Remember running your operating system off of a floppy disk? I recently came across the Vintage Mac Museum via a post on the Design Museum Blog. I found myself feeling a bit nostalgic for my orginal MacPlus, loaded with a full megabyte of RAM. The online Vintage Mac Museum shows a series of screen shots from the original Macintosh operating system.
In the image above, the icon in the upper right is from a 400KB floppy disk. Hard disks were just starting to become available, but they were still very expensive.
All this brought back memories of the coolest early Macintosh I owned. (Yes, even cooler than the MacPlus.) It was an original Mac “clone” and one of the first Mac portables. It was called the Outback, and it was developed, as the name suggests, by a company in Australia.
The company basically ripped apart Mac SE computers and repackaged them in a portable format. The battery for the laptop was a standard camcorder battery. If I remember correctly, Apple eventually sued the makers of the Outback and won, and the Outback went out of business. Several years ago, I donated my Outback computer to the Obsolete Computer Museum. You can see the full-entry for this unique, portable computer here.