Rosebud

Rosebud (we have all been here before . . .)

William Ahearn

©2005 William Ahearn

Please see notes at end.

Nostalgia, that harmless longing for a familiar time or place, was considered a serious psychiatric condition in the 18th and 19th centuries manifested in symptoms that we now call post trauma stress disorder and anorexia nervosa. At least that is the contention of Ed Brown in his essay, Notes on Nostalgia. The annals of the so-called science of psychiatry are filled with affliction definitions such as hysteria and homosexuality that have since faded as disorders and while I would love to spend this time trashing the hacks and quacks of the post-phrenology psychiatric industrial complex, I’m more concerned with restoring a Macintosh PowerBook 100.

If nothing else, I have priorities.

The PB 100 was the first Apple laptop. There was a huge box that Apple called a Portable but many people thought it was a prototype for a suitcase nuclear weapon since it weighed almost sixteen pounds and could have been marketed as ENIAC Jr. Interesting as an historical oddity, it wasn’t a side road that I wanted to go down. Having had the obsession of promiscuously collecting vintage gear, my small New York City apartment was at one time overrun with 37 Macs in various stages of upgrading or repair and I had beige tracings burned into my retina. Literally hundreds of machines have gone in and out of my door, most donated to nonprofits or to people who couldn’t afford computers and working in advertising had given me access to those IT closets filled with older – and to them – useless gear. They were very happy to see the machines go where they would be used.

Something had to give.

So the great boxen were sent to tread the world except for an upgraded Beige G3 that acted as dump server, VCR and TV, and I began gradually and then suddenly to collect laptops. The PB 100 came from raino at MacRenewal up in Eugene, Oregon, and since it wasn’t a machine that a newbie computer user could use, I made a donation and soon enough the ancient machine arrived.

When this particular Macintosh was manufactured can be determined exactly and I do know it was built or at least assembled in the US sometime between 1991 and 1992 and that is as specific as I need to get. My interest in the machine is its ability to run system software 6, the first really viable Macintosh operating system.
What also interests me is why that interests me.

Everybody who opts to deal with vintage gear has their own set of reasons. And I’m never sure which are mine. When the PB 100 arrived, it booted fine into a clear screen and system software 7.0. Since it doesn’t have a built-in floppy I bought one on a swaplist and put the little bugger aside as I worked on a Lombard for a friend. Today I started it and the screen lit up but the hard drive didn’t kick over and I noticed that the connector for the power supply was hinky and erratic.
I couldn’t help but smile.

This machine needed me.

Recently I picked up a PB 520 for free on craigslist. The screen assembly had been damaged but other than that it was in fine shape and came with the AC adapter. After spending $25 (shipping included) I had an almost perfect PB 540 and enough parts left over to pull the guts out of the 520 and the damaged screen and finally get around to making a real case hack. There has to be another AC adapter out there.

It seems to me that perfection is a worthy pursuit but an uninteresting endpoint. It is, after all, only an old, working but obsolete computer when you’re done.

Which, once again, makes me question this interest in taking a 14-year-old laptop, running an archaic operating system, that tops out at 8 megabytes of RAM and has a 16MHz 68000 processor, that needs an external floppy drive (in fact, the need for the floppy indicates that this machine should be left on an ice floe drifting in a southerly current), and nursing it back to health. The most that it can ever realistically be is a word processor and while I hesitate to say a nice word about Microsoft, I have to say that I can I write in MS Word 5.1a on a PB 100 and transfer it to my Lombard and Word 2001 seamlessly. (Whether it will transfer to X Office on my Pismo remains to be seen.)

What I’m wondering is whether nostalgic tinkering is really a suppressed reactionary response, a deep hostility dressed as constructive endeavor and a raised middle finger to the forces that drive endless, chaotic and sometimes pointless upgrades. It’s not like any new developments are on the event horizon for gear that more often than not is nestled next to mummified Twinkies in a landfill. So, when the restoration is complete, the lifecycle is over. Other than the addition of peripherals or painting the case or other cosmetic modification, what remains is a nostalgic toy.

And that may be the intention.

For a while now, I have, as the old song goes, been losing my religion. I actually bought a new Apple in 1997 and took to talking up the Mac (evangelism is distasteful to me in any form so I couldn’t go that far). It wasn’t long before I sensed that, as someone on applefritter pointed out, the pirates had become the Navy. It started with machine-specific OS installers, and then went to harassing and threatening to sue vintage websites, and the bogus deal with Microsoft. (I’ll spare you all the details of that.) When OSX was released, the agnostic tendencies slipped into apathy. Frankly, I find OSX bloated, pretentious and someone should tell the Apple design team that an OS should be transparent and not translucent. It is a cold and purposely futuristic looking OS and while it may incorporate numerous improvements that were long overdue, it signaled in no small way the death of “a computer for the rest of us