Is all of this just so much nostalgia or could the PowerBook 1400 still be a usefull computer in 2010? Let's find out. They are still available on eBay. As usual, I'm looking for bargains. Low and behold, I found a machine listed as unworking that no one seemed to be interested in. At 2:00 AM I put in the only bid and got it for 59 cents plus shipping. Wow! It came to me looking good, but it had a bad rattle. I pulled the keyboard and found that the memory chip had come loose, which accounted for its being listed as "unworking". Putting that back into place gave me a completely functional PowerBook 1400c at a great price.

OK, it needed a new battery, a larger hard drive, and a power adaptor. It also needed some way of connecting to a network and the Internet. It was all there on eBay, including an Orinoco Wi-Fi card that brought this machine into the world of wireless connectivity for $12. It connected to the "guest" network on my Airport Extreme router, albeit without password protection as the card can only handle WEP, not WAP. Come on, Apple, give users of older machines a break and update your Airport software to include more security options on your pricey dual-band router.

Now for some software. I'm a pack rat in that department, having just about every program I've ever used since 1995 including installation codes and original receipts. Mac OS 8.6 supported the Wi-Fi card and ran well on this 133 MHz processor machine. Clarisworks and Microsoft Office were just as usable as I remembered them to be. If one only uses a computer as a typewriter, this one is perfectly capable. What about the Internet? The big problem with running the classic Mac OS these days is the lack of an up-to-date browser. iCab and the new Classilla work... sort of. But, they really require at least a G3 processor and more RAM than this machine's maximum of 64MB to be considered usable. Well, I'm hooked on this old beast now so it's back to eBay again.