The world's fastest laptop...circa 1997 :-)

[647156]

I seem to already have what some might consider to be an unhealthy number of PowerPCs but I couldn't resist acquiring this in an auction recently for £17 which seemed a decent price especially considering it came with a few accessories that I can re-sell - I really like the design of it and it's cool to have what was the world's fastest laptop when it was released back at the start of 1997

Well, the top-of-the-range version was briefly the world's fastest anyway; this one is the mid-range of the three PowerBook 3400c models that they released, with a 200 MHz PowerPC 603e processor, 2 GB hard drive, 80 MB RAM (16 MB built in plus a 64 MB module), and it came with the swappable CD-ROM and floppy modules.

I'm trying out both Mac OS 9.1 (the latest OS that Apple supported on it) plus stepping back to the day it first came out of its box with its model-specific build of 7.6.1 (both the 7.6 installer and the 7.6.1 update are specific to the 3400c given that it was released after 7.6, luckily I was able to hunt down both online) which is interesting as I have never run System 7 on anything this near, barely on PowerPC at all. As you can see below, it is even still just about possible to go online today using System 7 – most websites seem to have switched to HTTPS-only now though so a lot of sites won't load in such an old browser (presumably as the certificates that they recognise are too old or something), even apple.com is no longer reachable as they seem to have recently switched.

What do you think of it, a Mac worthy of adding to the collection even if I possibly already have too many?... ;-)

I do like that PowerPC logo above the screen to remind you what architecture you're using – it wouldn't be quite the same if newer Macs said "Intel Inside" in that same location would it...

I've removed the separate PRAM battery (which seemed dead anyway – it is a rechargeable battery and lives under the left speaker) from it as I saw a post online that said you should, apparently they are prone to leaking and killing the board.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Wow - what a bargain at £17 Looks to be in great shape!

 

[ActionableMango]

I like the postage-stamp-sized touchpad.

 

[AphoticD]

Great score @647156 !

It looks to be in excellent condition. I spotted one recently on the 'bay here in Australia, selling with it's original packaging with only 16MB of RAM. 3 bidders are going to war on it, currently sitting at AU$182.50 + $34.95 (local) shipping already. So, I think you did well for £17.

From what I understand, the 64MB RAM module is worth a small fortune on its own.

Back when my daily driver was a 200Mhz 603 with 144MB RAM, my fave OS was 8.6. It was compatible with many OS9 apps, including Carbon apps once CarbonLib (v1.6?) was installed, but it felt much lighter than OS9 in general use. Classilla browser v9.3.3 runs nicely on OS 8.6 too.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Very nice find

for £17 too very nice I noticed Powerbook 3400c,s they tend to either go for a a boatload or quite cheap depending which way the wind is blowing it seems

I have 3 Laptops of this design 2 PowerBook 3400c,s and a Kanga

the Hooper (code name for the 3400c which was named after the name of one of the developers dogs) 2400c, and Kanga hold the distinction of being one of the most mature OpenFirmware/software and Hardware wise of all the PowerStar based macs

and as such they actually run OS X quite well (slow but good LOL). (the 3400c/2400 and Kanga are the only PowerStar macs that you can install OS X Server 1.x onto... for now )

with the 80MB of RAM your machine has you should be able to Squeeze 10.2.8 on there

sadly both of my 3400c machines only have 16+16 giving me 32MB of total RAM, so i cant run OS X 10.x but its just enough to run OS X Server 1.2v3 Luckily my Kanga had a 64MB RAM card installed allowing me to run Tiger on my Kanga (sadly tho the card only shows up as 32MB when installed in a 3400c)

its a good thing you removed the PRAM battery because indeed they are known for leaking all over the logic-board and nuking the board.

on all 3 of my machines they had just started to leak and as such the battery wires had corroded but luckily nothing had leaked onto the logic board on any of them so i got to them in the nick of time it seems

(on my first one which was my 240Mhz one, it was sold as tested non working totally dead, and I suspected the worst a leaked battery but luckily this turned out not to be the case, the problem was with the Power Jack it needed soldering back to the logic-board once i did, it fired right up into Mac OS 7.6 full of the last owners stuff!)

its also worth noting that the PCMCIA slots in the 3400c and Kanga are un-officially CardBus compatible, if you shave/cut the nub off of a CardBus card that prevents it from being installed into a regular PCMCIA slot and insert it into one of the 3400c,s slots it will work

all in all they are fun machines to play with indeed and yours looks to be in nice shape too

 

[647156]

I like the postage-stamp-sized touchpad.

Hehe, yes I guess it is small compared with the ones that Apple use nowadays!

with the 80MB of RAM your machine has you should be able to Squeeze 10.2.8 on there

I did look to see if I could try it but XPostFacto doesn't let you try to boot OS X unless you have 96 MB RAM!

I noticed Powerbook 3400c,s they tend to either go for a a boatload or quite cheap depending which way the wind is blowing it seems

Indeed, they seem to be expensive currently, the two that sold on eBay UK in the last couple of months were both over £100 - strange. Cool that you've got a Kanga, they absolutely never seem to appear - very rare for some reason.

 

[Mildredop]

When did keyboards stop having the letters in the bottom corner of each key?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Hehe, yes I guess it is small compared with the ones that Apple use nowadays!


I did look to see if I could try it but XPostFacto doesn't let you try to boot OS X unless you have 96 MB RAM!


Indeed, they seem to be expensive currently, the two that sold on eBay UK in the last couple of months were both over £100 - strange. Cool that you've got a Kanga, they absolutely never seem to appear - very rare for some reason.

XpostFacto 2.2.5 will work down to 64MB, what I recommend is installing everything using Xpostfacto 4 (using the menu bar volume inspector option IIRC you can navigate to that then click install everything getting round its 96MB block), then open xpostfacto 2.2.5 and install BootX and use that to reboot into OS X (the BootX in XPostFacto 3 and up need 96MB or more)

The Kanga was a £20 win on ebay a while back but yeah the Kanga is one of the rarest PowerBooks it was a stop gap model that was Very expensive. it was Just a PowerBook 3400c fitted with a G3 CPU, it did not have any of the major Platform upgrades the G3 beige had, in fact in OpenFirmware the Kanga,s model identifier is AAPL,3500. PowerBook 3500 anyone?

heres a Photo the kanga running tiger from a while back

 

[galgot]

Nice score ! Looks beautiful.
I have several of these, one running OS X Server 1.2. Sadly ethernet not working, say it can't find DNS or something...
Remember it worked once or twice after installation, then failed.
An old Ubuntu can run on these too (better on a Kanga tho).

 

[AphoticD]

XpostFacto 2.2.5 will work down to 64MB, what I recommend is installing everything using Xpostfacto 4 (using the menu bar volume inspector option IIRC you can navigate to that then click install everything getting round its 96MB block), then open xpostfacto 2.2.5 and install BootX and use that to reboot into OS X (the BootX in XPostFacto 3 and up need 96MB or more)

The Kanga was a £20 win on ebay a while back but yeah the Kanga is one of the rarest PowerBooks it was a stop gap model that was Very expensive. it was Just a PowerBook 3400c fitted with a G3 CPU, it did not have any of the major Platform upgrades the G3 beige had, in fact in OpenFirmware the Kanga,s model identifier is AAPL,3500. PowerBook 3500 anyone?

heres a Photo the kanga running tiger from a while back

View attachment 748236

How does Tiger fair with 2MB of VRAM on the 3400? Is it better than the 4400's performance?

My Blueberry iBook does a commendable job with only 4MB of VRAM. General performance improves with shadow switched off. But now with an SSD and maxed out RAM, Tiger is quite a pleasure to use. I don't understand why Apple decided not to support it officially.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Nice score ! Looks beautiful.
I have several of these, one running OS X Server 1.2. Sadly ethernet not working, say it can't find DNS or something...
Remember it worked once or twice after installation, then failed.
An old Ubuntu can run on these too (better on a Kanga tho).

the ethernet issue is because Hoopers and Kangas which have the ethernet only expansion card installed, that ethernet card is not compatible with OS X sadly from what I have looked into it seems like some basic onboard firmware on the DEC ethernet card/chip is too old and the kext bails (you can see it trying to load in verbose mode)
the Ethernet modem combo card does work fine (well the ethernet side at least dunno about the modem) sadly all 3 of my machines have ethernet only cards.

fun thing about this tho is the Error messages the kext/driver throws up are exactly the same from OS X Server 1.2v3 to OS X 10.4.11 (not tried Leopard yet gotta figure out how to fit a G4 to a Kanga first )

I have tried getting Ubuntu running on my 3 machines sadly it seems whatever video driver they have for the Chips and Technologies 65555 Video chip causes the back light to turn off and the system to hang... (theres a video of Ubuntu 9 booting on a 3400c on youtube where the backlight turns off too but unlike his mine just hangs and i cant turn the back light back on or anything I even tried booting via an ext monitor and nothing...)

How does Tiger fair with 2MB of VRAM on the 3400? Is it better than the 4400's performance?

My Blueberry iBook does a commendable job with only 4MB of VRAM. General performance improves with shadow switched off. But now with an SSD and maxed out RAM, Tiger is quite a pleasure to use. I don't understand why Apple decided not to support it officially.

the Kanga runs MUCH better then the 4400 since in OS X none of the Video chips are providing any sort of acceleration its mostly all handled by the CPU, and as im sure your aware of the 250Mhz PPC750 plus 512KB of L2 cache is much faster then the PPC603ev with no L2 in the 4400

but sadly on the Kanga Video in OS X is only in 256 colours in 10.3+ 10.2 and bellow has 16bit colour. (tiger actually handles 256 colours pretty damn well tho)

I did run Geekbench on the Kanga https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2622693

the reason the memory score is so low is it (because of only 96MB of RAM ) paged out to disk and effectively just benchmarked the 5GB Full hight hard drive (took a good few hours to finish thanks to that LOL) iv noticed if you run GeekBench 2 on less then about 512MB of RAM it will run out of RAM and page to disk during the memory part of the benchmark causing geekbench to take very long to finish

 

[AphoticD]

the Kanga runs MUCH better then the 4400 since in OS X none of the Video chips are providing any sort of acceleration its mostly all handled by the CPU, and as im sure your aware of the 250Mhz PPC750 plus 512KB of L2 cache is much faster then the PPC603ev with no L2 in the 4400

but sadly on the Kanga Video in OS X is only in 256 colours in 10.3+ 10.2 and bellow has 16bit colour. (tiger actually handles 256 colours pretty damn well tho)

I did run Geekbench on the Kanga https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2622693

the reason the memory score is so low is it (because of only 96MB of RAM ) paged out to disk and effectively just benchmarked the 5GB Full hight hard drive (took a good few hours to finish thanks to that LOL) iv noticed if you run GeekBench 2 on less then about 512MB of RAM it will run out of RAM and page to disk during the memory part of the benchmark causing geekbench to take very long to finish

Not a bad score there ol' Kanga. I've seen that with the memory tests too, 512MB appears to be the minimum for a genuine memory score.

 

[galgot]

the ethernet issue is because Hoopers and Kangas which have the ethernet only expansion card installed, that ethernet card is not compatible with OS X sadly from what I have looked into it seems like some basic onboard firmware on the DEC ethernet card/chip is too old and the kext bails (you can see it trying to load in verbose mode)
the Ethernet modem combo card does work fine (well the ethernet side at least dunno about the modem) sadly all 3 of my machines have ethernet only cards.

fun thing about this tho is the Error messages the kext/driver throws up are exactly the same from OS X Server 1.2v3 to OS X 10.4.11 (not tried Leopard yet gotta figure out how to fit a G4 to a Kanga first )

I have tried getting Ubuntu running on my 3 machines sadly it seems whatever video driver they have for the Chips and Technologies 65555 Video chip causes the back light to turn off and the system to hang... (theres a video of Ubuntu 9 booting on a 3400c on youtube where the backlight turns off too but unlike his mine just hangs and i cant turn the back light back on or anything I even tried booting via an ext monitor and nothing...)
...

Ah thanks , so that is the problem ! Weird I managed to make it work once or twice.
I've must have swapped that Ethernet combo card with another at one time without knowing… that was some time ago. So I must have that Ethernet combo card somewhere

Yes, That is ubuntu 9.10 i managed to run, but you need to make a custom xorg.conf file to have video working. find the .conf files I use on a Kanga (My 3400C don’t run Linux anymore, but remember it was the same) in the attached zip :
conf_files_for_Ubuntu_9.10-PB34.zip
Also saved the links with infos at the time, seems other .conf files works too :
https://web.archive.org/web/2015090...per.dk/old/linux/hardware/powerbook-3400.html
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php/46476-Installing-Breezy-Badger-on-PowerBook-3400c/page2
Here one of my Kanga running Ubuntu 9.10, with a Mac OS themed XFCE :




PS: @647156 , sorry your thread is a bit hijacked, I move all this away if you want

 

[647156]

sorry your thread is a bit hijacked, I move all this away if you want

Hehe not at all, it's cool to get some discussion going!

 

[647156]

At least I don't need to feel bad about my £17 outlay given the prices 3400cs seem to be fetching at the moment, I saw that one sold yesterday for £240 :O (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/142663693969) That one was the top-of-the-range 240 MHz version and had the original packaging which mine doesn't, but still, what a price!

At least maybe I don't need to feel bad about acquiring PowerPCs if they can be seen as an "investment"!

 

[LightBulbFun]

Ah thanks , so that is the problem ! Weird I managed to make it work once or twice.
I've must have swapped that Ethernet combo card with another at one time without knowing… that was some time ago. So I must have that Ethernet combo card somewhere

Yes, That is ubuntu 9.10 i managed to run, but you need to make a custom xorg.conf file to have video working. find the .conf files I use on a Kanga (My 3400C don’t run Linux anymore, but remember it was the same) in the attached zip :
conf_files_for_Ubuntu_9.10-PB34.zip
Also saved the links with infos at the time, seems other .conf files works too :
https://web.archive.org/web/2015090...per.dk/old/linux/hardware/powerbook-3400.html
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php/46476-Installing-Breezy-Badger-on-PowerBook-3400c/page2
Here one of my Kanga running Ubuntu 9.10, with a Mac OS themed XFCE :

View attachment 748413
View attachment 748414

PS: @647156 , sorry your thread is a bit hijacked, I move all this away if you want

very cool!

its good to document and save this information its too easily lost to the winds of time.

Ill defo have a go with this stuff on my 3400c/Kanga

At least I don't need to feel bad about my £17 outlay given the prices 3400cs seem to be fetching at the moment, I saw that one sold yesterday for £240 :O (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/142663693969) That one was the top-of-the-range 240 MHz version and had the original packaging which mine doesn't, but still, what a price!

At least maybe I don't need to feel bad about acquiring PowerPCs if they can be seen as an "investment"!

indeed! i spotted that 3400c bundle a while back. did not see what insane price it had sold for! LOL (the most iv seen 3400c,s go for was about £100,) this bundle went for 2400c amounts of money LOL not too surprising tho considering how complete it was