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Retro rarity: spring cleaning unearths a Colby Walkmac
For those of us who have been around the mobile computing space for a while, the name Ken Landau is quite familiar. Landau's currently the CEO of iOS development firm mobileAge, but he's been producing software for handheld computing devices since the true birth of the industry in 1993 with the introduction of the Apple Newton MessagePad. Recently, he was doing a bit of spring cleaning and found a rarity in his basement: a Colby Walkmac. Landau's brother-in-law, David Carnoy, is an editor at CNET, so he wrote about the find in a recent post. The 13-pound Colby Walkmac was actually the first battery-operated Mac as well as the first portable Mac with an LCD display. At the time, amber displays were considered to be much more ergonomic than those nasty green screens: This machine was officially sanctioned by Apple, and used a stock Mac SE motherboard. A later model -- named the Colby SE30 after Sony threatened to sue Colby for a trade name too close to Walkman -- used the SE/30 motherboard and had an integrated keyboard (Editor's Note: I purchased two Colby SE30s for the company I was working for in 1990 because they were much faster than the Mac Portables Apple was selling). Landau ended up with the Walkmac during his tenure at Apple between 1986 and 1992. According to Carnoy, Landau was "investigating sales force automation options when Colby Systems sent him one." The price at the time the Walkmac first appeared was about $6,000, or close to $12,000 in today's dollars. There's more about Landau's find in the CNET post, as well as information about Colby Systems founder Chuck Colby, a man who could best be described as a serial inventor. You can read more about Colby on his own website, which is chock full of amazing facts like the fact that when he was 12 years old, he built what is believed to be the first commercial transistor radio.
How old is your oldest working Mac?
A few months ago I brought my family's old Macintosh SE/30 to my home office. While it booted fine a few years ago, it looks like mine has developed SimasiMac, which means a trip inside the machine to replace a few capacitors (I hope). Along with the SE/30 I brought a Powerbook 540c, one of the more capable (and last) of the smaller, 68LC040-based laptops from Apple. The 500 series had numerous firsts, like a trackpad and sleep mode when you shut the lid, plus you could upgrade the CPU to a PowerPC chip.Currently our 540c doesn't have much software on it, as we used Zip disks to store many of the educational programs my little brothers used in the 90's. It does, however, have a copy of SoftPC, and Windows 95 installed on it. Not two months ago my son sat here in the office and had a ball playing with Paint (why isn't there something like this pre-installed on Macs, hm?) and Minesweeper. He's playing with the calculator in the picture. I find it a little sad that we had to resort to Windows for casual fun, but I guess that's why Macs were never considered "toy computers" (that's sarcasm for those who missed the reference).When the kids do play classic Mac OS games, I let them use my 500 MHz G3 iBook (the first of the "icebooks"), which not only runs Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, but has a version of TuxPaint for OS X, which I highly recommend. It should be noted that quite a few older Mac educational games won't run on the iBook. Often it's an issue with older versions of QuickTime expected by the program, or some funky extension or Director call that just won't work after OS 8.5 (remember Sherlock?).You can see some really old Macs pulling serious duty over on Cult of Mac as well. But I want to know what you readers are running in the way of older Macs. What's the oldest Mac currently still living in your house, and what do you use it for? Oh, and if anyone has a copy of NetTrek they'd like to share...
