How an Ancient PowerBook Captured a Summer Vacation

While cleaning out a corner of my basement today, I stumbled upon a relic from the early days of portable computing: a 1992 Apple PowerBook 145 laptop. Just like that, I was back in 2006, reliving a summer vacation with my daughter.

It’s strange how a piece of outdated hardware can tie itself to a moment in time. Here’s the story behind it.

Every year, I’d rent a cottage at Glen Manor Cottages in Muskoka, nestled along the gorgeous sandy shores of Dwight Bay. The place had a big private beach, and I’d bring my daughter for a week of sand, sun, and a welcome break from our usual routines. She loved the water, and I loved the fresh air and the opportunity to unplug. We both needed it.

The cottages were old. Really old. Drafty and slightly uneven, with mismatched furniture and appliances that hadn’t seen an upgrade in half a century or more. Yet, they held a charm that’s hard to describe. The faint musty scent, like that of an old and well-loved book, was oddly comforting. That scent carried memories of childhood summers spent there with my grandparents.

Our days followed a somewhat regular rhythm: long mornings at the beach, quiet afternoons at the cottage, and the occasional stroll to the corner store for Muskoka Dry ginger ale, homemade beef jerky, and fresh salads.

We’d sometimes venture into the nearby tourist town of Huntsville to grab ice cream, as well as browse the novelty shops and used bookstores. I’d pick out a few titles to read back at the cottage while my daughter played by the water. Leisure reading was a rare luxury for me then – most of my time was spent poring over textbooks and technical manuals for the courses I taught at the college.

One afternoon, while driving back from Huntsville along Highway 60, I noticed an Apple reseller in a small strip mall by the roadside called “Macs at Work.” I had to stop. Exploring computer shops had always been a guilty pleasure of mine, and both my daughter and I used Macs at home (she had an eMac and I had an iMac). Maybe we’d find a cool accessory or an educational game. Macs had the best educational games at the time. My daughter loved playing them, and I loved buying them for her.

The store was modest but packed with stuff. But what struck me front-and-center was a vintage PowerBook 145 on display. It was booted and running, and its small monochrome screen looked like it had materialized straight out of a time capsule from the days before the Internet. The owner explained it was there as a novelty – a fun piece of tech history that showed customers that Macs were reliable enough to last a long time (good for sales).

I had to have it.

After chatting him up for a bit, I offered him $20 for it. He was initially reluctant, but as we were leaving, he said “OK, $20 and it’s yours.”

Back at the cottage, while my daughter played by the beach and I kept an eye on her from the window, I set the PowerBook on the kitchen table, plugged it in, and powered it up. The old SCSI hard drive spun to life with a mechanical groan that reminded me of the hard drive in my 386 DOS PC of the same era. Music to my ears.

The keyboard was stiff, the trackball clumsy, and the whole system painfully slow by 2006 standards. It was perfect. Vacation was meant to be an escape from modern technology, and this wasn’t modern technology. It was a fossil. A fascinating, charming, nostalgic, fossil.

The PowerBook had a monochrome display, a 25MHz Motorola 68030 processor, 4MB of RAM, and a 40MB hard drive. Modest, even for 1992.

Back in those days, operating systems didn’t have a “reset” function like they do today, and few people bothered to remove files from their hard drives before parting with a computer. So I began exploring its contents like an investigator looking to solve a mystery. I found several budget spreadsheets, Word documents (some personal, some work-related), and a handful of grainy images of unfamiliar faces and places. A digital time capsule…

I cleared the old files and opened Word to begin something of my own. I titled the document “July blog post.”

Famous writers often romanticize the deliberate and slow pace of a typewriter. Every single keystroke demands thought. That PowerBook offered a similar experience. Clunky, deliberate, and incredibly satisfying. I spent the next hour crafting a blog post about our vacation, all while enjoying the fresh air from the lake and my daughter’s laughter as she swam at the beach with the other cottaging kids she quickly befriends each year. After I finished, I closed the laptop lid, unplugged and tucked it away for the remainder of the vacation. Then, I joined my daughter at the beach, where I relaxed while reading one of the books I picked up at a used bookstore in Huntsville.

When we returned home, I saved the blog post onto a floppy disk, then used a USB floppy drive to move it to my iMac. Office 2004 Word opened it flawlessly. So I copied the contents to the iWeb compositor I use to create and publish new blog entries on my website.

Fast forward to today. I’m holding that same PowerBook 145 in my hands. On a whim, I plug it in. The familiar whirr greets me once more. On the desktop? A folder titled “July blog post,” just as I left it.

So I opened up that document, and waited for ages while Microsoft Word started.

Then I wrote this blog post.

I saved it to a floppy disk and used the same USB floppy drive (albeit with a USB-A to USB-C adapter) to transfer it to my Mac Studio. Microsoft Word 365 opened it flawlessly, and so I copied the contents to create the modern blog post you’re reading right now.