Changing of the Guard

The times, they are a’changing… I remember those lyrics quite well. Change is good, especially if things run quicker and smoother…

Back in 1998, I purchased a used PowerBook 520c for a few hundred as a laptop that I could take along on business trips or wherever, just to keep writing when I had some down time. (That was back in the days when I really spent a lot of time working on My Mac, like every day.) The PowerBook 520c featured a blazing fast 25 MHz 68LC040 processor, 36 MB of RAM, a 240 MB hard drive in a grey portable case with a 9.5″ color dual-scan display. The PowerBook 500 series was the first line of PowerBooks to have a “trackpad” that made it seen somehow revolutionary.

Unlike today, with systems capable of running with GBs of Ram, one made things run a tad bit faster by utilizing certain programs like Speed Doubler, Ram Doubler and Ram Charger to push the envelope, as it were. I know I did on the PowerBook. SimpleText, ClarisWorks 5.0 and Tex-Edit Plus were the normal word processors along with DocMaker, a stand-alone application that produced self-running document files that we at My Mac used to produce the content. At the beginning, My Mac Magazine was a downloadable magazine that later became web-based content.

For ten years I’ve had my PowerBook, although I used it less frequently than I used to, primarily because of speed and the fact that I couldn’t even access the Internet with it. Two weeks ago, I made the decision to purchase a refurbed White MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz laptop to bring my capabilities up to speed. Once I received it, I popped in 4 GB of Ram, added iWork to the hard drive where along with iLife, I think I have things pretty well covered. It’s sleeker, faster, runs like a dream and is just great to look at. But you know what… when I plugged my PowerBook 520c in, it started right up, ready to go. I still have copies of My Mac Magazine on it that I had worked on.

So rather than just hide it away, I sat it down next to the new MacBook. I figured maybe the two of them could just kind of sync up, with the PowerBook filling in the MacBook on what to expect. They look good together, don’t you think?

Time for the changing of the guard….

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