "disk appears to be ok" even on severely damaged drives; as for the software problems (erratic cursor) if you used to work in DTP and uses a LOT of fonts (with Extensis Suitcase or Adobe Type Manager) that can literally cause lots of weird software and performance issues in MacOS 9; so yes, booting with Extensions OFF rules that out (later you need to enable one by one and reboot to check which one is the culprit)
Oh yeah those font issues. I know that was a big problem for him back then and could likely have been the issue. Although, not sure why it would stop working like that being stored.
I always loved the Pismo. By the way, I could tell that was a Pismo by FireWire and 500 MHz. I think Lombard was the one without FireWire, Wallstreet had the rainbow Apple Logo, etc. etc.
16:10, yes macOS before OSX had no protected memory (unlike Linux, Windows NT/2000 or OS/2). At that time I always wanted one of those iMac G3, but the lack of a proper OS wasn't acceptable. So I waited until 2001, when OSX 10.1 was introduced on those shiny new white iBook G3s. Great machines, but horribly slow :-) Regarding identifying the laptop: look at the sticker at the bottom: M7572 is the important information and mentioned at the guides by iFixit.
@@Sonikkua Hi, I have 10.4 Tiger on my G4 ibook, very nice, does everything except youtube these days, i use 104 browser, but most pages have to many scripts and animation it crawls There are some Linux PPC iso's available but i dont think they would be modern enough to have recent ( last 5 years ) firefox or chrome web browsers
@@EvilTurkeySlices Perhaps it used some features of it, but Windows 3.x or 95 etc. were based on DOS and didn't prevent processes from overwriting memory of other processes. Similarly to the old macOS, this was not acceptable for me.
It was tough to be an Apple fan back then. Steve Jobs was just beginning his remarkable resurrection. If you had told me in 1999 that Apple would one day be one of the most valuable companies in the world I would have thought you were crazy.
I bought a fully-working Pismo for £50 ($60) from eBay a couple of days ago. Apart from the screen being a bit dirty (since cleaned), the machine was immaculate. I’ve been using Apple computers since 1980, when I used an Apple II at school. I collect vintage Mac’s and the Pismo is a great addition to my collection. Incredible design, hot-swappable bays were years ahead of their time
I remember playing around with a PowerBook G3 in CompUSA back in the day; the trackpad was small by today's standards but it was *really* nice to use. And yes, they did have Wi-Fi back then (802.11b if I remember right); Apple called their version AirPort. I also remember the AirPort Wi-Fi Base Stations they had back then that were shaped like a flattened Hershey's Kiss.
Thanks for this video - it gave me the nudge I needed to finally take an image of the old 420MB hard drive from my Amiga 1200 that's been sitting in my shed for many years. I thought it might be broken due to being repeatedly frozen and baked, but other than noisy bearings, it worked!
I think you may have overlooked the #1 benefit of the power adaptor- it has no right angles. This thing would not experience the chronic breakage problems of magsafe style connectors. It would have been very durable for traveling; wrapping it up and throwing it in a case often.
Actually where the DC wire comes out of the PSU is perpendicular to it, so tightly wrapping it does bend the cable at an extreme 90 degrees and I could see that part was already looking stressed. But even for travel you had the AC cold with no way to tie it up.
The naming scheme for some of the macs of the era are a bit weird, as they're usually based on their codenames, but they're easy to identify if you know what you're looking for With the Powerbook G3's, there were 4 major models/revisions the Kanga looks completely different to the rest of the models, and it's basically a 3400c but with a G3 in it The Wallstreet looks similar to what you have, but it has a matching grey keyboard, a rainbow logo on the bottom of the bezel instead of the white one on the top, it had two cardbus slots along with all the legacy io, and it was a bit thicker and heavier (there was also a minor revision of that, the PDQ, but it's pretty much identical, it just only came with a 14.1" lcd) The Lombard and the Pismo are pretty similar, the Pismo being what you have. The only main difference being the IO, with the Lombard having the HDI-30 scsi port instead of Firewire
This was right before release of the Titanium Powerbook, which still had a latch, as did the later aluminum Powerbooks and polycarbonate Macbooks. It wasn't until the unibody era that they dropped the latch in favor of a torque hinge. PS - Yeah, the Pismo had an Airport card slot, but it was not included as stock.
Thank you for your content these really hard times. Helps a lot. May we be able to ever enjoy it in peace and in the belief there's a future worth living, which now it's absolutely and painfully unclear. But for the time being, thanks again for what you do.
20 years was just yesterday. ;-) I moved to PCs in 1995. I miss older computers of the 8-bit era. After 1990 the computer market became boring to me. Thus I very much appreciate Adrian's videos about the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum or old Macintosh computers.
I do like these old macs. I was in high school when this came out, and our computer labs used Macs. I always wanted one for myself, but they were way too expensive. I remember we transitioned from PowerMacs with PowerPC 603e CPUs to iMac G3s. The PowerBook G3s came out soon after, and they were very sexy compared to the x86 laptops around at the time. I really should get around to opening up my PowerBook 1400c. I think the PRAM battery is dead, since it doesn't boot anymore. It would really help with getting files onto my Mac Classic II and SE/30, since I basically have to use a USB floppy drive on my PowerBook G4, which just about has a heart attack any time I try to access the floppy drive. I can access files on the network using wifi, but it's hit and miss getting them onto the floppy disk, and copying files off the floppy is definitely a no go. However if I can get my 1400c working, I can copy the files from my PC to a CF or SD card using a regular USB card reader (or the SD card slot on my Macbook Air), use a CF or SD to PCMCIA adapter to read it on the PowerBook 1400c and copy the files to the floppy disk. It's an extra step, but probably a lot more reliable than trying to use the USB floppy drive on the PowerBook G4. The hardest part would be finding where I put my PCMCIA card readers! Or I could just bite the bullet and buy a SCSI2SD v5.5, which should plug directly into the SCSI port on my Macs. It's only $85 Aussie Dollary Doos, so it's probably a worthwhile investment.
Well, Adrian... apart from screaming at my screen, when you started dismantling it from the bottom saying flip it over and pull the keyboard tabs, it was fun to watch. The g3 500 was the top of the range model and I paid a small fortune for mine back in 2000... also a top tip for the future... G3 Wallstreet black keyboard, G3 Lombard has a translucent keyboard and no firewire that leaves Pismo translucent keyboard and firewire
also, not all of your links work, www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-24-28-32-40-pin-IC-Test-Universal-ZIF-Socket-Fs/303206721971 for example is dead now, your standard signature probably needs linkchecking and updating to searches lol also again, you want to get a 3.5 ide to 2.5 ide adaptor, they include external power which SOME drives need, more than the 500 mw standard or if you're fancy and got a dual lead usb, maybe 1 amp max
Dell seemed to copy this design for later of the Latitude C series, the C600 and C800 series. The difference between this and a Windows laptop from that time was that you'd probably end up with a Pentium III and the same amount of RAM. For same price you'd end up with a Pentium III at twice the speed with twice the installed RAM and a dedicated video chipset! I don't know if I'd go so far as to say Apple switched to using magnets *soon* after this machine, they were selling iBooks and PowerBooks with metal latches until about 2006 or 2007. The polycarbonate Core Duo Macbooks were the first to have magnets in lieu of a mechanical latch. Those power supplies were actually nicknamed "the hockeypuck" or "the yo-yo" by owners for this design! Hard disks of that era all make a whining sound (bearings) and clunking and clicking noises (actuators). They're loud and noisy from the day they left the factory, and those noises are the sound of a full or simply fragmented hard drive. The LCDs in these machines were never particularly bright when new either, but the wear and tear probably didn't help it. Very difficult to see even the brightest, best kept LCDs of that era in direct sunlight. The fact the battery flashes one light... It might work! Plug it in and let it charge for a few hours and see what happens. It won't hurt anything. It's a 500MHz G3 - Just look on Wikipedia for what PowerBook G3 models had a 500MHz processor. Or put the model number itself into google instead of the name of the machine. ThinkPads loose their screws because they're not designed very well. They're not even designed to be as serviceable as these old PowerBooks - It's not surprising that parts would fall out and the rubber would perish. I personally like Mac OS 9.2 better than Macintosh System 7 that preceded it and Mac OS X that we have now. For it's time, I'd say it's probably better than Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Maybe on par with 2000. It wasn't horrifically unreliable as long as you didn't purposely provoke it. EDIT: I don't really get why you destroyed the battery, but it's your computer...
My favorite era of Mac computers was around 2003, when the Powerbook G4 and Powermac G5 were king. This was just before that, and a lot of the design asthetics were sort of in a transitional phase. This and the clamshell iBook were the last mac laptops to have the logo upside down.
This was SUCH a flashback to being a Mac owner back then, and constantly dealing with extension conflicts. Remember running "Conflict Catcher" over and over?
Heh I don't remember that as I stopped using Macs around system 7 time. The insane amount of extensions wasn't so bad those days -- but the sheer number of them on this machine was staggering!
I love these older G3 PowerBooks. A few years back I used to have a Wallstreet. Amazing machines. Though I have to say I prefer the pre USB G3 PowerBooks over these, like what I had
I recall there were different models of these vintage PowerBooks. G3 Pismo, G3 Lombard. I think I had the Lombard which was the worst design, as the L2 Cache would die from overheating causing crashes and other odd behavior. I actually sent it in to a company that resoldered new cache and placed an improved copper heatsink. Back then I spent probably around $200 for those repairs.
Ah yes, this was a real machine back in the day, and the 2300c Duo. We used to jam early SSDs in the Pismos and Mac OS 9 really rip. I actually worked on the Sound Manager on that model.
That Pismo's actually in really nice shape! The keyboards have always been that bronze color; in fact the model that immediately preceded it (Lombard) was sometimes nicknamed "Bronze" to set it apart from *its* predecessor (the "Wallstreet", which had a black keyboard). I remember seeing pictures of them in magazines (MacWorld and MacAddict) back when they were new, and they looked exactly like your dad's old G3. Kids, this is why we refer to Macs by model year these days. You have to expect confusion when you give the same name to four different products in five years. It would be pretty quick if you replace the hard drive with flash memory. For OS 9, a 32 or 64 gig SDXC card in an IDE adapter would be plenty fast. (For OS X you'd want an mSATA SSD in an adapter.)
I've got a project going to to emulate all my major computer systems going back to the 80's. Perhaps a video on 8 bit computer emulators for modern platforms would be handy?
If you have a windows machine you can just use dosbox, if you want to emulate, try say Oracle VM, you can emulate dos and linux easily enough ( i have had issues with apple osx ) I have set up DOS 4 as one machine, then Dos 5, Dos 6, Dos 6.22, Dos 5 + Win311, Win 95, Win 98 Set up each machine one by one, and make each one have its own unique dos hard drive, you need to stay within the dos file size limits for each version, also not Win 95 and Win 98 set virtual memory to under 512( 128 or 256 is fine ) , it will install and reboot but it will not run after the initial set up. So i have separate virtual machines, and also separate virtual hard drives, you can mix and match sort of, i also have a generic dos 5 data drive for saved files as a D drive, and also a separate 512meg for most of my popular software / games as E drive For linux, grab a runable cd or the ISO, create a virtual machine, specify no hard drive and just map the cdrom to the ISO you downloaded, and it should work For Apple i only emulate older apples there are seperate programs like Virtual Apple2, Mini Vmac and Basilisk Regards George
Mess, like the mame arcade emulator, emulates a lot of machines. Granted I like individual programs like vice for c64 or winuae for amiga. Also qemu does a good job of emulating some non x86 machines too. I enjoy emulating macOS 9 and today I was trying out emulating a sun sparc 5.
You should zap the PRAM on that thing... Hold down CMD+Option+P+R immediately when you power it on until you hear the system chime TWICE and then let them go.. That will hopefully fix the glitchy mouse behavior and other things. That may also fix the issues with the volume on the startup sound. That will reset all the ethernet/sound/clock/etc.
There is actually an AirPort slot on this machine, under the keyboard. You have to be *really* careful when inserting the antenna wire not to damage the display data cable though!
Honestly the Pismo is one of the best G3 laptops ever made, with the iBook G3 clamshell being a close second. It’s iconic and unique, and far more valuable and fun to have than its other iterations. The clamshell surpasses anything the G3 snow or G4 iBooks have to offer honestly, while the Pismo outshines its siblings with the Wallstreet being the second best, the Kanga being the third, and then the Lombard being that one stop gap that existed. Also, your super lucky. The 500mhz model is more rare and is the fastest Pismo there is.
"Not a better repair video"...? I personally enjoyed it. It does not need to be ultra freaky everytime. And most important: your father will be happy! :)
I was looking at that and thinking it would have been less stupid to put the power input on the side and have the charger cable curl over it. But it is a supply design
I had a 2001 Indigo iBook Firewire with that same 'yo-yo' power adapter (the iBook was the system it was designed for). I always thought it odd that they also used it with the 'Professional' PowerBook systems as well.
Not their best design, that one. You can see what they were going for, but it does seem like they gave up half way through. The round shape is actually kind of smart. Every time I saw someone wrap their cord tightly around the typical rectangular power bricks for PC laptops, I always cringed. The yo-yo is a little goofy but it does at least guarantee a reasonable bend radius.
But did the PowerBooks get released at the same time as the iBook? Was the iBook the lower end machine? Or was there a dedicated black "PowerBook" brick? Regarding the "i was made... " - I own a clamshell iBook and they used this on all components, it also states where the battery was made in this manner.
@@purplesparc There were dedicated black power bricks for the Powerbooks but they had a recall. Apple replaced it with this style which had two different tips under the same model numbers.
Sometimes its nice just to have a simple fix. I did something similar years ago to an old Pentium 2 laptop battery that had died. Just gutted it and put the old housing back in place to cover the hole. Amazing how much lighter it made the laptop overall!
Pismo 400mhz owner here: Actually, This Pismo (can tell by it is a Pismo by having Firewire) DOES have internal airport. under the keyboard on the opposite side of where the HD is. that is where the airport card would go if it had it and if you look you can see the Airport cable hanging around over there. I had one with mine...It's wireless B so its basically useless. so I removed&discarded mine. I use a PCcard wireless G card if I want to use wifi on my pismo. I'am also surprised your Dad's Pismo powers on with a dead PRAM bat as mine will not even boot chime with a dead PRAM battery. from looking online, its a common issue with Pismos refusing to boot with dead PRAM battery but that one seems to be fine with it plugged in...interesting... Also, that power light...is a sleep light. put that mac to sleep and you'll see the green power light glow on and off. There is no power light that I know of on these.
You're giving me total flashbacks to working on these things in the 1998-2001 timeframe. All the managers were total Apple fanboys and they thought I was an idiot for saying these machines were hard to work on. Glad it wasn't just me. The documentation was horrible, narrowing down which one of the hundreds of extensions was causing trouble could take 10+ hours to do, and they were prone to odd behavior like the date issue you uncovered... But hey, since you could do things like power them up in disk mode everything else about them must have been great, in their minds. I don't miss that generation of Mac at all.
Not gonna lie, I cringed when you tried to open the machine from the bottom! (That's mostly for servicing the power/sound board, which is what killed my own Pismo back in the day...) I have very fond memories of mine, it being my daily driver in college for a while; the thing that killed mine was me trying to repair the power/sound board because the headphone jack had broken off its mount. I'd love to have another working one someday, though obviously I'd have to figure out how to get a backlight mod installed since the majority of them just have too many hours on the CCFLs. Also, they're super-easy to work on - deceptively so, I'd say, given your experience! I'd love to see a restore/upgrade video, personally, since the machine didn't need any actual repairs (PRAM and main battery rebuild aside).
Lithium ion batteries are generally fine - it's the NiMH ones you need to worry about. Also, the fact that the battery icon was flashing when it was removed from the machine actually suggests it was still working to at least some extent, so unfortunately you killed a potentially good pack!
If the battery was discharged below 3.3v for an extended period of time, the lithium and copper start forming little needles that pierce the dielectric layer and can cause extreme shorts, like a Galaxy Note 7 battery. Bigclivedotcom has an excellent video on how Lithium batteries fail with age and manufacturing errors
Yeah I've worked with enough ancient batteries to know this one was toast. Old overdischarged batteries and not generally safe and definitely won't hold a charge. It hadn't been plugged into power in probably 10 years and that destroys the cells due to self discharge. I ran the machine off battery (not shown) and it had an indicated 50% charge. After a few minutes it was flashing it was about to die.
I still have one of these old Powerbook G3s (Wallstreet which still supports the Floppy drive module. Also a Pismo )and even though the LEDs on the battery pack will light when it is plugged in trust me the battery pack is not charging and they are dead. I would be surprised if any of these packs from that era still work. The iBook packs from 2 years later are still working. You can refurb them but it is not as easy as you think thanks to the controller board.
Adrian you have a natural ability to educate. This video was great! You could choose to do a video on the most boring topic imaginable and it would still be interesting to watch. If only you could answer email as well as you can produce videos!
This is an excellent video done by a 20-year Windows user. Also, I am sure your Dad was very happy to have access to his files again (you are a great son). Own two of these G3 Firewire Powerbook laptops (keep the second one for spare parts, if needed). This model has been a joy to own. In the year 2020, these old laptops are just for vintage fun but back in the day this model had everything an Apple laptop user could ask for. Why, you may ask is this model which, was the last of the "Black and White" Powerbook systems my all time favorite? Because there are so many ways to have fun with its two USB ports, two Fire-wire 400 ports, PC card slot, two "Hot Swapable" dive bays (for an extra battery, zip drive, super disk/floppy disk drive, and extra memory drive, etc.). This was also the first Powerbook with an internal airport card for a wireless connection.
An absolute success! I so much envy that you managed to run it in QEMU. I used to try to solve a similar problem once. I've still got that raw HDD image, from the pre-PCI era PowerPC Mac, which I tried to run under several emulators, but no luck so far.
There were two that had the "bronze" keyboard if I recall; the Lombard and the Pismo. The Pismo was a far better machine, but this might be a Lombard, and those things were LEMONS.
This was really nice to watch! I hope your dad enjoys the emulated version of the machine! I did data recovery for years on anything from MFM all the way to SATA drives, and even some obscure media like Syquest cartridges and Ditto tapes. Its nice to see more of it done!
Great video, but I always go for the nuclear option first: dd the hard drive before fiddling with the system. The emulation was a nice touch... something that I wouldn't have tried.
I would say the finder got worse in OSX than it was in OS9. I used 68040 / G3 / G4 Macs day in day out for work and have fond memories of them. It's true the lack of protected memory could be a pain; often a bad font or rogue Xtension in someone else's Quark Xpress document would bring down the whole machine, but on the whole I liked MacOS back in this era.
this is fascinating, and like seeing an alternate universe, mac is an alien world to me, i've been on PC with DOS/windows my whole life, so I wouldn't even know where to start to troubleshoot a mac, like "ok, you guys have boot disks like DOS, right?, can't you boot from a floppy or a cd to get to a command line?"
0:40 M7572 is the family/model number. You can look up the exact details using that serial number at everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/ 19:10 It's the G3 Pismo: everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/specs/powerbook_g3_500_fw.html
I would have appreciated if Apple literally wrote model number on the sticker like every other company on Earth, instead of calling it "family number."
The Mac was just stupid for years. A mono computer? why would you go backwards and remove colour? Maybe if you're making a word processor or doing DTP, which is what Macs ended up doing a lot of.
Target Disk Mode is awesome. I have 9.2 on my G4 and 10.4/10.5 on my G5. I once connected them together and booted 10.4 on my G4, using my G5 as a massive bootable hard drive.
I always wonder if anybody used target disk mode as a laptop dock of sorts, using a more powerful desktop computer and screen at home while booting off of the laptop's drive to seamlessly synchronise work between home and on the go.
@@kaitlyn__L I did that for years! One of the slickest features of its time! I had the Pismo 500 with 1G of ram and used it for concert touring and music industry road work for years, and would "T-Drive" it to the MacPro at home. That thing was unbelievably reliable and toughs nails, and ran recording and processing on well over 1000 shows in its time.
The worst part of the power adaptor is that there are two versions with different jacks on them and they even sold with the same model numbers. Same voltage and everything, but only some worked with both the clamshell G3s and Powerbook G3s that I own. Trying to find one of those right now, if I have to pay $60 for one I might as well get the right one to work on both. In the meantime I can at least try the QEMU route to see if they even have a functioning install.
Definitely a Pismo PowerBook G3. I've got one here that still works, albeit the hinge assemblies for the screen have bit the dust. I run it "headless", with an external display and set it to mirror the video. It kinda has a n Apple IIc vibe going on. You can hook up external hard drives or even USB thumb drives, as long as you make sure they're using FAT32 as the file system, to get the files off of it.
@@adriansdigitalbasement The hinge wore out from normal use; no forceful trauma. This is a common part failure for this model. So is the DC-In/Sound Board. I used to repair these laptops and would get the occasional Pismo in because of accidental torqued audio and charger jacks. The part is easy and cheap to replace, but requires a complete tear-down of the laptop; that can take about 2 hours to do on a good day. Apple certainly meant to send this series of PowerBooks out with a bang, as they threw everything but the kitchen sink in it. Room for 2 batteries (for up to 10 hours of battery use). The second battery slot (where the DVD-ROM drive goes) serves for also holding either an external HDD from VST or an Imation SuperDisk FDD (which I still have both of). These can be hot-swapped at any time under both OS X and Classic OS 9.x.x. You could even get upgrades that would get the machine up to a PowerPC G4 running at 1 GHz. Quite the workhorse of its time, though I think it runs fastest under Classic OS. Also, a correction--in Mac OS 9.2.x, they were finally able to implement Protected Memory Mode, according to Steve Wozniak. I hope this helps! Thank you for all your useful videos; I find them very informative and entertaining.
@@adriansdigitalbasement Oh, the power supply/charger is affectionately named a "Yo-Yo Power Adapter". The only disadvantage of these is that they are prone to overheating and the wire going into the center hub of the yo-yo housing can wear out, causing the insulation to break and eventually the exposed wire along with it. Owners are better off going to someplace like PowerBook Medic and picking up a brick charger for around $25 + shipping.
I didn't like that the battery pack was destroyed. You could at least keep the components together and have the option to put new lithium-ion cells and rebuild the package one day. Maybe also restore the machine in the future: change the batteries of the PRAM and mount a fully working hard disk (few $). I'm pretty sure this wasn't your plan but I always tend to make sure I have a chance to go back. Who knows if one day that old machine will have a purpose, after all we are retrocomputer's lovers!
Found your channel a while back, been watching your videos at work, good to pass the time with ( I work security ). I remember working on the occasional apple G series at a PC repair shop I worked in when I was in high school around 2006, we had a busted up g3 laptop like that. I set it up to pull data, it was the lower half of the case and the bare lcd panel stuck to the wall with double sided tape next to some older apples I can't remember the models of that we used to pull files from weird crap people brought in, actually had someone bring in a SE with a dead CRT in late 2006 asking if we could replace the screen. I convinced my boss to keep the SE to resell as is for the cost of pulling the guys files... Bunch of word docs, took all of a few minutes to transfer and my boss sold the SE for 50 bucks. Anyway, I don't know much about Macs or apples, but my boss didn't even know about about target disk mode. We eventually got a g3 tower that someone dropped to replace the humpty dumpty g3 laptop, it wasn't taped to the wall but it was partially taped together.
The logo on my ThinkPad is upside down from an onlooker's perspective, but to distract from that I also have a couple of used Royal Mail first class stamps on the opposite corner, just 'cos... :P
Same On my X120e, X131e, and X140e, being upside down, but on the the X131e, and X140e the the i in the ThinkPad logos light up, so can't really cover them up, same for the goofy green lights in the middle of the lids in which I just have American flag stickers over them to tone them down. I know why they did the lights, is because these where for educational use, and it showed the students had the machines on. I just use them for basic Manjaro Mate Linux machines as couch computers/backups and the the X120e as a Chromium OS machine as a backup, and someone comes over, and needs a computer, I can put them in guest mode.
Used to have one of those. It was stolen from my apartment in college. I sometimes check ebay for it, and wonder what it's doing now. Hope it's still out in the world. I miss it.
This machine won’t startup with p-ram batteries connected. (The Braun pack under the keyboard. When disconnected it starts up normally without problems.
thats actually the latest and best of the black Pismo G3 Powerbooks, with a 500 Mhz. Nice machine..internally the same board as the first Titanium G4 Powerbooks.
Who would have thought that 20 years ago apple made computers which last for decades and are made to be serviceable... they sure got those bugs nailed later on.
No.... we don’t need him coming in here and going “LoOk At ThIs SHit It DOEnT WoRk RiGht! It ShoUlD WoRk FlawLEsSly EvEN AfTeR yeARs, PlaNnEd ObsOlEsEnCe!!!!! FuCk ApPle, ItS NoT 100% PeRfEctLY DeSigNed LiKe My ThInKPaDs ThAT CaNt FaiL BeCaUsE ItS PeRfEcT!
I have never seen this laptop before. Nor have I ever seen that yo-yo space power supply. I have used the iBook G3 I think it is that I have. Maybe a G4. It has the same power supply design language as the latest laptops (even compatible with the extension you can get for the iPads and MacBooks today). I do miss the power indicator light on the MacBooks today. It’s not really needed, but I thought that would be handy to have. Another interesting thing to note is the older lithium ion batteries (authentic) used in Apple laptops (at least on my iBook) are extremely reliable and hold a good charge after all these years. They don’t make laptop batteries like those anymore. Other laptop batteries I had don’t last a few years. Some even were bad after a few months. Some people I’ve talked to claim that the iBook was the Apple laptop that had the highest reliability. It went downhill from there. MacBooks have been notorious for their issues, which is a shame.
I started with a Commodore 64 -> 128 -> Amiga but when Commodore failed I went to the PC since I had a business and did not want to move to another platform I felt invested in. At he time I was convinced Apple would fail in a few years too 😅
The power cord was quite the opposite of half-assed as you put it. The idea was that the flat power connector acts as a stand, or foot, and the power supply can be situated either on the desk or floor with its disc and logo upright, allowing it to be both aesthetically pleasing and tidy.
Target disk mode is what hook me up as a computer technician to Macs. That and being able to boot your Mac drive onto any Mac. Made my life so much easier.
It's a bit of a shame to hear so much generic Apple disdain in this video, when really these PowerBooks are really nicely made machines. As you said, the plastics are well chosen so that they haven't degraded over the 20 years they've been around (and compare to other laptops of that era!). They're also incredibly serviceable, and they still generally work fine (beyond battery issues). The two bays are a fantastic idea - you can mix and match them according to your needs. You can also get a wifi card which fits in the upper left section. Overall, they're fantastic laptops of that era. A total remnant of the time when Apple was very consumer friendly.
That machine (the G3 Pismo) was my last Macintosh purchase. I didn't realize at the time that it was at the tail end of Apple designing for humans, compatibility, and maintainability. The rounded front was a pleasant place to put your wrists while you worked, unlike modern MacBooks with their knife-edge aluminum cases that look so cool but dig right into your wrist. It had every major port of the era built right in along with the PCMCIA port for expandability. Inside there was a space for an AirPort card that used an integrated antenna built around the display for excellent range and reception. The whole keyboard-pop-out to get to RAM, HD, CPU, and clock battery was fantastic. The side ports could hold batteries or drives-two batteries meant a huge runtime, and the option for Zip disks, SuperDisks, DVD readers and burners, and even IDE hard drives was great.
A nice reminder of the days when Macs were designed to be serviceable
This is probably the most serviceable Apple laptop ever -- and while not that serviceable compared to contemporaries, compared to machines today by Apple, it's an entirely different world.
@@adriansdigitalbasement they were this serviceable up until the unibody. Thats when steve job got his original goal of truly sealing the computer
Naoki Saito i have a old macbook pro mid 2012 ive put 16gb of 2133 mhz ddr3 ram and a 500 gb ssd and its crazy fast
@@Wortex300 On newer macbook you can't even recover data if something goes wrong, ssd is solder to the motherboard and can't work outside cause it's encrypted and linked to the cpu. No ram upgrade, it's solder too, keyboard is riveted and die shortly, the only things that can be changed are battery and screen.
@@NaokisRC tbh i like the unibody design, they're custom and benefits come with it
I restored one not so long ago, it was my dad's old pismo, the screen was pink, very dim (like yours), with a dead main battery and a whole lot of other problems, its also the 500mhz model, now it works flawlessly, first i replaced the cfl backlight tube with a newer one, but i was not satisfied because i had a brighter strip on the bottom edge of the display and it was quite obnoxious really, i replaced the entire panel with a tft panel out of a broken thinkpad (dead ramslots, the thinkpad sometimes would boot, but most of the time it just beeps), and since that thinkpad wasn't used much, the display is as good as new, now, my Pismo is fully working, the only thing i need to do is change the hinges, and thats it, i even replaced all the dead cells in the main battery pack with brand new lg ones, and its working flawlessly ever since! I use this Pismo to type text on, i am currently writing a book on it :)
The Pismo G3 PowerBook G3 I had replaced a mediocre (sometimes terrible) PowerBook 3400c; the Pismo was a HUGE(!!) improvement. The Pismo I had was reliable, in use by family members up to 2011 when it was replaced by a MacBook Pro. Yes, you could really get yourself in trouble with OS9.x extensions. Extension troubleshooting was a pain.
The Pismo (that model) is actually one of the best of the era. You can remove the optical drive, and plug in a second battery in the other side for extra time. Under the keyboard on the left side is also a place to plug in the optional Apple AirPort card... the same one used through the G4 Powerbook Titanium models, iBook G3, and iMacs of that era as well. :D
Is this secondary battery hot swappable like some ThinkPads?
@@pedrofelck as far as I remember it was.
I bought one of these (only a 400 MHz) in 2000 to run MacOS X Beta. Loved it. In 2005 I turned it to a Linux laptop - worked great that way too.
The AC cord was designed to be on the floor/table
This looks like a standard "bronze keyboard" PowerBook G3 - so that keyboard colour is correct and original.
Being a 500MHz unit identifies it as the highest end "Pismo" model (the last of the G3 powerbooks) - which also tended to be referred to as "Firewire". Whilst it, too, had a bronze coloured keyboard, I have a a recollection that the term "Bronze Keyboard" tended to refer to the previous revision "Lombard"
@@jasonmusgrove7861 Yep. Definitely a Pismo. I had that exact model. The CPU speed is the dead giveaway.
Jason Musgrove you can also tell Lombard and Pismo apart from just the screen - Lombard/Bronze Keyboard says "Macintosh PowerBook G3", whereas Pismo just says "PowerBook"
I love this line of powerbooks Wallstreet, Lombard, and Pismo
I recently acquired a Lombard 400 and restored it for fun. Couldn’t believe it but the battery is OEM and still holds a charge. I had it in battery for hours and it still had life. I maxed out the ram and loaded a dual boot of OS X 10.3 and 9.2.2. It plays vintage games nicely and the lcd hasn’t dimmed yet. Nice machine for the time.
2 things I remember from those G3/G4 days: when the computer takes a lot of time to boot up (i.e. stays with the happy mac at switching on or slowly performs checks of disk while booting) it's almost 100% hard drive failure and the included utility Disk First Aid was known for reporting "disk appears to be ok" even on severely damaged drives; as for the software problems (erratic cursor) if you used to work in DTP and uses a LOT of fonts (with Extensis Suitcase or Adobe Type Manager) that can literally cause lots of weird software and performance issues in MacOS 9; so yes, booting with Extensions OFF rules that out (later you need to enable one by one and reboot to check which one is the culprit)
Oh yeah those font issues. I know that was a big problem for him back then and could likely have been the issue. Although, not sure why it would stop working like that being stored.
I always loved the Pismo. By the way, I could tell that was a Pismo by FireWire and 500 MHz. I think Lombard was the one without FireWire, Wallstreet had the rainbow Apple Logo, etc. etc.
Everymac is your friend when you want to identify an old Mac.
The Mactracker app is also good for this.
Also lowendmac.com
16:10, yes macOS before OSX had no protected memory (unlike Linux, Windows NT/2000 or OS/2). At that time I always wanted one of those iMac G3, but the lack of a proper OS wasn't acceptable. So I waited until 2001, when OSX 10.1 was introduced on those shiny new white iBook G3s. Great machines, but horribly slow :-) Regarding identifying the laptop: look at the sticker at the bottom: M7572 is the important information and mentioned at the guides by iFixit.
It's been a while but my memory is that it was OSX Tiger that was finally both great and fast.
You could run MorphOS on that G3 now.
@@Sonikkua Hi, I have 10.4 Tiger on my G4 ibook, very nice, does everything except youtube these days, i use 104 browser, but most pages have to many scripts and animation it crawls
There are some Linux PPC iso's available but i dont think they would be modern enough to have recent ( last 5 years ) firefox or chrome web browsers
Windows 3.0 had protected mode.
@@EvilTurkeySlices Perhaps it used some features of it, but Windows 3.x or 95 etc. were based on DOS and didn't prevent processes from overwriting memory of other processes. Similarly to the old macOS, this was not acceptable for me.
Wow, this Pismo is in great shape! Your dad must have taken really great care of this beauty. :)
My Pismo remains one of my favorite Macs. Still kicking myself for having sold it way back when.
It was tough to be an Apple fan back then. Steve Jobs was just beginning his remarkable resurrection. If you had told me in 1999 that Apple would one day be one of the most valuable companies in the world I would have thought you were crazy.
Yeah I mentioned in another comment it was the malaise era for Apple. There was a reason they were just about bankrupt...
The main battery dying won’t actually reset the volume on these things - that’s stored in the PRAM.
I had a G3 Pismo which I overclocked from 400 to 550MHz, using some solder-jumpers. Sure I can‘t do this to my current rMBP.
Guess you got pretty lucky - I heard these G3s tend not to take kindly to overclocking more than 50MHz or so.
Ah! A swap of the 18650 cells would've been cool to see.
I bought a fully-working Pismo for £50 ($60) from eBay a couple of days ago. Apart from the screen being a bit dirty (since cleaned), the machine was immaculate. I’ve been using Apple computers since 1980, when I used an Apple II at school. I collect vintage Mac’s and the Pismo is a great addition to my collection. Incredible design, hot-swappable bays were years ahead of their time
I remember playing around with a PowerBook G3 in CompUSA back in the day; the trackpad was small by today's standards but it was *really* nice to use. And yes, they did have Wi-Fi back then (802.11b if I remember right); Apple called their version AirPort. I also remember the AirPort Wi-Fi Base Stations they had back then that were shaped like a flattened Hershey's Kiss.
Thanks for this video - it gave me the nudge I needed to finally take an image of the old 420MB hard drive from my Amiga 1200 that's been sitting in my shed for many years. I thought it might be broken due to being repeatedly frozen and baked, but other than noisy bearings, it worked!
Now you can use that image in FS-UAE.
Emulating that old computer was pretty awesome,
I think you may have overlooked the #1 benefit of the power adaptor- it has no right angles. This thing would not experience the chronic breakage problems of magsafe style connectors. It would have been very durable for traveling; wrapping it up and throwing it in a case often.
Actually where the DC wire comes out of the PSU is perpendicular to it, so tightly wrapping it does bend the cable at an extreme 90 degrees and I could see that part was already looking stressed. But even for travel you had the AC cold with no way to tie it up.
The naming scheme for some of the macs of the era are a bit weird, as they're usually based on their codenames, but they're easy to identify if you know what you're looking for
With the Powerbook G3's, there were 4 major models/revisions
the Kanga looks completely different to the rest of the models, and it's basically a 3400c but with a G3 in it
The Wallstreet looks similar to what you have, but it has a matching grey keyboard, a rainbow logo on the bottom of the bezel instead of the white one on the top, it had two cardbus slots along with all the legacy io, and it was a bit thicker and heavier (there was also a minor revision of that, the PDQ, but it's pretty much identical, it just only came with a 14.1" lcd)
The Lombard and the Pismo are pretty similar, the Pismo being what you have. The only main difference being the IO, with the Lombard having the HDI-30 scsi port instead of Firewire
This was right before release of the Titanium Powerbook, which still had a latch, as did the later aluminum Powerbooks and polycarbonate Macbooks. It wasn't until the unibody era that they dropped the latch in favor of a torque hinge.
PS - Yeah, the Pismo had an Airport card slot, but it was not included as stock.
Thank you for your content these really hard times. Helps a lot. May we be able to ever enjoy it in peace and in the belief there's a future worth living, which now it's absolutely and painfully unclear. But for the time being, thanks again for what you do.
20 years was just yesterday. ;-) I moved to PCs in 1995. I miss older computers of the 8-bit era. After 1990 the computer market became boring to me. Thus I very much appreciate Adrian's videos about the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum or old Macintosh computers.
Nice touch to use QEMU to emulate the old machine with the drive image. I like it 👍
I do like these old macs. I was in high school when this came out, and our computer labs used Macs. I always wanted one for myself, but they were way too expensive. I remember we transitioned from PowerMacs with PowerPC 603e CPUs to iMac G3s. The PowerBook G3s came out soon after, and they were very sexy compared to the x86 laptops around at the time.
I really should get around to opening up my PowerBook 1400c. I think the PRAM battery is dead, since it doesn't boot anymore. It would really help with getting files onto my Mac Classic II and SE/30, since I basically have to use a USB floppy drive on my PowerBook G4, which just about has a heart attack any time I try to access the floppy drive. I can access files on the network using wifi, but it's hit and miss getting them onto the floppy disk, and copying files off the floppy is definitely a no go.
However if I can get my 1400c working, I can copy the files from my PC to a CF or SD card using a regular USB card reader (or the SD card slot on my Macbook Air), use a CF or SD to PCMCIA adapter to read it on the PowerBook 1400c and copy the files to the floppy disk. It's an extra step, but probably a lot more reliable than trying to use the USB floppy drive on the PowerBook G4. The hardest part would be finding where I put my PCMCIA card readers!
Or I could just bite the bullet and buy a SCSI2SD v5.5, which should plug directly into the SCSI port on my Macs. It's only $85 Aussie Dollary Doos, so it's probably a worthwhile investment.
Well, Adrian... apart from screaming at my screen, when you started dismantling it from the bottom saying flip it over and pull the keyboard tabs, it was fun to watch. The g3 500 was the top of the range model and I paid a small fortune for mine back in 2000... also a top tip for the future... G3 Wallstreet black keyboard, G3 Lombard has a translucent keyboard and no firewire that leaves Pismo translucent keyboard and firewire
peeks at files: "women only","books ilust", distiller,and jogging photos........Saucy
Lol no wonder he wanted those files.
hey adrian, can we have a mirror of the old 90s porn collection on archive.org? especially the 1s that play in realplayer basic
also, not all of your links work, www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-24-28-32-40-pin-IC-Test-Universal-ZIF-Socket-Fs/303206721971 for example is dead now, your standard signature probably needs linkchecking and updating to searches lol
also again, you want to get a 3.5 ide to 2.5 ide adaptor, they include external power which SOME drives need, more than the 500 mw standard or if you're fancy and got a dual lead usb, maybe 1 amp max
"Men at work". I found an old porno VHS with that title years ago.
Dell seemed to copy this design for later of the Latitude C series, the C600 and C800 series. The difference between this and a Windows laptop from that time was that you'd probably end up with a Pentium III and the same amount of RAM. For same price you'd end up with a Pentium III at twice the speed with twice the installed RAM and a dedicated video chipset!
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say Apple switched to using magnets *soon* after this machine, they were selling iBooks and PowerBooks with metal latches until about 2006 or 2007. The polycarbonate Core Duo Macbooks were the first to have magnets in lieu of a mechanical latch.
Those power supplies were actually nicknamed "the hockeypuck" or "the yo-yo" by owners for this design! Hard disks of that era all make a whining sound (bearings) and clunking and clicking noises (actuators). They're loud and noisy from the day they left the factory, and those noises are the sound of a full or simply fragmented hard drive. The LCDs in these machines were never particularly bright when new either, but the wear and tear probably didn't help it. Very difficult to see even the brightest, best kept LCDs of that era in direct sunlight. The fact the battery flashes one light... It might work! Plug it in and let it charge for a few hours and see what happens. It won't hurt anything. It's a 500MHz G3 - Just look on Wikipedia for what PowerBook G3 models had a 500MHz processor. Or put the model number itself into google instead of the name of the machine.
ThinkPads loose their screws because they're not designed very well. They're not even designed to be as serviceable as these old PowerBooks - It's not surprising that parts would fall out and the rubber would perish.
I personally like Mac OS 9.2 better than Macintosh System 7 that preceded it and Mac OS X that we have now. For it's time, I'd say it's probably better than Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Maybe on par with 2000. It wasn't horrifically unreliable as long as you didn't purposely provoke it.
EDIT: I don't really get why you destroyed the battery, but it's your computer...
Love these videos on newer computers. These are the vintage that are becoming troublesome to repair.
My favorite era of Mac computers was around 2003, when the Powerbook G4 and Powermac G5 were king. This was just before that, and a lot of the design asthetics were sort of in a transitional phase. This and the clamshell iBook were the last mac laptops to have the logo upside down.
This was SUCH a flashback to being a Mac owner back then, and constantly dealing with extension conflicts. Remember running "Conflict Catcher" over and over?
Heh I don't remember that as I stopped using Macs around system 7 time. The insane amount of extensions wasn't so bad those days -- but the sheer number of them on this machine was staggering!
I love these older G3 PowerBooks. A few years back I used to have a Wallstreet. Amazing machines. Though I have to say I prefer the pre USB G3 PowerBooks over these, like what I had
Happy you were able to get your father's data backed up. I have so many dead hard drives from various systems with alot of lost data.
I recall there were different models of these vintage PowerBooks. G3 Pismo, G3 Lombard. I think I had the Lombard which was the worst design, as the L2 Cache would die from overheating causing crashes and other odd behavior. I actually sent it in to a company that resoldered new cache and placed an improved copper heatsink. Back then I spent probably around $200 for those repairs.
Ah yes, this was a real machine back in the day, and the 2300c Duo. We used to jam early SSDs in the Pismos and Mac OS 9 really rip. I actually worked on the Sound Manager on that model.
Worked on the Sound Manager eh? My name should be familiar then. Your name?
That Pismo's actually in really nice shape! The keyboards have always been that bronze color; in fact the model that immediately preceded it (Lombard) was sometimes nicknamed "Bronze" to set it apart from *its* predecessor (the "Wallstreet", which had a black keyboard). I remember seeing pictures of them in magazines (MacWorld and MacAddict) back when they were new, and they looked exactly like your dad's old G3.
Kids, this is why we refer to Macs by model year these days. You have to expect confusion when you give the same name to four different products in five years.
It would be pretty quick if you replace the hard drive with flash memory. For OS 9, a 32 or 64 gig SDXC card in an IDE adapter would be plenty fast. (For OS X you'd want an mSATA SSD in an adapter.)
I've got a project going to to emulate all my major computer systems going back to the 80's. Perhaps a video on 8 bit computer emulators for modern platforms would be handy?
That would be great. Good idea! @adrian ... you know what to do, good sir!
If you have a windows machine you can just use dosbox, if you want to emulate, try say Oracle VM, you can emulate dos and linux easily enough ( i have had issues with apple osx )
I have set up DOS 4 as one machine, then Dos 5, Dos 6, Dos 6.22, Dos 5 + Win311, Win 95, Win 98
Set up each machine one by one, and make each one have its own unique dos hard drive, you need to stay within the dos file size limits for each version, also not Win 95 and Win 98 set virtual memory to under 512( 128 or 256 is fine ) , it will install and reboot but it will not run after the initial set up.
So i have separate virtual machines, and also separate virtual hard drives, you can mix and match sort of, i also have a generic dos 5 data drive for saved files as a D drive, and also a separate 512meg for most of my popular software / games as E drive
For linux, grab a runable cd or the ISO, create a virtual machine, specify no hard drive and just map the cdrom to the ISO you downloaded, and it should work
For Apple i only emulate older apples there are seperate programs like Virtual Apple2, Mini Vmac and Basilisk
Regards
George
Mess, like the mame arcade emulator, emulates a lot of machines. Granted I like individual programs like vice for c64 or winuae for amiga.
Also qemu does a good job of emulating some non x86 machines too. I enjoy emulating macOS 9 and today I was trying out emulating a sun sparc 5.
You should zap the PRAM on that thing... Hold down CMD+Option+P+R immediately when you power it on until you hear the system chime TWICE and then let them go.. That will hopefully fix the glitchy mouse behavior and other things. That may also fix the issues with the volume on the startup sound. That will reset all the ethernet/sound/clock/etc.
Apple made some PCMCIA AirPort cards. That's probably what those drivers were for.
There is actually an AirPort slot on this machine, under the keyboard. You have to be *really* careful when inserting the antenna wire not to damage the display data cable though!
Honestly the Pismo is one of the best G3 laptops ever made, with the iBook G3 clamshell being a close second. It’s iconic and unique, and far more valuable and fun to have than its other iterations. The clamshell surpasses anything the G3 snow or G4 iBooks have to offer honestly, while the Pismo outshines its siblings with the Wallstreet being the second best, the Kanga being the third, and then the Lombard being that one stop gap that existed. Also, your super lucky. The 500mhz model is more rare and is the fastest Pismo there is.
"Not a better repair video"...? I personally enjoyed it. It does not need to be ultra freaky everytime. And most important: your father will be happy! :)
Target disk mode rocks!
Ohhh i pine for the g3 era. My first computer was a g3 tower and i loved it. Still miss it.
Pismo! Probably one of my all time favorite Macs. They're getting hard to find at a decent price.
4:42 yes that was actually a great power adapter, with cord management (well most of the cord managed.)
I was looking at that and thinking it would have been less stupid to put the power input on the side and have the charger cable curl over it. But it is a supply design
I had a 2001 Indigo iBook Firewire with that same 'yo-yo' power adapter (the iBook was the system it was designed for). I always thought it odd that they also used it with the 'Professional' PowerBook systems as well.
Not their best design, that one. You can see what they were going for, but it does seem like they gave up half way through.
The round shape is actually kind of smart. Every time I saw someone wrap their cord tightly around the typical rectangular power bricks for PC laptops, I always cringed. The yo-yo is a little goofy but it does at least guarantee a reasonable bend radius.
The reason for the lower case I in the I was made in statement on the power adapter is because the early iBooks used the same charger as the pismo
But did the PowerBooks get released at the same time as the iBook? Was the iBook the lower end machine? Or was there a dedicated black "PowerBook" brick?
Regarding the "i was made...
" - I own a clamshell iBook and they used this on all components, it also states where the battery was made in this manner.
@@purplesparc There were dedicated black power bricks for the Powerbooks but they had a recall. Apple replaced it with this style which had two different tips under the same model numbers.
Sometimes its nice just to have a simple fix.
I did something similar years ago to an old Pentium 2 laptop battery that had died. Just gutted it and put the old housing back in place to cover the hole. Amazing how much lighter it made the laptop overall!
Pismo 400mhz owner here: Actually, This Pismo (can tell by it is a Pismo by having Firewire) DOES have internal airport. under the keyboard on the opposite side of where the HD is. that is where the airport card would go if it had it and if you look you can see the Airport cable hanging around over there. I had one with mine...It's wireless B so its basically useless. so I removed&discarded mine. I use a PCcard wireless G card if I want to use wifi on my pismo. I'am also surprised your Dad's Pismo powers on with a dead PRAM bat as mine will not even boot chime with a dead PRAM battery. from looking online, its a common issue with Pismos refusing to boot with dead PRAM battery but that one seems to be fine with it plugged in...interesting... Also, that power light...is a sleep light. put that mac to sleep and you'll see the green power light glow on and off. There is no power light that I know of on these.
You're giving me total flashbacks to working on these things in the 1998-2001 timeframe. All the managers were total Apple fanboys and they thought I was an idiot for saying these machines were hard to work on. Glad it wasn't just me. The documentation was horrible, narrowing down which one of the hundreds of extensions was causing trouble could take 10+ hours to do, and they were prone to odd behavior like the date issue you uncovered... But hey, since you could do things like power them up in disk mode everything else about them must have been great, in their minds. I don't miss that generation of Mac at all.
Not gonna lie, I cringed when you tried to open the machine from the bottom! (That's mostly for servicing the power/sound board, which is what killed my own Pismo back in the day...) I have very fond memories of mine, it being my daily driver in college for a while; the thing that killed mine was me trying to repair the power/sound board because the headphone jack had broken off its mount. I'd love to have another working one someday, though obviously I'd have to figure out how to get a backlight mod installed since the majority of them just have too many hours on the CCFLs. Also, they're super-easy to work on - deceptively so, I'd say, given your experience! I'd love to see a restore/upgrade video, personally, since the machine didn't need any actual repairs (PRAM and main battery rebuild aside).
22:24 - neat trick there QEMU is cool......
Yes, I'd have loved more about that in the video. I found that extremely interesting.
@@ninline2000 yeah, he should do a video about that.
Thats such an adorable idea, making an emulator for your dad to explore his old laptop. Loved the vid!
Ah, I still have my Pismo. It’s in perfect working order (aside from the battery, that is). Love it. And, yes, it has an AirPort card.
Mine does not have an airport card, and I have no bat devices. It works fine however.
Lithium ion batteries are generally fine - it's the NiMH ones you need to worry about. Also, the fact that the battery icon was flashing when it was removed from the machine actually suggests it was still working to at least some extent, so unfortunately you killed a potentially good pack!
The battery was still charging. The battery pack showed one LED after a while.
There should be a way to check the individual batteries and assemble the pack together.
If the battery was discharged below 3.3v for an extended period of time, the lithium and copper start forming little needles that pierce the dielectric layer and can cause extreme shorts, like a Galaxy Note 7 battery. Bigclivedotcom has an excellent video on how Lithium batteries fail with age and manufacturing errors
Yeah I've worked with enough ancient batteries to know this one was toast. Old overdischarged batteries and not generally safe and definitely won't hold a charge. It hadn't been plugged into power in probably 10 years and that destroys the cells due to self discharge. I ran the machine off battery (not shown) and it had an indicated 50% charge. After a few minutes it was flashing it was about to die.
I still have one of these old Powerbook G3s (Wallstreet which still supports the Floppy drive module. Also a Pismo )and even though the LEDs on the battery pack will light when it is plugged in trust me the battery pack is not charging and they are dead. I would be surprised if any of these packs from that era still work. The iBook packs from 2 years later are still working. You can refurb them but it is not as easy as you think thanks to the controller board.
this is the one time where I kinda died inside watching adrain trying to figure out a mac but one thing I will say this was amusing
Adrian you have a natural ability to educate. This video was great! You could choose to do a video on the most boring topic imaginable and it would still be interesting to watch.
If only you could answer email as well as you can produce videos!
It's the puck power supply -- came with the iBooks too. Don't hate on one of my fav Apple Laptops of all time. It was amazing in 2000
This is an excellent video done by a 20-year Windows user. Also, I am sure your Dad was very happy to have access to his files again (you are a great son). Own two of these G3 Firewire Powerbook laptops (keep the second one for spare parts, if needed). This model has been a joy to own.
In the year 2020, these old laptops are just for vintage fun but back in the day this model had everything an Apple laptop user could ask for. Why, you may ask is this model which, was the last of the "Black and White" Powerbook systems my all time favorite? Because there are so many ways to have fun with its two USB ports, two Fire-wire 400 ports, PC card slot, two "Hot Swapable" dive bays (for an extra battery, zip drive, super disk/floppy disk drive, and extra memory drive, etc.). This was also the first Powerbook with an internal airport card for a wireless connection.
An absolute success! I so much envy that you managed to run it in QEMU. I used to try to solve a similar problem once. I've still got that raw HDD image, from the pre-PCI era PowerPC Mac, which I tried to run under several emulators, but no luck so far.
It was Mac Performa 5200, its harddrive's been damaged, and yeah, it was total mess... )
20 years old wtf I’m feeling soooo old now
The aspect ratio of this screen it’s just perfect for older games
The original power supply was a grey oblong brick shape. The power supply you were using came from a clamshell G3.
There were two that had the "bronze" keyboard if I recall; the Lombard and the Pismo. The Pismo was a far better machine, but this might be a Lombard, and those things were LEMONS.
Lobmards had USB and SCSI, Pismos had USB and FireWire (this is a Pismo).
This was really nice to watch! I hope your dad enjoys the emulated version of the machine! I did data recovery for years on anything from MFM all the way to SATA drives, and even some obscure media like Syquest cartridges and Ditto tapes. Its nice to see more of it done!
Bernoulli!
Great video, but I always go for the nuclear option first: dd the hard drive before fiddling with the system.
The emulation was a nice touch... something that I wouldn't have tried.
I would say the finder got worse in OSX than it was in OS9. I used 68040 / G3 / G4 Macs day in day out for work and have fond memories of them. It's true the lack of protected memory could be a pain; often a bad font or rogue Xtension in someone else's Quark Xpress document would bring down the whole machine, but on the whole I liked MacOS back in this era.
this is fascinating, and like seeing an alternate universe, mac is an alien world to me, i've been on PC with DOS/windows my whole life, so I wouldn't even know where to start to troubleshoot a mac, like "ok, you guys have boot disks like DOS, right?, can't you boot from a floppy or a cd to get to a command line?"
It is a miracle that booted with the p-ram battery inside most PowerBook g3 pismo do not boot with that inside
The soft retraction of the toggle knobs reminds me of the same sort of attention to detail that Volkswagen seems to implement in their products.
0:40 M7572 is the family/model number. You can look up the exact details using that serial number at everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/
19:10 It's the G3 Pismo: everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/specs/powerbook_g3_500_fw.html
I would have appreciated if Apple literally wrote model number on the sticker like every other company on Earth, instead of calling it "family number."
Fun to see a Mac from this era. Until recently, I still had one but it went to the recycler.
I was a big Apple fan back in the 6502 days... But by the time they moved to the Mac and the 68000 architecture, I had moved on to PC's.
The Mac was just stupid for years. A mono computer? why would you go backwards and remove colour? Maybe if you're making a word processor or doing DTP, which is what Macs ended up doing a lot of.
@@6581punk But Martin Mystere had Mac. He would not used spmething that is bad, he studied at MIT
Target Disk Mode is awesome. I have 9.2 on my G4 and 10.4/10.5 on my G5. I once connected them together and booted 10.4 on my G4, using my G5 as a massive bootable hard drive.
I always wonder if anybody used target disk mode as a laptop dock of sorts, using a more powerful desktop computer and screen at home while booting off of the laptop's drive to seamlessly synchronise work between home and on the go.
Kaitlyn L I had never thought of that, what an awesome idea. You wouldn't even need a hard drive in the more powerful computer then.
@@cleanycloth indeed, or only having the hard drives in the bigger computer be longer term storage, crammed to the brim without anything bootable.
Kaitlyn L Also true. Very cool idea, it could still be done even today though you'd need a pretty hefty desktop mac to make that worth it 😛
@@kaitlyn__L I did that for years! One of the slickest features of its time! I had the Pismo 500 with 1G of ram and used it for concert touring and music industry road work for years, and would "T-Drive" it to the MacPro at home. That thing was unbelievably reliable and toughs nails, and ran recording and processing on well over 1000 shows in its time.
The worst part of the power adaptor is that there are two versions with different jacks on them and they even sold with the same model numbers. Same voltage and everything, but only some worked with both the clamshell G3s and Powerbook G3s that I own. Trying to find one of those right now, if I have to pay $60 for one I might as well get the right one to work on both. In the meantime I can at least try the QEMU route to see if they even have a functioning install.
Definitely a Pismo PowerBook G3. I've got one here that still works, albeit the hinge assemblies for the screen have bit the dust. I run it "headless", with an external display and set it to mirror the video. It kinda has a n Apple IIc vibe going on.
You can hook up external hard drives or even USB thumb drives, as long as you make sure they're using FAT32 as the file system, to get the files off of it.
Was the hinge fragile or did it break from some trauma?
@@adriansdigitalbasement The hinge wore out from normal use; no forceful trauma. This is a common part failure for this model. So is the DC-In/Sound Board. I used to repair these laptops and would get the occasional Pismo in because of accidental torqued audio and charger jacks. The part is easy and cheap to replace, but requires a complete tear-down of the laptop; that can take about 2 hours to do on a good day.
Apple certainly meant to send this series of PowerBooks out with a bang, as they threw everything but the kitchen sink in it. Room for 2 batteries (for up to 10 hours of battery use). The second battery slot (where the DVD-ROM drive goes) serves for also holding either an external HDD from VST or an Imation SuperDisk FDD (which I still have both of). These can be hot-swapped at any time under both OS X and Classic OS 9.x.x. You could even get upgrades that would get the machine up to a PowerPC G4 running at 1 GHz. Quite the workhorse of its time, though I think it runs fastest under Classic OS. Also, a correction--in Mac OS 9.2.x, they were finally able to implement Protected Memory Mode, according to Steve Wozniak. I hope this helps! Thank you for all your useful videos; I find them very informative and entertaining.
@@adriansdigitalbasement Oh, the power supply/charger is affectionately named a "Yo-Yo Power Adapter". The only disadvantage of these is that they are prone to overheating and the wire going into the center hub of the yo-yo housing can wear out, causing the insulation to break and eventually the exposed wire along with it. Owners are better off going to someplace like PowerBook Medic and picking up a brick charger for around $25 + shipping.
I didn't like that the battery pack was destroyed. You could at least keep the components together and have the option to put new lithium-ion cells and rebuild the package one day. Maybe also restore the machine in the future: change the batteries of the PRAM and mount a fully working hard disk (few $). I'm pretty sure this wasn't your plan but I always tend to make sure I have a chance to go back. Who knows if one day that old machine will have a purpose, after all we are retrocomputer's lovers!
Found your channel a while back, been watching your videos at work, good to pass the time with ( I work security ). I remember working on the occasional apple G series at a PC repair shop I worked in when I was in high school around 2006, we had a busted up g3 laptop like that. I set it up to pull data, it was the lower half of the case and the bare lcd panel stuck to the wall with double sided tape next to some older apples I can't remember the models of that we used to pull files from weird crap people brought in, actually had someone bring in a SE with a dead CRT in late 2006 asking if we could replace the screen. I convinced my boss to keep the SE to resell as is for the cost of pulling the guys files... Bunch of word docs, took all of a few minutes to transfer and my boss sold the SE for 50 bucks.
Anyway, I don't know much about Macs or apples, but my boss didn't even know about about target disk mode. We eventually got a g3 tower that someone dropped to replace the humpty dumpty g3 laptop, it wasn't taped to the wall but it was partially taped together.
I miss that power supply and would love it if our modern MacBook Pros had similar cord management.
Apple Macs are based on BSD-UNIX Berkeley Software Distribution which got combined with the Next Step GUI to create MAC OS.
The logo on my ThinkPad is upside down from an onlooker's perspective, but to distract from that I also have a couple of used Royal Mail first class stamps on the opposite corner, just 'cos... :P
Same On my X120e, X131e, and X140e, being upside down, but on the the X131e, and X140e the the i in the ThinkPad logos light up, so can't really cover them up, same for the goofy green lights in the middle of the lids in which I just have American flag stickers over them to tone them down. I know why they did the lights, is because these where for educational use, and it showed the students had the machines on. I just use them for basic Manjaro Mate Linux machines as couch computers/backups and the the X120e as a Chromium OS machine as a backup, and someone comes over, and needs a computer, I can put them in guest mode.
1:13 It's not OS Eks, it's OS Ten.
Listening to you talk while the laptop hadn’t been backed up yet was giving me anxiety lol.
Fascinating
I have replaced those cells without issue. And I am still using that old Powerbook just for old games and for fun.
One of the things you could replace the dvd drive with was a Zip drive module. I still have mine.
Used to have one of those. It was stolen from my apartment in college. I sometimes check ebay for it, and wonder what it's doing now. Hope it's still out in the world. I miss it.
This machine won’t startup with p-ram batteries connected. (The Braun pack under the keyboard. When disconnected it starts up normally without problems.
thats actually the latest and best of the black Pismo G3 Powerbooks, with a 500 Mhz. Nice machine..internally the same board as the first Titanium G4 Powerbooks.
Who would have thought that 20 years ago apple made computers which last for decades and are made to be serviceable... they sure got those bugs nailed later on.
Louis Rossmann has entered the chat ;)
Did someone order sour grapes?
No.... we don’t need him coming in here and going “LoOk At ThIs SHit It DOEnT WoRk RiGht! It ShoUlD WoRk FlawLEsSly EvEN AfTeR yeARs, PlaNnEd ObsOlEsEnCe!!!!! FuCk ApPle, ItS NoT 100% PeRfEctLY DeSigNed LiKe My ThInKPaDs ThAT CaNt FaiL BeCaUsE ItS PeRfEcT!
@@EndOfLineTech exactly. He's such a salty b*tch over the very things that pay his salary.
I have never seen this laptop before. Nor have I ever seen that yo-yo space power supply. I have used the iBook G3 I think it is that I have. Maybe a G4. It has the same power supply design language as the latest laptops (even compatible with the extension you can get for the iPads and MacBooks today). I do miss the power indicator light on the MacBooks today. It’s not really needed, but I thought that would be handy to have. Another interesting thing to note is the older lithium ion batteries (authentic) used in Apple laptops (at least on my iBook) are extremely reliable and hold a good charge after all these years. They don’t make laptop batteries like those anymore. Other laptop batteries I had don’t last a few years. Some even were bad after a few months. Some people I’ve talked to claim that the iBook was the Apple laptop that had the highest reliability. It went downhill from there. MacBooks have been notorious for their issues, which is a shame.
Those powerbooks came with a "weight saver" for the expansion bays. Wish I still had mine to send to you, but you made your own anyway, ha
I started with a Commodore 64 -> 128 -> Amiga but when Commodore failed I went to the PC since I had a business and did not want to move to another platform I felt invested in. At he time I was convinced Apple would fail in a few years too 😅
They nearly did fail a few years after Commodore did.
@@Okurka. Yeah those were the dark ages for Apple and I was afraid another eco-system I got heavily invested in would die and break my heart 💔
You should have told me you were doing a video on G3 era Macs! Ive got a box full of stuff :3
I miss os 9.2.2 It was so stable and nice and easy !! That powerbook G3 is in nice condition! Score !