(Or, Going wireless with Mac System 7.6.1 on a ‘parts’ PowerBook 1400 cs/117 and 16 MB of RAM)
“Igor! It…is…online!”
Yes, Virginia, you can turn a box of old computer parts into a wireless laptop! This was an experiment born of curiosity, spare parts and a determination not to let anything Mac go to waste.
Over time, I’d accumulated two non-working spare PowerBook1400s as a source of parts for the one that served as my daily productivity machine until the start of 2008. They went mostly unused, and were disassembled in the closet for over a year. One of the PowerBooks had been an upgraded 183 MHZ ‘cs’ (passive matrix) model; the other one was a 117 MHZ model with a non-working ‘c’ screen.
There they lay, gathering dust, until, succumbing to spousal pressure to downsize the Mac museum, I decided to assemble them into two semi-complete computers (minus RAM and processor), and sell them on eBay as ‘parts’ laptops. Neither sold, even at a price under $10.00, after several tries.
Determined to not let them go to waste, I began trying different combinations of lowers body with the good ‘cs’ screen, the 117 Mhz processor (I’d sold the 183 previously), a spare 3 GB HDD and one piece of 8 MB ’stackable’ RAM, which was all the spare memory that I had.
It powered up, even with a power supply that has been duct-taped together since I bought it three years ago. Using an OS 7.6 install CD that had been gathering dust for a while, I had the PowerBook set up for the experiment to move forward. The speed was nothing to brag about, though the use of a 256 MB PCMCIA card in the lower of the PowerBook’s two slots gave the machine an additional 76 MB of RAM (via the ‘Virtual Memory’ option in the System 7.6.1 preferences menu) that added enough zip to make going online practical. Loading drivers for wireless connectivity was easy, thanks to the easy-to-follow directions at http://www.pennmachine.com/techie/airport1400.html. The wifi card, a Lucent WaveLan Silver 802.11b, came from an Airport ‘Graphite’ base station. With everything in place, it was time to test. After configuring the system preferences to use the wifi card, and using IE 5 as the test browser, I was online fairly quickly. Pages loaded reasonably fast using our home DSL wireless network, and IE rendered them well enough to be usable for basic surfing.
To sum things up, Apple hardware is almost never beyond redemption for some kind of use, and Apple’s System 7.6 is still viable as a vehicle for basic web surfing. (With WordPerfect 3.5, now available at no cost, as well as other productivity, multimedia and other apps for download at www.main.system7today.com/, this machine becomes highly usable for basic tasks, even though it is made of parts a dozen years old.
The picture above is of FrankenBook online with Internet Explorer 5.
Tags: Apple, Chaos, Laptop, spare parts