>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 11:29:40 EDT > >What's an Outbound?
Back in the early nineties (late 80's?) Outbound made unlicensed Mac clones by scavenging ROMs from existing Macintoshes. All the clones they made were laptop and notebook models. They had some very cool features. The Laptop Model 125 ran a 15 MHz 68000 which was comparable to Apple's Mac Portable. But the 125 only weighed 9 lbs where the portable weighed 16 lbs. I don't know what the starting list price for the 125 was, but list on the Apple Portable was $6,500. On the other hand, the Apple Portable had that nice active matrix screen (125 was passive) and, I think, longer battery life. But the 125 used standard Camcorder batteries, so for the difference in price and weight, you could carry a few extra charged batteries for the 125. The 125 could only have either a hard drive or a floppy drive installed internally, but here was an external floppy, making it similar to the PowerBook 100 before the PB100 came out. But, the 125 could dock via cable with the Compact Mac from which the ROMs were scavenged, giving you two monitors (albeit, small ones) and access to the Compact Mac's ports. I'm still looking for one of the docking cards, or to borrow one long enough so that I can copy it. The 125 also has a cool detachable IR keyboard which has a very nice feel to it. And there's a port on the keyboard into which you can plug a PS2 mouse. Often overlooked is the Silicon Disk feature. The 125 has four extra 30 pin SIMM slots inside (8 total). The four extras are solely for a silicon disk. So, if you could install up to 16 MB of RAM in the four extra slots and have a 16 MB RAM disk on the machine. When shut down, the battery maintained it's contents and there was a back-up battery to allow you to change the main battery without losing the Silicon Disk contents. Having the OS and applications on the Silicon Disk made the 125 very fast. The link Dave R (Hi, Dave!) put up covers the Outbound Notebook, but not the earlier Laptop 125. The Laptop 125 is described in more detail here: http://www.applefritter.com/macclones/outbound/laptop/ EveryMac says they were only around from 91 - 92 but I could swear they were around longer than that. But that was a long time ago, so maybe the period during which I saw all those ads in MacUser and MacWorld seems longer than it was. EveryMac also says that the PB100 put them out of business, but it wasn't just the PB100. The PB100 could outcompete the Outbound Laptop, but the Outbound Notebooks had 68030 processors and were as light as a normal notebook. It was the whole line of first PBs that ran them out of business. I know they were around before the PowerBooks, and they lasted about six months to a year after PowerBooks were introduced. The Outbound actually had some advantages over the first PowerBooks (less expensive, standard expansion of RAM/hard drive) but they just couldn't compete in users' minds with the sleek PB 100/140 and 170. MacUser and MacWorld of that era had ads from Outbound doing a tabular comparison of the Outbound models to the PowerBooks and showing how the Outbounds were a better buy. The notebook computer in the movie "Single White Female" is an Outbound. Jeff Walther -- PowerBooks is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PowerBooks list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/powerbooks.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/powerbooks%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
