Apple PowerBook Duo 280c and DuoDock Review and Repair
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ค. 2024
- Thanks to www.pcbway.com for sponsoring this video.
Before the MacBook Air, there was another long serving range of PowerBook ultra portables. If you didn't want to trade power for portability, you picked yourself up a PowerBook Duo 280c. Complete with a Motorola 68040 and an active matrix colour screen it was a portable powerhouse for computing on the go. The downside however was the complete lack of any useful ports, requiring a dock for any sort of connection or expansion. It didn't even come with a floppy drive!
Thankfully Apple designed a couple of great dock options with the MiniDock and the DuoDock. The MiniDock gave you all the necessary ports you needed, but the DuoDock took this one step further. Not only did it provide the same ports as the MiniDock, but it also had built in Ethernet, extra video RAM for higher resolution displays, a built in floppy drive and space for NUBUS cards and even an extra hard drive!
Before we can use the PowerBook Duo, we have to do a bit of preventive maintenance by replacing some troublesome caps, then carry out a few upgrades like solid state storage, extra RAM and a unique SD card solution. Along the way we use a BlueSCSI to help out with the OS install.
Please note, this video is for entertainment purposes only. Don't try any of this yourself. Especially the dangerous sparky bits.
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Credit:
Macintosh Portable Footage: @polymatt
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro and design
2:43 MiniDock
4:36 DuoDock
5:40 Kindly sponsored by PCBWay
6:15 Unique design
6:50 Tearing down the PowerBook Duo
10:29 More modifications
13:09 Powering it up and installing OS using MiniDock
14:33 Quick look inside the DuoDock
15:16 Using the DuoDock to connect to AppleShare
16:29 Conclusion and outro
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I bought a 2300c and DuoDock brand new when I worked at Apple in mid 1990’s. For the day it was considered a marvel.
I still think it’s a marvel!
Super awesome. You’re amazing. As an electronics engineer & Mac user since 1984, I have to say your hacking skills brought memories AND great admiration for your creativity.
Oh wow, thanks for the encouragement, really nice of you ☺️
Super slick install of that SD device, I've never seen an SD card 'extender' like that so it's cool to know those exist. Great vid!
Thanks! Keeps things easy 😄
Nice work buddy! Some of us would love a big dock but are stuck with a little tiny dock. Wife says it doesn't matter, but come on who are they kidding
At least it’s not a microdock 😂
Awesome video and very cool SD extension trick - I’d never seen that before!
Thanks Matt, and thanks for the great Portable footage! Also, thanks to you, now I have a use for the modem card I swapped into my other 280c. Now just to find a way to dial into your Time Machine 😂
I had a Duo 250 and a Duo Dock. I really liked it at the time. When it was docked, it gained an FPU. As a result, I had a few apps that required having two versions, depending on whether it was in or out of the dock.
That’s really neat, I love the idea of an extra FPU when docking. Sadly the DuoDock I have doesn’t have that feature, as the 68040 and later powerPC didn’t support it.
Awesome! Might also want to open up the display as it also tends to have leaky capacitors.
Perfect thumbnail pun :) Great SD install too! One thing to watch out for, I read that those extenders can lose some bit or cause weird problems. I don't think it's guaranteed, and this seems to be working perfect for you... just something to keep in mind, if you start experiencing odd drive issues, try without the extender. Lovely overview video!
I have been getting a few issues. Computer will randomly hang. The scsi2sd was an old unit I bought years ago before bluescsi was available, so might swap that out in the future. I’ve also bypassed the sd extension in case that was the issue, but it’s persisting.
@@TheBasementChannel Yeah, if it's the older SCSI2SD, that might be it. Just the other day, Technight was talking about a ton of random issues in an older PB using the first version of SCSI2SD.
@iiidiy yes we had a brief Twitter exchange on the topic.
Great channel. Deserves more subs!
Thanks Mike, nice of you to say 😊
Great video! The 2300c and DuoDock are my daily driver vintage Mac - so slick! BTW - the DuoDock I recently purchased has the internal SCSI hard drive mounted on the underneath side (near the NuBus cards). The mount looks just like the one used to mount a drive in the IIci - it just clips in - and it just has a long cable that routes up to the top. I actually replaced it with a BlueSCSI instead and use the dock to recover data from Duos I come across and recap/fix/sell. Oh, and the capacitors in the DuoDock power supply (riveted closed!) are as bad or worse than the ones on the Duo logic board...
Thanks Shane, appreciate your interesting comment. I had wondered where the hard drive would fit so that makes sense.
Nice video, great explanations, but I am angry that you kept the cleanups you obviously did to yourself.
😂 I realised while editing I didn’t have any cleaning footage, my bad. Next time I’ll remember to put a bit of scrubbing in there. 🙏
Thank you for your video. I have inherited a PowerBook Duo that my father used in the 90s. We have 2 issues. The first is the laptop is stuck in the duodock, any suggestions to get it out? The second is we want to get the data off the drive. Is there a way to do it? It has been sitting idle for years! Thank you in advance for any answers you have. Cheers.
Hello Judith. Thanks for your comment. I’m no expert, but I may be able to help out a little. On the side of my DuoDock (opposite to the floppy drive) there is a small slot. I poked in a rod and this manually disengages the docking mechanism. Once you get the powerbook out, the lid might be stuck to the body as the rubber bumpers have likely turned sticky with age. Slide a credit card or similar each side of the latch if so. With the machine open connect the power adapter and hopefully you get a boot chime and it loads up the OS from the hard drive. If the hard drive doesn’t work, you can try giving it a few sharp taps. They have a rubber bumper inside that also turns to goo, and sometimes the arm that holds the heads can get stuck.
If the machine is working fine, then getting the data off can be a bit of a challenge without a working dock. If the DuoDock is working, you could write files to a floppy disk and read them on a modern machine with a USB floppy drive. You could network the computer (AppleShare) to another later mac with usb (like a later G3 or G4). You could use the SCSI port on the back to connect a blueSCSI or similar and copy the files to this external drive, which you then could access in an emulator.
If the Dock isn’t working, you can still network the powerbook using the serial port on the back behind the feet. But you would need another older serial equipped machine to receive the data.
As I’m typing all this I’m realising there’s no easy way really! I’d be happy to help out if you lived nearby, or were willing to ship the machine. Reach out if you like, contact details are in my bio.
Well done! I like the SD extension, was it difficult to fold / route its cable inside the PowerBook chassis?
Thanks! Not really, lots of extra space where the HDD used to be.
@@TheBasementChannel Oh cool, I might have a go at this 👍
@GarthBeagle test it out of the machine first, some extenders give weird dropouts or don’t work.