(In true 1990s fashion, my laptop featured a picture of a Vorlon ship from Babylon 5.) Christopher Phin My laptop of this era was the PowerBook 1400, a gray laptop with a delightful twist–a clear slide-out window where you could put custom art to make your laptop your own. Apple released an updated version of the PowerBook 500 series, the PowerBook 5300–and its batteries started catching on fire. The PowerPC processor entered, and all the numbers went from three to four digits. The next era of Mac laptops really put the “power” into the PowerBook name. I know people who loved those laptops, though I never had one–and in my opinion, they never really paid off people’s initial excitement about them. The PowerBook 500 series, code-named “Blackbird,” was Apple’s first major PowerBook redesign.

Though the Duo was unlike any Mac ever made, its successors include the MacBook Air and the one-port Retina MacBook. The Duo Dock sucked in the laptop (sort of like a front-loading VCR…you remember those, right?) and connected it to an external display, expansion cards, a video card, and even a processor upgrade. It was a legitimately small laptop–4.1 pounds, in 1992!–and was Apple’s only real experimentation with the idea of a laptop with a docking station. This era also saw the introduction of the PowerBook Duo, one of the most interesting Macs ever made. It would’ve been the perfect time to break in my PowerBook…but instead I wrote a bunch of short stories in longhand. I got the message that my PowerBook 160 (capable of displaying 16 shades of gray!) had arrived for pickup the day after I went home sick for two weeks with mono. In the fall of 1992 I was a grad student, and my rationale for buying a PowerBook at The Scholars Workstation–UC Berkeley’s campus computer store–was that I could write stories anywhere, not just on my Mac SE back at my apartment. My first PowerBook was from this era, though it wasn’t in the original generation, but in the second wave, released in 1992.

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