PowerBook 170 question

From: Scott Stevens <sastevens_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Wed Apr 14 23:31:13 2004

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 21:29:49 -0400
Gene Ehrich <gehrich_at_tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

> I just acquired a Power Book 170. Hopefully it is old enough to be on topic
> here.
>
> It looks to be in great physical shape but I have a few questions.
> When I plug it in there is a mouse pointer and a small blinking diskette.
>
> 1. What do I do next? What disk is it looking for?
>
> 2. Should there be a hard drive in this computer?
>
> 3. If there is a hard drive why should it be looking for a diskette?
>
> 4. Battery does hold a charge
>

You can download a MacOS verison to run on that Powerbook direct from Apple. They've put MacOS 7.5 on their site as a free download. It's not completely obvious where to find it. There's a place with links to the download, and a lot of other info you'll probably want about your new Powerbook, at this website:

http://lowendmac.com/early-macs.html

Trawl around the site and you'll probably find most of what you're wanting. I am the proud (?) owner of a Powerbook 165c. Mine has the regular 4 megs of RAM and an 80 meg hard drive. I keep it around because once in awhile you need something Mac-related, i.e. to read a disk or run something Mac-specific.

You will need to find the rectangular cable adapter for the Powerbook to get it's external SCSI port working, which is worth it if you're going to expand it at all. Mac CDROM drives that will work with that machine are near free these days. I have a pile of internal drives. Write me if you want one or a few for the cost of shipping. You can stick one in a generic external SCSI case, if you get the SCSI cable for your Powerbook, and then you've got a CD drive for it.

I (or I am sure a lot of other people here) can get you a diskette set of MacOS if you need it to get started on the machine. You might need this from some one else who has a working Mac because to use the downloadable 7.5 OS set from Apple you'll need them on Apple-readable and bootable diskettes to do anything with the machine. This presents sort of a catch-22 if you don't have other Apple equipment to download the disk images to and write them to diskettes.

NetBSD on a Mac SE/30 rocks.

Scott


>
>
> =================================
> Gene Ehrich
> gehrich_at_tampabay.rr.com
>
Received on Wed Apr 14 2004 - 23:31:13 BST

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