Refreshing a PowerBook Wallstreet
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12 September, 2008
By Holden Scott
Simple, fresh, back to basics and back to work. No overly excessive GUI distractions, just the pureness and quickness of OS 9 on the black shark.
Ah, back to when things were still somewhat simple, the OS 8 and 9 days. It was 1998, and the PowerBook Wallstreet was a radical departure from the previous PowerBooks that preceded it. Not that prior PowerBooks weren’t notable, but he Wallstreet was the completely redesigned, and the first PowerBook ever to support a screen larger than 12.1”, topping out at 14.1”. Not only that, but the top end machine came loaded with a 300 mhz G3 processor, with 1 MB of L2 cache with a bus speed of 66 mhz. With two hot swapable drive bays, the Wallstreet could house two batteries for double the power on the road. With an optional PCMCIA DVD decoder card, along with the DVD-ROM drive, DVD playback became possible under OS 9. However, since OS X’s DVD player did not support the DVD decoder card, DVD playback is restricted to OS 9 and earlier. Add a beautiful keyboard, two PC card slots, which can house USB, Firewire, wireless cards, and the like, with legacy ports, the Wallstreet bridges the old with the new. Since I recently purchased a Newton MessagePad 2100, the Wallstreet will service as a syncing device for the Newton, since it is a bit quirky to sync the Newton under OS X.
So, what is under the hood of my upgraded, refreshed Wallstreet?
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