My sister is returning to Singapore soon, and she wanted the recipes which she had downloaded from Usenet onto her old (and presumably spoilt) 1993 Macintosh PowerBook 180 which has lain unused since at least last millennium, so my brother in law was running around Sim Lim, hoping to find a wizened tinker who would possess the necessary skills the repair this antique.

I pointed out to him that even if anyone could retrieve data from its hard drive, it'd cost him a bomb, considering that data recovery rates for a normal HDD start at $300, so if all she wanted were her recipes, she could do better than to pay me $300 to sift through Google Groups's archives instead of this.

Unfortunately, no one had ever even *seen* a Powerbook 180, let alone possess the lost arcane lore required to retrieve data from its hard drive, but they were all quite excited at the prospect of seeing this artefact from a long-forgotten age that has since passed into the Realm of Legend. On the up side, we managed to get it started up:




Using the PS/2 ports as a point of reference, you should be able to guess how massive and brick-like the damn thing is




Pity about the cracked LCD


About This Macintosh: PowerBook 180. System Software 7.1, (C) Apple Computer, Inc. 1983-1993, Total Memory: 8,192k

Maybe we can get the Smithsonian to buy this baby...