Macintosh
PowerBook 100

This is the original Apple PowerBook the 100 which was actually made in Japan by Sony. It was also the most compact PowerBook until the Titanium PowerBook came out in 2001. Lowendmac has a very good writeup on this machine at http://lowendmac.com/pb/100.shtml . The 100 was also the first PowerBook to incorporate SCSI disk mode, using a special square scsi cable that had an extra pin allowing the PowerBook 100 to be mounted on a Macs desktop as an external hard drive a very handy feature. Oddly the PowerBook 140 and 170 do not support this feature.

Yup I still have the original box and packing.

Lots of packing considering the size of the actual components!

When they first shipped they came with a whopping 2 mb or ram and 20mb hard drive, the hard drive was 2.5' scsi which I've upgraded as far as 730mb and memory could be upgraded to 8mb. The screen is b&w. It came packed in quit a substantial box which contained the computer, external floppy drive, AC adaptor and instruction manuals.

Opening the PowerBook 100 is pretty straightforward though you have to remove the small rubber plugs covering the three screw holes. Thankfully Sony used standard phillips head screws!

Once the three screws are out the screen assembly can be folded back.

Pulling out this plug allows you to remove the entire screen assembly. Not sure if I really recommend doing this though.

Next you can lift off the keyboard, be careful of the two ribbon cables at the top. The memory simm is plugged in just above the VLSI chip, a 6mb chip is the largest the computer will see. The chip in the photo is 4mb for a total of 6mb. The 16 mhz 68000 chip is sitting on the daughterboard to the right.

The internal fuse was one of the weakest links in the entire setup, well actually it was also the AC adaptor that had a bad plastic tip which would short the power plug and blow the fuse. The original PowerBook 100 came with a fuse that was soldiered onto the motherboard. This particular 100 has had the Apple repair which replaced the soldiered on fuse with a replaceable fuse. My original 100 had this repair done under warranty and at the time I was also able to buy spare fuses.

Apple also made a couple of modifications to the motherboard at two locations under the chip marked LSI and just at the right bottom corner of the cpu daughterboard. I'm not sure what the reason for this was but I do notice that the unmodified 100 I own has some video issues.

Some of the other weak parts besides the AC adaptor and fuse are the feet on each side, the rear door and video.

This is the original fuse soldiered onto the PowerBook 100 motherboard.

The unmodified motherboard, it looks like Apple did soldier on some extra leads to try and solve some issues.

The trackball was also a source of trouble on the PowerBook 140 and 170 there were little ruby coloured jewels that the trackball rolled on. With the PowerBook 100 it was two black plastic posts, the blue rollers would load up with goo and this would cause the the trackball to become erratic. The problem was easily cleaned though. I would bet you won't find any good used working batteries these days as the 100 used a sealed lead acid battery like the original Mac Portable, BTI made a replacement pack but I have a feeling they aren't current.

Still I always liked my PowerBook 100 it was light and was used for over a year running our FirstClass based network up here in Canada. It had a whopping 230mb hard drive and 8mb of ram. If you were part of OneNet, CanadaNet or Toronto Online in Canada there is a good chance that many of the messages you were reading that came in from boards like Mac in Time, digitalNation, Macquarium, Insane Domain, and OneNet Boulder were routed through my trusty PowerBook 100 since we were the OneNet regional hub and still are today! And no I'm not using the 100 anylonger everything is running through a B&W G3 450.