Initially, I loved this system.
In 1994, I went on a driving trip across the United State and Canada, with the goal of seeing a game in every major league stadium. I wrote about that trip on the Internet at the time, on my personal website, hosted by my ISP, who was just some dude with a router and a bunch of modems. That ISP and website are long gone, so during the pandemic, I reproduced it on my personal blog.
When I started planning this trip, the only computer I owned was the Mac IIci I had purchased a couple of years earlier. This was not a portable solution. I would have had to take the CPU, and a big monitor, and keyboard, mouse, and cables. So I wanted a laptop to carry on the trip.
In 1992 and 1993, Apple introduced the PowerBook Duo series. These laptops were light (for the time). To save space, they had removed almost all of the ports, but it had a big slot-bus thing on the back which had docks that could plug into. The only ports on the machine were a port for the power, and a phone jack for the internal modem. Apple sold some docks for it that provided monitor ports, scsi ports for storage, ADB ports for keyboards/mice, etc. You slid the PowerBook into the Dock, and it locked, and all of those peripherals would work with the machine.
Seemed perfect. So, in late 1993, I bought myself a PowerBook Duo 250, with a Duo Dock II, and a mini-dock. The Duo had 80 MB of disk space and 4 MB of window, and dock had an internal 80 MB disk. I could use my existing monitors, keyboard, mouse, external drives, AppleTalk network, etc. The plan was to take the Duo on my trip, and when I was home before and after the trip, I would use this setup as a primary setup. And I sold the IIci for a good price to help defray the cost.
So how did that work out?
As a laptop, I would have to give this a C to D. Yes, it was a Mac, and that is a plus. However, the display was tiny. Not quite original Mac tiny, but it was really small. The wheel that was a replacement for the mouse was ok, but not great.
But that keyboard. That keyboard SUCKED. It missed about 10-15% of the characters I typed. I got used to that when I could see what I typed, and I would automatically correct. But when the typing was invisible, like when typing passwords logging into my ISP’s shell, I could not get my password to work. I finally put the password in a Sticky, and then I would copy it out, and paste it into the terminal windows.
The other BIG drawback happened a couple of weeks into my trip. I got my computer out one day, and it wouldn’t boot. It would go a little bit and then just crash.
I had no other disk, nor a disk drive, so I had no way to diagnose this at all. So, I found a Mac store in Denver, dropped it off in the morning, and they did something magic. I paid them $75 that afternoon and picked it up, and I did not have any other problems on the trip.
OK, so, all of this in and of itself, did not cause me to hate this machine. Quite the opposite, I loved it, because it was my first laptop. It was freedom. I could travel and still get email, and post my trip diary to my website, basically real time. Plus, I could still keep using my accounting software to keep track of my money. And I could play games or write music or browse Usenet newsgroups when I wasn’t driving or visiting with people.
In 1994, Apple started releasing its PowerPC-based Macs. I had been working with prototypes porting FileMaker to it for a couple of years, but it took a while for Apple to produce machines with the Power PC in them.
It took a while for the PowerPC to bubble down to the Duo, but in August of 1995, Apple introduced the PowerBook Duo 2300c/100. At the same time, they introduced an upgrade to 68K-based PowerBook Duo machines to have the same PowerPC 603 motherboard as the new 2300c. Rather than spend $3-4K on another PowerBook Duo, I decided instead to pay around $1200 for the upgrade.
It never really worked. It crashed all the time. I had a bunch of 68K software, and that software was really really slow. And some of the software, detecting I was running with a PowerBook Duo 2300c motherboard really expected that machine’s color display. I ran out of memory a lot.
So, I had a crashing, expensive, buggy machine with a tiny grayscale display, a mediocre trackball pointer, and a terrible keyboard.
Yeah, I did not use this machine very much longer.