A Hackintosh ... in 1986

You need an Outbound Laptop Model 125 from 1989. It was totally cool. It weighed about 9 lbs, which was still lighter than the Macintosh Portable, had a detachable IR keyboard with pointing device. The pointing device was an isobar which rolls for up and down movement and slides side to side for left right. In addition to the normal four SIMM sockets for 4 MB of system RAM, there were four SIMM sockets for persistent RAM Disk (called a Silicon Disk by Outbound) which could be up to 16 MB with four 4MB SIMMs (one of these days I'll try 16 MB SIMMs in there). The CPU was a 15 MHz 68000 and it used either SE or Plus ROMs. The screen was 640 X 400 LCD. It used a standard camcorder battery. One could have either an internal floppy drive or an internal 2.5" IDE drive of 20, 40, 60 or 80 MB capacity. However, this creates the biggest conundrum for the collector. If you get one with the internal hard drive, you have no floppy drive unless you get the external floppy drive with it. Many of these machines have been separated from their peripherals over the years. And the floppy was not "standard". It was a standard Citizen brand floppy mechanism, but it had a controller card on the back end with a security protected GAL included. Sigh. As well as a 37C65, a WD92C32, a small Atmel EEPROM (28C64) and a Xicor X9103 (digital pot.). It was possible to dock the Laptop to the (now ROMless) SE or Plus (if one had a docking card installed in the ROM sockets) and then use the I/O ports, screen and memory of the ROM-less host computer. So one could have dual screen operation. The Outbound could also be put in Target Disk mode when using the SCSI adapter so that the internal IDE drive would appear as a SCSI disk to a connected host machine. Or the SCSI adapter could just be used to connect to SCSI peripherals. Standard Macintosh Serial ports were included with support for LocalTalk, so if you lack an external floppy drive, file transfer via LocalTalk/AppleTalk is still possible. There were other cool features and much thoughtfulness in the design, such as a cable to connect the keyboard if one was operating in an environment where the IR wouldn't work (bright sunlight?). And a Bus Mouse port on the keyboard so one could use a mouse instead of the Isopoint device. I wish I could track down Doug Schwartz who owned/started Outbound. I'd really like the code for the GALs in the floppy adapter and the SCSI adapter (assuming he still has them). And if he has the source for the laptop EEPROMs (there was a little code in additional EEPROMs in the laptop to handle various details) that would be nice. They were based in Boulder, CO. Anyway, as far as cool Mac clones, in my opinion, the Laptop Model 125 was the coolest. Outbound later made some nicer Notebook computers with lower weights and more traditional form factors, but the Laptop Model 125 takes the cake for cool features at a very early date. The clones of the mid-to-late 90s were (mostly) just Apple chip sets (and often entire Apple logic boards) wedded with different power supplies and computer cases. When you dig into the actual feature sets, they didn't offer anything you couldn't already get from Apple, except that one clone that had the standard set of PC ports... The Laptop 125, it had innovative stuff that didn't come from Apple. Jeff Walther