A lil bit of Macintosh history

[gfish31]

So we were cleaning out the attic today, and we found some of our old computers. We found:

Macintosh Powerbook 145 - circa 1992 - still works fine, b&w screen, flight simulator, the works

Macintosh Performa 6115CD - circa 1994 - it may work, i'm not sure... but the specs on the box are hilarious

Not pictured, we found an iMac G3, the slot-loading 700mhz version, that doesnt work

 

[gfish31]

dunno why it didnt post the pics in the first place

 

[Xavier]

It is truly incredible how far personal computers have advanced and the current rate of technology development is immense.

 

[dmr727]

I've always loved the first generation of Powerbooks. They were such an improvement in design over any other laptop of the time.

 

[sjinsjca]

dunno why it didnt post the pics in the first place

I had a similar PowerBook. I don't miss cleaning the mouse-ball rollers at all. Seriously, who has time for cleaning mouse balls?

The Performa specs are indeed hilarious. "High-performance, 60MHz CPU"! Wow. Now we're routinely walking around with computers in our pockets that clock about 40X faster than that, are probably more like 500X more powerful altogether, which run days on batteries, with a whole spectrum of connectivity options ranging from 2G to 3G to 3.5G to WiFi and Bluetooth, with GPS, with an accelerometer, with a compass, with a gyroscope, with a camera, with a touch interface, with a color display, with stereo sound and voice and now video calling... and which cost about an order of magnitude less even with inflation. All over about 15-17 years. Astonishing.

 

[toffa813]

That is incredible. Makes the G4 with 800mhz/ 256mb ram my dad still uses for some reason sound decent. My iPhone 4 still has better specs though

 

[dmr727]

It's incredible the improvement in computing horsepower, but it's also kind of disappointing that fundamentally the software hasn't changed much. Things are prettier of course, and we've been able to store more and more media digitally, but I think we've been grossly underutilizing the advances in hardware from an innovation standpoint.