Powerbook Slaughter

A couple of Powerbooks were kicking around so without further ado I slaughtered them. I suppose that means this is snuff photography:

Toshiba Libretto

Happy new year (about 6 weeks late)!

After an extended break from Free Geek for the holidays and a jaunt down to South America, it's great to be back at the laptop station. Nothing seems to have exploded or grown mold in my absence -- a slight disappointment to my ego, which likes to claim indispensability. In fact, the place is generally looking good and I was happy to see all the regulars.

Free Geek has accumulated several interesting portables since I was last in. The first one I got my hands on was a Toshiba Libretto:

Looks pretty boring until you put something in there for scale.

Macintosh Autopsy

This is what science fiction used to look like:

...but then again, so was this.

Proxima Desktop Projector 2400

I like old video projectors. They've been around in some form since the dawn of television -- the old CRT-based ones were technically the same as televisions with the brightness cranked so that they'd throw an image onto a screen. These evolved into huge three-tube monstrosities that you can now get for the price of a hernia.

But when the LCD display came along things got more interesting. In the late 80s someone started manufacturing little units that sat on top of a classroom-standard overhead projector. IBM's Thinkpad 755CDV laptop from 1995 could have the back of its display stripped off so that it could be similarly used to project an image.

By the end of the 1990s digital projectors had taken a familiar shape and dropped massively in both weight and price... but in the meantime there were some weird species in circulation. I already wrote about one (see the end of the article). Here's another. Excluse the blurry photography.

Commodore C286LT Laptop Teardown

Hi all,

I'm about to disappear to Europe for a couple of weeks (whee!) and will try to visit something interestingly nerdy while I'm there -- the Berlin Computer Game Museum? A small computer museum at Humboldt? But in the meantime, here's a teardown in the oddly fertile vein of 286 laptops.

Mystery Laptop

I wrote here about the difficulties laptop manufacturers had in the late 1980s combining hard drives and battery power, and made the suspect statement that the Macintosh Portable in 1989 was one of the first to feature both.

I might have found a better contender. It's definitely a strange one:

Technological Atavism

Sometime in the early 1990s I came into possession of a Wang word processor -- one of the ones with 8" floppy drives. I tried to find out about that particular model, but quickly learned that you have to be careful how you search for pictures given this subject matter.

My favourite things at Free Geek are the technological neanderthals -- the also-rans and could-have-beens. I've posted numerous times about obsolete laptop teardowns and the strange shapes that portable computers tried out before the bog standard laptop emerged. (And who knows how long that'll last -- personally I'm not sold on the idea of tablet computing just yet, but who knows.)

A strange one came into Free Geek over the last week.

In the words of Alan Jackson (ugh) -- what's so crazy about that?

Zenith Eazy Pc Teardown

Somewhere on the West Coast of Vancouver Island...

I played hookie from Free Geek this week and hung around Vancouver Island. Fortunately I saved up a teardown for just such an occasion.

Thursday's Mystery Device

Last Thursday there was a bit of a disturbance at the Receiving desk -- a batch of old equipment arrived in boxes, and one of the boxes turned out to have a dead mouse in it. (The meaty kind.)

The box also contained this:

Mystery Device

At first glance, this appears to be an ancient scanner, filthy and discolored from exposure to sunlight. When it failed to actually be a scanner (i.e. there was nowhere to stick paper into it), I rescued it for further investigation. This turned into a really fun teardown.

Toshiba T1000 Teardown

My favourite rare treat at Free Geek is taking apart unusual old equipment. (See e.g. Industrial Computer Teardown.) Forgive me for posting this stuff as frequently as I possibly can -- it's fun, it's interesting and I love writing about it.

Toshiba T1000 Cockpit View

Industrial computer teardown

One of the main reasons I volunteer at Free Geek Vancouver is to get myself up to my elbows in old gear. My introduction to computer hardware came from several sources: Value Village, dumpster-diving as a 12-year-old for Commodore 64s behind my elementary school, tearing apart whatever parents of friends brought back from the office, but primarily it came from the BC Tel Pioneer Surplus Store. This was a warehouse run by old-timers where people affiliated with BC Tel (now Telus) could rummage through decades of detritus and take it home for pennies a pound. Visually, it looked a lot like Freegeek does.

Here be geeks.

Through the 1990s the warehouse, unfortunately, succumbed to homogenization. Gradually desktop computing took over from custom hardware and what was once a bizarre assortment of obscure telecom gear morphed into just another bunch of superannuated desktops.

I'm incredibly lucky to have had the chance to take some of that old gear home during that pivotal period of change in the world of computing. Growing up, my suburban basement was filled with pieces of these relics -- teletypes, an enormous WANG word processor, daisy-wheel printers, relay banks, electronic charting devices, stereo equipment, and more.

Free Geek of course deals almost exclusively in computer gear and most of what comes in is middle-of-the-road -- neither new nor old enough to be exciting. But occasionally something pretty strange comes in. When that happens, a volunteer will fall in love with a piece of old gear at Receiving only to have his or her heart broken when it's generally scrapped, functional or not, for being unsaleable. For a long time, there was a museum collection but it grew to fill whatever space it had -- first a corner of the warehouse, then an outside storage locker -- and nobody quite knew what to do with it.

Of necessity, FGV is currently pretty ruthless -- the mandate doesn't extend to a museum and there is simply no room for the stuff to collect. (Incidentally, if anyone wants to spearhead a better policy, please bring it to the fg-general mailing list! We're all ears.)

On Thursday an old industrial computer came in. Interesting, yes. Unusual, yes. Valuable, no.

Pentium-class industrial computer