1997 - The fat Mac: PowerBook G3

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As mentioned earlier, now my DuoDock is toast, I bought the PowerBook G3 as a 'bridging' device so I could still write distraction free on the little Duo and yet access my files on modern computers as needed. The presence of an AppleTalk port and an ethernet port isn't its only party trick though- the G3 has literally all the connectivity that Apple could have thought of at the time. There is a wealth of ports on the back for various devices, two Cardbus slots for SD/ CF cards and (crucially) wireless internet, as well as two module bays which could be populated with any combination of multiple hard drives, batteries, or CD/ DVD drives. Sadly, the DVD drive on my G3 is very close to the end of its life, struggling to read the MacOS install CD and causing me to resort to some operating system file cannibalism to get it to run properly when I first bought it. Also, the battery has long since expired, and although I did manage to find a seller online that had some in stock for very reasonable prices (I bought all of them) - they then refunded me my full order a few days later, and told me that they haven't actually carried them in stock since 2005. Oh dear :(

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So, just like the Duo, my G3 is permanently tethered now - which is not as problematic as it sounds as I had thought ahead and had a power socket installed next to the garden dining table where I was working on it during the hot weather this summer. Yet, getting the internet connectivity to work has caused me greater bother. While I do have ethernet ports all over my house as I'm much happier with my data flowing over cables I can see and touch rather than over the air where I have no control over who is snooping; I'm not going to lie and say it isn't enormously convenient using WiFi - especially in the garden - and thus it's a significant limitation that my G3's AirPort card has died. No amount of plugging/ unplugging, driver and software reinstalls have made a shred of difference. I think it might be time to set up an alert on eBay for a new one...

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I bought the G3 for the very specific purpose of using it as a data transfer mule for the Duo, but how does it fare as a laptop in its own right? Well, in addition to the dead WiFi, battery, and DVD drive - the hard-drive was making the kind of clicking noise that I used to rub my hands in delight in hearing when I used to run a computer repair business! Replacing hard drives and reinstalling operating systems was my bread-and-butter, but data recovery was always the icing on the cake. When it's your own laptop and you're worried about losing your data and programmes, it's a very different feeling, especially when that laptop is a quarter-century old and the software on it is even rarer than the device itself.

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First order of the day then was to replace the ailing drive with a new one, and given the limited space inside the laptop, I decided to use a Compact Flash (CF) to IDE adapter and give the machine a boost from the stock 8 to 64 GB. MacOS 9, which it's running, supports partitions up to about 128 GB (potentially higher, I can't find any consistent answers to this question online, nor have I been frivolous enough yet to try ultra-capacity CF cards). Should I add a second operating system (many G3 users had a dual-boot setup with 'classic' MacOS running side-by-side alongside the new MacOS X), I may yet give myself a little breathing space and upgrade to 256 GB, but CF cards that large are expensive, and a drive that large in such an old machine feels excessive.

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On upgrading the hard drive, my efforts then turned to copying all the old MacOS software I had acquired over the years onto it, and reacquainting myself with life in the late 1990s. The G3 is now running Microsoft Office 98 which was instantly familiar to me as the office suite that I was using when finishing school, and so the learning curve of how to get things done quickly was short and sweet. It was at this point that I found the previous (or original owner) was an academic in the field of music anthropology, as her email account was still set up on the device, and with no password protection on the user account to boot up, I had access to her (albeit 20 year old) personal files. A quick web search, and it turns out that she is quite eminent in her field, and I've dropped her a note on Linkedin to say that I've got her old laptop, and she can rest assured that her data has now been securely wiped.

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While I'm a big fan of giving redundant devices a new lease of life via eBay or other second-hand marketplaces, this does rather neatly illustrate the lesson that when your machines get to the end of their useful life it's very important to be thorough with deleting their contents, but please don't do the wasteful thing of smashing their hard drives and deleting the software which I'm very glad this lady didn't do. As an aside, passwords and encryption are often thought to be a safe way of securing data - but that's only true of data in motion, such as what you're transmitting wirelessly from device to device, and also only true in the moment. For data at rest, or data that was in motion that's now been intercepted and stored, then time is your enemy. The lady who once owned my G3 laptop is very likely to be using the same password on her email or files today as what she used 25 years ago. So many of us do, and if not the same, then very probably a small variation of it. If I were a cyber-criminal, it would be very easy for me to simply copy the contents of the hard drive to a modern machine (or up to the Cloud) and using modern processing power crack the code in minutes, if not quicker. All those who've spent thousands of dollars on NFTs be warned - 25 years from now, your 'original' .jpeg of a monkey might not be so original any longer!

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It was at this point that I made a discovery on the hard drive of the G3 that slowed down my research significantly. No, it wasn't some nefarious documents or scandalous photography. It was a computer game from 1996 which my wife had spent too much of her youth playing, and so for the next few weeks our evening conversation consisted of the best strategic moves in Settlers II (die Siedler) and she went on a campaign of conquest building iron mines, hunters, foresters, smelters, and eventually armies. Watching the game unfold and her simulated economies develop made me realise the key aspect that the game had missed - the impact of these settlements on their environment. The level by which she was mining the island of its resources, cutting down its forests, and certainly polluting its freshwater and air was thoroughly unsustainable, yet in the era that the game was developed in (the era from which my wife and me are also a product of) - these things were less at the top of mind even though we all knew as far back as then that one day the music would stop.

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When eventually she tired of the game and returned the machine back to me, I found the underside of it hot. And when I say hot, I mean burn your legs hot!

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I believe the G3 is passively cooled - so much like the latest MacBook Air - with no fans to draw in cool air and reduce the temperature on its critical components. While modern laptops can also generate very high temperatures, they are thermally very efficient and thus can be enormously powerful without risk of causing injury to their users (or catching fire). They are especially of smart design with how they dissipate the heat through their case, but the G3 is not and has a very hot part on its base in exactly the position where my thigh is when its on my lap. I'm glad I'm not doing anything more taxing than some light usage, else I would have to resort to the table-top to use it for any length of time. This indeed was the era when laptops were anything but.

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Exploring the G3 made me realise something quite profound about these old devices compared to their modern versions - all the software on the laptop runs just exactly as it did when it was new. While some of the hardware has reached the end of its usable life and has failed, something is still true of the G3 which isn't of later machines - if you buy a high quality machine (which this undoubtedly was in its day) and look after it, it will last you a lifetime. The web was only just becoming ubiquitous when the G3 was new, and so it's likely that most of the internet connectivity back then would have simply been for email. While the email clients installed (Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Entourage) don't support Office365, modern Exchange, or Gmail; you could very easily set up a simple POP+SMTP or IMAP email service and run this machine exactly as it would have operated straight out of the box. In fact, I might just do this - especially as I know that Microsoft and Google who together are the duopoly that quite literally own email in the western world are working their hardest to make it impossible for you to run an independent mail server in 2022 and still interact with the wider world.

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Why?

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Well, all in the name of spam protection of course - and nothing to do with coaxing us all onto monthly recurring payments for services that were once as free as the air.

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So, while the Duo is still a perfect word processor in 2022, the G3 is a somewhat compromised email device. But what about the web? Well, you won't get far with Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer 5. You'll get slightly further with Classilla which is the most modern browser that'll run on MacOS 9. Amazingly there are still a community of websites dedicated to this old Mac hardware, including System7today, Macintosh Garden, and MacOS9Lives. The experience is very much like a walled garden internet, very much like AOL in the '90s for those that remember this era. Thanks to the dedication of these communities, software from this era is still preserved, drivers available, and support and tips exchanged in a friendly way. In fact, the various forums that I've spent time getting to know the last few months in pursuit of the perfect portable computer have reminded me that the internet used to be a delightful place to explore and not at all the cess-pit of hate and filth that it largely has become today. The communities that I've joined are exactly that, communities of support groups for people with mutual interests - very far removed from the constant jockeying for attention, one-up-(wo)manship and status that characterises the 'influencer' driven internet-culture of today. I've often thought that technology will help us get back to how our ancestors once lived but at scale. I hope these words become true of the internet also, because the internet when the G3 was new was still something to be excited about and not fearful of, which is as I am today.

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In conclusion on the G3, it's perhaps the first mobile 'workstation' that Apple developed and they made a very good job of it. While not as upgradable as the Duo, you could still upgrade the CPU on the G3 all the way to the later G4 and the combination of module bays, Cardbus slots and other ports made it a very expandable machine. But yet it's a blunt swiss-army-knife, the screen is too small and low-resolution for working on spreadsheets, PowerPoint 98 is a toy compared to newer generations, the web is out of reach and email is soon to be also. All this, and it has the downsides of some modern laptops in that it runs too hot to be comfortable, and, as soon as I replace the WiFi card, there will be just enough temptation to look something up or download files that it won't be possible to work distraction-free.

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While I'll always need the G3 to keep my Duo serviceable, it's too flawed as a laptop to ever serve as a replacement for it. The quest for the ultimate Apple laptop continues...!

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