5 Jan
2007
5 Jan
'07
2:35 p.m.
Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:43:12 -0500
From: Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com>
Jeff Walther wrote:
There may have been Apple machines with ST-506s but unless my memory
is much worse than I hope, there was never a Macintosh with an
ST-506. Unless you're thinking of the "Macintosh Hard Disk 20"?
But looking through old emails, that has a Rodime Model 552 drive
inside with a mysterious 26 pin interface, not an ST-506.
Additionally, the Outbound Laptop is an interesting beast in that it
uses 2.5" IDE hard drives. This is the first Macintosh to use an
IDE device by many many years. I don't think any Apple Mac used
them until the Quadra 630 and its performa and LC cousins.
Perhaps true, but there were macs with 3.5" st-506 drives long before
that. Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2007 14:26:08 -0800
From: "Billy Pettit" <Billy.Pettit at wdc.com>
I'm not familiar with the Outbound Laptop. What
was the model number?
Outbound was a company. So they were producing non-Apple
Macintoshes by scavenging Apple ROMs from Apple machines.
The model number in this case is the Laptop Model 125. A very cool
machine with four SIMM sockets devoted to a "silicon disk"--that is a
dedicated RAM Disk. You could install up to 16MB in there--at
least. I have not tried 16 MB SIMMs yet.
The keyboard was detachable and had an IR interface. It also had a
trackbar ("isopoint") at the bottom of the keyboard. A ?-bus (not
PS2, not ADB that other one used on PCs (required an ISA card) with a
round connector) mouse could be plugged into the keyboard if one
preferred a mouse. Additionally, using the optional SCSI adapter,
the Laptop could be "docked" as an accessible SCSI device on any
Macintosh with a SCSI interface.
I do know that I was supporting Apple at Quantum in
early 1994 and qualified
an IDE 2.5 inch drive for their laptops.
The Laptop 125 was around as early as February 1990. I'm not
certain exactly when it was first released. It pred-dates the
Powerbooks. So, e.g. the cool SCSI docking feature was available on
an Outbound, long before it was a feature on the PowerBooks.
Jeff Walther