Watched a DVD on my Powerbook G3 Lombard. A very uninteresting thing one might say but the lead up to it shows just how dumb I was and have been. I was kicking myself when i realised I could play DVD's in the machine because I had no idea it could and more importantly, it was not something I was looking for as part of my purchasing decision.
I purchased the machine second hand a very very long time ago to replace my aging 3400. The previous owner had installed OSX 10 on it and I left it at that. I had checked it over before purchase and noticed it had CD drive, battery, pc card slot and a number of connections on the back hidden by a drop down cover. Well i used the machine for a year before the display hinges gave out. Couldn't afford replacements so put it into storage until I could afford them. A few years later I found a set of replacement hinges but never fitted them because I was already doing other stuff with a windows laptop at the time so yep, hinges went into storage.
Well move on to present day. I had to do some clean up and found the hinges. This time I had time on my hands so got the G3 out of storage to replace the hinges. During the dismantle of the machine I removed the battery and cd drive and checked on the side of the machine where the pc card slot was and here is the kicker. In all the time I've owned the G3 I thought there was a door on the card slot, just like those you find on pcmcia slots and never thought anything more of it, never inspected it very closely, just assumed the black thing I saw was a door protecting the slot. Well yep those who know, it was not a door but something actually in the slot. I pressed on the lever which allowed me to push out what ever was in the slot and I was shocked at what I saw, a PC card that said 'Macintosh Powerbook DVD-Video PC Card for Powerbook G3 Series'. I was like what the ****. I investigated what this card was and found out that it does not work in OSX but in OS 9 and when working in OS 9 you see a icon on the desktop and in the task bar telling you the DVD card is installed BUT it does not show on the desktop in OSX BUT it does show up in the taskbar, something I did not bother to look into.
All this time I had this G3 and not once did I bother checking that it had the all the items necessary to watch DVD's (used to watch DVD movies on my windows laptop because of it). After I fitted the new hinges and installed OS 9 on a different partition of the hard drive, there it was on the desktop, the icon for the DVD card. I clicked on it and Apple DVD Player program opened. I clicked play button and the DVD i had put in started playing (the Black Hole), I couldn't believe it, I was over joyed but yet my heart still sank because it dawned on me that I could have been watching DVD's on this G3 all those years ago way way before I got a windows laptop to play DVD's. Man I feel so stupid. Live and learn as they say.
. I wish I could find RAM for it (at least 16 Gb, now it has only 8 installed). And, well, we can only dream about more powerful (multithreaded) CPUs...
