Portable Computing in 1992

The first computer that was ever mine and just mine was a Macintosh PowerBook 145b.

Photo Credit: Lee Carson

EveryMac has this to say:

The Apple Macintosh PowerBook 145b features a 25 MHz 68030 processor, 4 MB of RAM, either a 40 MB or 80 MB hard drive, and an internal 1.44 MB floppy drive in a compact portable case with a 9.8" monochrome passive-matrix display.

My goodness, I loved that computer. My mom and dad took me to a local electronics store, showed me the notebook apples and said, “pick one out.”

I had no idea what I was getting into. I had to chose between the 145B and the Powerbook Duo 210. Today, I’d have picked the Duo, hands down, but at the time, I didn’t like the small trackball and I didn’t like the fact that the Duo did not come with a floppy disk drive. And the grayscale screen was this weird passive matrix LED that was kind of hard to see. Remember, kids, back then, color computing only came at great expense and was, really, not so pretty.

It turns out the 145b was the right choice for me. I had tons (read: tons) of experience with similar strength computers in our families SE30, could tweak out Mac OS 7.5 like nobody’s business, and ended up buying a 2400kbs modem so I could connect to the University of Wisconsin’s VAX.

I have owned about a half-a-dozen laptops, and I’ve not felt the connection to them the way I was connected to my 145b.

Point is, I’ve been lucky to live in a world where portable computing has always been at hand and that writing on the couch while my family watches Xena :Warrior Princess is something that we’ve been able to do together for over 20 years now.

It's great to live in the future, isn't it?