A Seamless Transition

Powerbook 190 running System 7.5.2
Powerbook 190 running System 7.5.2

Pete and Shelley asked us to keep a look out for a used Apple laptop because their old laptop, a Powerbook 190 running System 7.5.2, was acting up. It could not hold a charge anymore and the floppy drive stopped working. We watched Craigs List for a few weeks and found a nice 1.5 GHz PowerBook at a good price. We connected the old laptop to a LaCie 1 gig SCSI drive that we borrowed from Walter Ketcham. We dragged years worth of documents (letters written in SimpleText and short books written in Quark 3.0 for a total of 29.3 meg) from the laptop to the SCSI drive.

PowerMacintosh G3 with scsi and a firewire card running OS 9
PowerMacintosh G3 with scsi and a firewire card running OS 9

You can’t see our PowerMacintosh G3 (we use it as a stand for our HP laser prnter) but that is where the magic happened. Luckily we had saved our old CRT monitor and a ADB mouse and keyboard so I dug them out of the basement. We hooked the SCSI drive up to the G3 and dragged the Pete and Shelley files to an external firewire drive. We had put a $10 firewire card in that machine years ago. It was kind of fun booting in System 9 and watching the SCSI drive mount and I happy we hung on to our old equipment. In fact we are still using the blue/grey 350 MHz PowerMac G4 in the upper left hand corner of this picture to collect our email. Matt from theiLife.com helped us get Leopard on it by booting it in Target mode and installing from his laptop.

1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 running OS 10.5
1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 running OS 10.5

The last step was a breeze. We just plugged the firewire drive into Pete and Shelley’s new used laptop and slid their files on to the new Powerbook, a major upgrade for them and a seamless transition for us. They can sit in the woods and continue and carry on their digital lifestyle until their battery runs down. And then they will have to depend on solar power to recharge it.

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