Although I’m not a collector, I always wanted to have one PowerBook 100 just to remind my childhood. It was the coolest Apple notebook from the early 90s. Last year, we brought back to life two out of three dead PowerBooks 100 from a friend of mine, so we could keep one for free. The restoration was not finished though. All the 2.5-inch Conner SCSI hard drives were dead.
These drives are hard to find so I installed the PowerMonster II adapter last weekend. I would do it maybe half a year ago but the first experiment was with a 2GB CF card and resulted in the “SCSI Bus Not Terminated” error. I was later told that old SCSI Mac don’t like large hard drives. With a 512MB CF card, the system immediately detected a new drive on the bus.
Making it usable with Mac was a different story. OS installer diskettes contain an utility for hard drive setup but it refuses to work with non-Apple drives. I tried even “hacked” versions that should work with other drives but with no success. Finally, after trying multiple utilities, Lido 7 rescued me five minutes before I wanted to give it up. I clicked on “Easy Setup”, set a name and icon for the drive and everything was ready to install the operating system.
Unlike DOS and UNIX systems, old Macs never had universal utilities to set up any third-party hardware. I don’t like that approach but Apple had that as a part of its strategy.
The game runs smoothly on the 16-MHz Motorola 68000 and has better music and sound in comparison with the PC version. Unlike other passive-matrix displays of the era, this 640×400 1-bit panel from Sharp is really fast and makes the game quite enjoyable.
It took us three evenings to get two of the three PowerBooks back to life. The logic board of one of them was so damaged by leaked capacitors that it was impossible to fix it. The other two are now in a working state except for the SCSI hard drives. The most difficult part was to disassemble the display panel. The layer with liquid crystals contained several electrolytic capacitors that needed to be replaced as well. The original Conner drives did not properly spin up but that was expected behavior – I think that all first gen Conner 2.5-inch drives are already dead.
The only way to boot the laptop is to use an external floppy drive at the moment (or an external SCSI device). Running the System 6.0.8 from floppy is not very convenient. Fortunately, there is a nice solution. You can create a RAM disk, install the operating system into it and then set it as a boot device. PowerBook 100 is the only PowerBook with a persistent RAM disk function which content is backed up by three coin cell batteries. Data remains intact even after shutdown.
This is the smallest model from the first generation of PowerBooks. It was very thin and light for its time but didn’t have an internal floppy drive, which resulted in poor initial sales (before discounts). The logic board is based on a low-power version of 16-MHz Motorola 68000 coupled with up to 8 MB of RAM and 20 or 30-MB SCSI hard drives.
I have three non-working units and all of them need (at least) to replace bad capacitors. Their owner told me that I can keep one if I fix another for him.
PowerBook 100 has a special place in my heart. I had one back in the 1990s and I loved its big trackball, comfortable keyboard and proper palmrest area – features that were not present in typical PC laptops. Other early PowerBooks were not as small and light as the PowerBook 100, but they shared many design decisions with it. I perfectly understand people who bought and used these computers when they were new. On the other side, I cannot agree with those who see early PowerBooks as universally superior machines to PC notebooks. That’s just not true.
From time to time, I see nonsense statements like that PowerBooks were the first laptops with stereo sound, optical drives, docking stations or other features. Not sure at the moment, but I think that you can find some of these statements even on Wikipedia. However, all of these features were previously available in PC laptops.
In fact, the generations of early PowerBooks that came after the first generation were not considered very innovative back then. Just a few examples:
Support for gray-scale video modes on internal screens was added at the end of 1992. Until that, it was possible to run only programs that were written to work with the black and white mode. All VGA-equipped PC laptops supported gray scale and could also translate colors into levels of grey in hardware (no OS or program support was required).
Unlike with PC laptops, there was no support for features like color LCD screens, PCMCIA expansion cards and microprocessors with built-in power management capabilities in 1992.
There was no graphics acceleration in Apple’s video circuits which resulted in significantly slower screen redraw. This started to be a problem when Apple offered PowerBooks with color screens where the graphics core had to process far more data. The first color PowerBooks with competitively fast graphics chips were available after Apple started to use generic PCI solutions from the PC world (mostly Chips & Technologies, later ATI).
Many of the PowerBook graphics chips didn’t support more than 256 colors on external screens even in 1994. Lower-end machines didn’t even have a video output for an external screen.
The first color TFT PowerBook – 180c – was released in August, 1993 – almost a year after major PC brands released their first TFT portables. The PowerBook 180c was equipped with a small 8.4-inch 640×480 screen when PC laptops often used 9.5-inch screens and there were some with even 10.5-inch screens (like the famous IBM ThinkPad 700C – December, 1992). That was not the only issue – it lasted only about an hour on one charge because (unlike PC laptops) it didn’t have a 3.3V CPU, advanced power management features and NiMH batteries.
Heat and power consumption was so big issue with Motorola 68040 that Apple had to release 040-based PowerBooks with a version of the CPU that didn’t have a math coprocessor. Thus, programs that used it heavily were twice as fast when running on the previous generation of high-end 030-based PowerBooks. 486DX-based PC laptops could run the same code four times as fast.
Last time, I wrote an article about a Toshiba T3200SX laptop from 1989. It was a desktop replacement with a proper 32-bit CPU and a large gas-plasma display. This time, I will talk about a computer that is a year newer but has neither VGA graphics nor a 386 processor. On the other hand, it is much more portable and supports battery operation. For only $4,000.
Under the hood of the T1200XE laptop, you can find a 12-MHz 286 16-bit processor, 1MB of RAM, 3.5″ floppy drive with support for 1.44MB diskettes, 20MB Conner HDD and two memory expansion slots for up to 5MB of RAM. There is even a 15.7Wh NiCd battery (2200mAh, 7.2V) that used to provide about two hours of battery life.
The whole package weights 3.6 kg which may not seem very lightweight by today’s standards but back in the 1990, it was among the more portable, full-featured PC laptops. On the other hand, it is half a kilogram lighter than the original T1200 from the 1987. The predecessor had a 9.54-MHz 80C86, fixed 1MB of RAM, a primitive 640×200 LCD and either two 720KB 3.5″ floppies or a combination of a floppy drive and a 20-MB hard disk.
One of the ways to reduce the size and weight in the T1200XE was to use a smaller 2.5″ hard drive. Aside from the increased CPU performance (more than doubled), the biggest difference is in the display quality – the advanced side-lit display with the doubled vertical resolution improves the user experience significantly.
Mechanical keyboard pleasure
There are certainly some ergonomic drawbacks that were common to many portable computers from the era. One of them is the lack of a palm rest in front of the keyboard. On the other hand, the keyboard itself is fantastic. It looks like a standard rubber-dome keyboard, but it has mechanical switches.
The switches are not the clicky ones. They are very smooth and quiet. If you try hard, you can type on the keyboard almost without any sound. The tactile feedback can be compared with Cherry MX Brown switches, but these are low-profile and require very little force to press. I absolutely love writing this article directly on the laptop and this is one of the best keyboards I have in my portable computer collection.
I think this is the last generation of portables before Toshiba stopped using mechanical keyboards.
Do not expect a pointing device. This computer was introduced at the same time as Windows 3.0 which was the first truly popular version. Thus, it was designed at the time when mouse-driven programs/environments were not as common on IBM PC compatibles, and integrated pointing devices were not needed by mobile users.
Just enough connectivity
There is no PS/2 port for a mouse, so you have to use the only available serial RS232c port on the laptop. The computer acts as if it has two serial ports, but the second one is intended for an optional 2400-baud modem module.
There is also a parallel port interface that can operate in the output-only and bi-directional data modes and special mode for connecting an external 5.25″ floppy drive unit (which acts like an internal one and does not require any OS driver). I’ve never seen such a floppy drive in person, but the parallel port is extremely useful in my case for connecting an external ZIP-100 drive and the Xircom PE3 parallel port Ethernet adapter, so I can transfer files via FTP and access IRC channels from DOS.
Under an extra plastic cover, there is a 100-pin expansion port. This is not like with newer computers where you can order a docking station. This provides a full ISA/AT bus, so it is possible to connect an expansion box for desktop type expansion cards. I am not sure if such a thing existed. I do know for sure that such ports were often used for specific industrial applications. Any manufacturer could get the connector pinout and make their own compatible device.
The video output is an RGBI TTL type that supports only standard CGA resolutions with up to 16 colors.
“Double”-CGA resolution
One of the fascinating features of the T1200XE is its video circuitry and the display. From the list of IBM standards, the graphics core only supports the CGA video modes like 320×200 in 4 colors and 640×200 in 2 colors. On the other hand, it also adds an extra non-IBM mode with 640×400 in 2 colors. Fortunately, the mode is implemented in the same way as on the Olivetti/AT&T 6300 computers (followed by the Compaq and Toshiba gas-plasma portables of the 80s) which means that there was already plenty of programs supporting it when the T1200XE was released.
I have to admit that I am genuinely surprised how many programs support this 640×400 mode. For example, Windows 3.1 can detect the T1200XE (which is one of the few computers specifically mentioned in the installer) and enable the full resolution by default. Other programs, like Word 5.5, which I am using to write these lines, will only detect CGA, but you can manually select the Olivetti/AT&T driver and it will work fine.
QuickBasic 4.5 (or QBASIC bundled with DOS) is an exception. It supports this video mode but fails when you try to select it on this laptop. I thought there might be a similar problem as with Hercules support, where you need to install a TSR program to enable its use in QuickBasic, but that was not the case. Microsoft has implemented a very stupid way to check for the compatibility with the mode – it reads the BIOS string and looks for the Olivetti text.
A simple hack with a hex editor can bypass the check but be prepared that the QuickBasic will then consider every video card as compatible with this mode. You just need to find 4F 4C 75 58 in QB.EXE (or in any compiled program out of it) and replace it with 4F 4C EB 52.
The standard CGA (640×200) compared to the AT&T 6300 mode (640×400).
High-resolution text for everyone
Even if you don’t have any program that supports this additional graphics mode, you can still take advantage of the higher resolution of the internal 640×400 display. Any program running in text-mode (80×25 or 40×25) will automatically use high-resolution fonts with 8×16 pixels per character (compared to 8×8 of the standard CGA). This is done transparently by the graphics chip.
Fn + Right Arrow swaps the thin and thick font. The Flight Simulator 3.0 setup screen uses 40×25 character mode so the graphics chip doubles each column of pixels to fill the whole screen.
Unlike many LCDs even from the CGA era, this one uses a color resolution of one bit per pixel. Therefore, it is not possible to use multiple shades to interpret the 16 CGA colors that would otherwise be displayed on an external CRT. In the case of text mode, you can only have white, blue, and based on character attributes, you can draw bold text.
Word 5.5 in the text mode offers assigning colors & attributes to each font. Thus, it is possible to have bold text shown as bold even without switching into a graphics mode.
There are two fonts – regular and bold. You can set which one is used by default. The other is automatically used only for characters with the intensity bit set. Not all programs use this the same way, so you can swap the fonts by pressing Fn and the right arrow.
Blue & White LCD
The LCD itself is very interesting on this machine. Previous T1xxx models, except for the hi-end and much larger T1600, all used simple calculator-like LCDs with blue text on green background. These LCDs were very difficult to read, usually without backlight. The LCD in this laptop, on the other hand, is properly side-lit and has more in common with later black & white passive-matrix displays. The only difference is that it does not have the filters that would turn the blue into black (or gray, to be exact).
Personally, I consider this blue & white LCD much better. Sure, it has a very bad contrast ratio as well (Toshiba says only 5:1, compared to 100:1 of a gas-plasma display), but the additional color information makes the text easier to read. Perhaps it also helps that this screen has abandoned any attempt to create multiple shades of “gray” and only works with just fully on or off pixels.
The lack of semi-bright pixels is a problem when it comes to displaying the low-res 320×200 CGA video mode with 4 colors. The graphics chip worked around this by using the full 640×400 resolution internally and creating the semi-bright pixels by using different 2×2-pixel patterns.
The result is surprisingly good. However, do not expect this to be a good DOS gaming machine. The screen refresh is painfully slow (especially when changing a pixel from blue to white) and there is no way to invert the “colors”. The screen works in the inverted mode, so pixels that are white would be black on a normal CRT and blue would be white. I know of only one game that allows inverting colors, and that is Microsoft Flight Simulator 3&4. The video driver selection has a “CGA liquid display” option that does this.
MICROWEB is a simple modern web browser for DOS/mTCP. It supports the extra AT&T/Toshiba mode and allows inverting the colors using a keyboard shortcut.
BIOS setup and pop-up menu
Unlike later models, the T1200XE does not have an internal BIOS setup utility. On the other hand, once the computer starts, you can access the pop-up menu handled by the BIOS. It appears in the lower right corner of the screen and works regardless of the video mode.
The pop-up menu provides information about the battery level, allows you to change the power management features (display and hard drive off time), mute the speaker, enable the connection of an external floppy drive and toggle between shutdown and standby after pressing the power button.
For advanced configuration, there is a pre-installed DOS program, TSETUP, which is used instead of a ROM BIOS setup. The BIOS does not have too many options to change in addition what can be done in the pop-up window. It allows you to change the serial port address (COM1, COM2), disable BIOS shadowing into RAM (can free 64KB), change internal character table (as this cannot be done from DOS) and set the parallel port communication mode (output, bidirectional). The last option can significantly speed up any lap-link transfer on the input side.
Hard RAM: Persistent RAM disk
The TSETUP also adds the ability to partition the operating memory. The first 640KB are fixed. Everything above can be split between XMS memory, EMS memory and a persistent RAM disk called Hard RAM.
The RAM disk is a very interesting feature. If you allocate some memory to it, you will see a new fixed disk drive in the FDISK program, so you can freely partition and format it just like any normal disk. Once done, it works as a very fast storage space. The content survives reboots and even computer shutdowns.
The RAM content is protected by the main battery, and it survives even swapping the battery on the go (powered off and even when in the stand-by mode) because there is also an extra RAM backup battery to handle the situation. Only when both batteries run out of charge, the content of RAM is lost.
This is a very neat feature available on several older Toshiba laptops, and I see the main benefit in reducing the power consumption. You can put a program and a working document in there, so the hard drive can stop operating due to inactivity. This, along with the automatic downclocking of the CPU when not in use, has significantly increased the battery life – from two hours to three and a half.
I don’t think many other laptops had this feature. The only other one I know of is the Apple PowerBook 100.
Windows 3.1 experience
As mentioned above, the T1200XE is one of the few computers that Windows 3.1 specifically supports. The installer automatically detects the machine and sets all options accordingly (including video mode).
Unlike with Windows 3.0, there is no real mode support, so you need at least a 286 CPU and 1MB of RAM is required. If you have only 1MB (like this machine), the memory above 640KB must be treated as XMS/EMS (not high memory). Otherwise, the OS will not start.
I must say that although you can run Windows 3.1 on this machine, the experience is not very good. There is a lot of disk access involved when switching between programs as the OS removes parts of the programs from the memory and loads newly required ones. To my surprise, the OS runs even when the programs are supposed to fill more than 1MB. However, the speed of anything more complicated is significantly reduced (beyond what is tolerable).
It seems that only the lack of memory is the problem. As long as there is not too much disk access, the CPU seems to be fast enough for early Windows 3.x programs. Increasing the memory size to two or even three megabytes would improve the experience significantly.
I really like the support for the native resolution of 640×400. If you have any experience with the standard CGA (640×200) in Windows, you know that it is far from what can be considered usable. The 640×400 gives you have more space on the screen than the EGA and almost as much as the VGA. The fact that the pixels can only have two colors is not a problem for office tasks, spreadsheets, and communication packages. Programs from this era work well in the 1-bit-per-pixel modes.
The next generation
The T1200XE was the last generation of Toshiba portables without the VGA-compatible video. Within a year of its release, many competing portables began offering VGA black & white screens with a resolution of 640×480. This quickly became the standard for everyone.
Toshiba not only moved to VGA but also to 32-bit processors, with the 20-MHz 386SX as the baseline. Better integration made possible to get rid of the thick rear part of the base behind the screen hinge, so the portables finally started to look like modern laptops.
For me, the direct successor to the T1200XE is the 1991 Toshiba T2200SX: a very compact 386SX machine with up to 10MB RAM and 9.5″ passive-matrix B&W VGA LCD. It weighs only 2.5kg. The initial base price was $4,499 but dropped to $2.999 within a year.
Addendum: Brought back from a grave
The computer was given away to me 10 years ago by a person from the Czech subsidiary of Toshiba. Like a few other machines, it was in a non-working condition and without a power brick.
When I tested it, I found out that the computer tried to boot but the hard disk seemed to be dead. It was a Conner 20MB drive, which is prone to heads sticking to degraded material in the landing zone. I replaced the drive with another one and used ANYDRIVE to work around the BIOS’s inability to detect a hard drive with capacity other than 20MB.
Another problem was with the floppy drive. It did not work… and still does not work to this day. I installed the OS on the hard drive in another computer and have only used the serial and parallel ports to copy files from one to the other since then.
However, in the following years, more problems appeared. I had to install another hard drive, because the previous one would not spin up anymore. This fixed the problem for a few months and then the new drive started having a similar problem. The backlight also stopped working. When I disconnected the hard drive, the backlight started working again. I put the computer in storage where it stayed for several years.
One day, I’ve read about the old RTC and RAM batteries leaking in laptops. I disassembled the machine and sure enough, there was battery corrosion all over the internal power board. I just removed the battery and cleaned the board, but the machine was stone dead by then.
This year, my friends and I decided to fix this computer, which is my only computer with this particular type of LCD. We replaced the electrolytic capacitors (most of them were leaking), but the power board was beyond repair – the corrosion damaged one of the custom Toshiba microcontrollers and the computer refused to start.
A friend of mine decided to try to jump start it using multiple lab power supplies, and the mainboard beeped. We provided more voltages and connected the LCDs to confirm that the machine still wanted to live.
After reverse engineering the signals in the connector between the mainboard and the power board, we built a new power board – it does not support the stand-by mode, turning off the hard drive after inactivity, or working with the battery (which is dead anyway), but everything else works including the power on/off switch and reset button. After thoroughly cleaning of the case and fixing the keyboard switches with Deoxid, I am more than satisfied with the overall shape of this machine. The LCD backlight is still very good, and the painted case plastics are not prone to yellowing.
Technical specification
CPU: 12-MHz Intel 80C286 (optional math co-processor not installed)
RAM: 1MB (1MB integrated on mainboard; up to 5MB with two 2-MB modules)
Graphics chip: Toshiba Display Controller Gate Array (32KB video RAM)
These were the computers we brought to Bytefest – a Czech vintage computer show. David and I decided not to bring more than two desktop systems. Amiga 2000 was an obvious choice – we fixed it not a long time ago and I played a lot with it recently. The other computer was SGI Indy with the original set of peripherals including the Indycam camera. There are not many vintage UNIX computers to see on vintage computer shows in this country. Thus, it is my duty to bring at least one every year.
The Aritma Minigraf plotter sitting on top of the Indy was connected using one of the Indy’s serial ports though a special ARM-based module that David built. The module contained the control software that allowed it to draw faster and with better precision than the plotter was originally designed for. From time to time, there were couple of people standing in front of the plotter, being hypnotized by the smooth movement of the pen. The Indy itself was communicating with the module as a serial terminal with the ability to send HPGL files that needed to be drawn.
I’d never played that much with Indy before (aside creating the OpenGL 1.0 version of our 3D graphics benchmark) and this was a nice experience. The graphics card in our Indy is able to display no more than 256 colors (or 16 colors for double-buffered 3D), but it’s pretty fast and allows you to have a different 256-color palette for an active window and the rest of the system. Therefore, the color flickering effects are minimized in comparison with PCs set to 256-color modes. I was surprised by the visual quality of the composite input from Nintendo 64 in 256 colors.
Commodore Amiga 2000 was configured to show the capability of this platform during the late 80s (thus, Workbench 1.3 and Kickstart 1.3 only). It didn’t have any accelerator board and the only expansions were a simple hard disk controller, 2-MB fast RAM card and A2088XT PC emulator (with an 8088 and 512kB of RAM). During the show, I also added an ISA card with a serial port (for Microsoft InterLink purposes) and a VGA adapter.
The other devices that we showed were: Apple PowerBook 100 (this year with a working hard drive and full of software), Digital DECpc 325SLC (because a 386 with color LCD is cool) and HP OmniBook 900 (just a service laptop to convert the Wi-Fi Internet into a cable form for the Indy).
I play a lot with my PowerBook 100 these days. It’s a part of a large article about early Macs for my main blog (in Czech). PB100 is a cool office machine and it’s always a pleasure to work with it. I mostly run a text editor and a terminal emulator (the 9600 baud connection to a Linux box that can be used for the Internet access). When I need to relax, I have Test Drive II: The Duel (among other games). The Mac version of this game is somehow more fun than on PC even though it displays just black and write pixels.
Anyway, my obsession is to port our Sieve Benchmark to every single old computer I play with. PB100 was not an exception. I already had a version for Mac so I only needed to modify the code to run on the plain Motorola 68000 and System 7.x.
PB100 with a 16-MHz 68HC000 CPU runs twice as fast as Amiga 600 (with no fast memory). That’s not bad. However, my another small laptop from the same era – Toshiba 2200SX – is still three times as fast as PB100 thanks to its 20-MHz Intel 386SX. I’m not surprised that higher-end models (with 68030) from the first generation of PowerBooks were more popular. Still, this PowerBook is my favorite machine among early portable Macs.
I’ve installed a new “hard disk” in my PowerBook 100 a few months ago. However, until now, there was no time to install an operating system other than the primitive System 6.0.8E that I used in the floppy-only mode. My goal was to have a Czech version that would allow me to read and write documents with our unique letters like Ř/ř. With a help of my friend, I got the floppy images of Mac OS 7.1 CZ and was able to copy them on real floppies (using my modern iBook G4 and a generic USB drive).
Working with old Macs can be painful due to use of file metadata (called resource forks) that can be lost very easily. Old Mac apps insist on this metadata and refuse to open a file if metadata is lost. Having a modern Mac is always handy to prevent these situations.
I don’t have a Mac serial cable. However, I recently bought two adapters for the conversion from Mac/SGI 8-pin mini-DIN to PC DB9. Connecting these adapters to a standard null-modem on both sides worked well and I was able to copy programs and documents from another old Mac. I’ve also managed copying files from/to a modern Windows PC. I pack the files into a ZIP file (to preserve resource forks) inside a Mac emulator and copy it using ZMODEM.
I’ve brought some of my computers to Bytefest (a big Czech vintage computer show): Apple PowerBook 100 with an external floppy drive, IBM PS/2 P70 as a cool gas-plasma-screen serial terminal, SGI O2 (used only as a hard drive cloning machine running in headless mode), SGI Octane2 with all necessary peripherals and DELL Precision M50 for sharing wireless Internet connection with my other machines (and also to show how the graphics workstation market changed in less than two years from Octane2).
