FROZEN IN TIME
This article on how the original Apple Powerbook came to be, really took me down memory lane, as I recover from a great Thanksgiving 
(LowerEndMac via Digg.com and Memeorandum).
The Powerbook 100 series (especially the 170) definitely belongs on my list of tech products that have "Thrilled" me over the last couple of decades.
What was remarkable about it's success was that it came at a time when Steve Jobs was NOT at Apple, the company being in the heart of the Sculley era.
As the article notes, there were a number of reasons for the unit's billion dollar success, including it's built-in networking and online features (a relative first at the time), the software (it's Apple of course, and the size and weight (again, it's an Apple of course).
But the feature that I loved the most about this product was something most people were eventually happy to see fade away on notebooks, replaced by the now ubiquitous and banal Touchpad.
Apple's implementation of the Trackball "mouse" for the original Powerbook was one of the "perfect" ways to move around a cursor on a screen, especially for this geek.
An excerpt from the article:
"The most striking difference between the PowerBooks and the PC portables was the presence of a built-in trackball and its position on the case. Other manufacturers included trackballs (or other pointing devices), but they were often placed in awkward positions.
Compaq's trademark design element was to position the trackball on the back side of the display, so a user could grasp the display and move the pointer. Others put the trackball on the side (like the Macintosh Portable) or relegated it to an attachment to the side of the keyboard...
Tim and Asahi both put the trackball in front of the keyboard, in the middle of a large palm-rest. Tim and Asahi were not only easier to use, they were also much more comfortable."
The original Powerbook ushered in not only phenomenal success streak for Apple in laptops, but also influenced PC laptops for the rest of the decade.
There are a couple of Apple design firsts from the ocean of Apple design firsts that'll likely always be on my 
all-time- favorites list. The first is the trackball and Grey case design of the original Powerbook series, and the second is the cool swivel arm-based iMac.
It lasted only a brief time, and had nowhere near the influence on subsequent PC design as the Powerbooks did then and do now.
But for those that got to experience the feeling of making what is obviously a heavy display literally "float" to where you want it with the slightest effort of your fingertip...well, you know what I'm talking about.
It was the closest anyone of us have come to being able to whiz around a display with a finger like Tom Cruise in Spielberg's Minority Report so far in this new century.
The latest version of the iMac is cool, but the original is still unique, in my 
humble opinion.
It's not likely to happen, but I often wish that Apple would re-introduce these two products with updated components in the original design. Even if it were in a "Limited Edition", over-the-top priced product line a la Sony's high-end Qualia experiment (Note: This link takes you to a site with animation and sound).
In the meantime, both the products are stored in my computing time capsule, classics in their time...and now.
Comments