My First Laptop

I’ve been more or less living on a laptop since about 2002. I had a desktop machine as my only rig from ’87-’96 (Atari, Apple, Tandy, Gateway, Dell, IBM, white boxes, you name it…) and around 1996 I was finally able to pick up my first laptop on that new thing called eBay: an Apple PowerBook Duo 230 with a built-in modem, fax, rollerball and an extra battery. I quickly picked up a duoport SCSI adapter and was on my way.

It came from a guy in California that said he used it on the beach and hoped it didn’t have any sand in it – it did. I never managed to buy the whole desktop portion to slide the closed duo into, but it was one hell of a laptop.

This was the first netbook by about 15 years, I think. It was smaller and lighter than anything else out there even when I bought it used. The rollerball was killer, the buttons worked great, plus it had a built in modem, ethernet, and retractable legs!