A rare piece of probably unknown (to most) Apple history: the first portable Mac – which wasn’t the Mac Portable and wasn’t built by Apple. “I’d never heard of the Walkmac, which wasn’t built by Apple but by electronics pioneer Chuck Colby, who founded Colby Systems in 1982. The Apple-sanctioned model you see here was ‘modded’ around a stock Mac SE motherboard and hit the market in 1987, two years before Apple put out its Macintosh Portable in 1989 for $7,300. Subsequent Colby models were built around the SE-30 motherboard and had an integrated keyboard (that black mat in the picture above is a mouse pad).”
When I spoke to Brian Dougherty about GEOS he mentioned a portable Mac; the plan was to use GEOS with a Mac UI because the hardware team could not (initially) produce a portable Mac with enough power to run the regular Mac OS.
IMO Apple must have had a lot of internal struggle in bringing about a portable Mac. Scully was willing to compromise on the purist ideals to get to the market quickly, where as the hardware team must have been pushing to do a Real Mac^TM
This whole WalkMac thing plays into my idea that Scully was willing to compromise in almost any way just to get a portable Mac out there.
Oh man, GEOS!
In Portugal Phillips PCs were sold with it back in 1992!
Yes, but mine was from 1991! A Phillips PC with a 286 CPU that I still have laying around. And I also have the original diskttes for GeOS, which truly was an amazing system. Unfortunately it doesn’t run on FreeDOS, but I might give it a go with my original MS-DOS 4 diskettes. Oh, if only I had a working diskette reader… 🙂
+1 as I cannot vote.
Do you manage to keep your diskettes alive?!
I was forced to copy most of mine to CDs and dumped the rest.
In the process I also managed to break down a floppy drive while trying to read damaged disks.
Osnews : http://www.osnews.com/story/15223/GEOS_The_Graphical_Environment_Op…
Disk images : http://cbmfiles.com/geos/geos-13.php
http://lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/geos.html
Kochise
Actually I am speaking about diskettes in general, not only GEOS related.
But thanks for the links, they contain lots of nice information.
To be fair, it’s kind of a hit and miss. Some diskettes stayed alive, some didn’t and some others were killed by a murderous reader that I got. But you are right, I really should make backups of those precious diskettes to a new medium.
I love it! Look at that thing! It has every port and connector imaginable. What a treat!
Is that a keyboard? Never seen one like that.
That just looks like a mouse mat – though I can’t tell why it’s been left there. The Walkmac did have a conventional keyboard: http://www.chuckcolby.com/walkmac.html