In the days when hacking and modding your Macintosh computer was acceptable, if not mandatory, there was the Walkmac. A modded, Apple-sanctioned portable computer, the Walkmac predated Apple's official Macintosh Portable by two years.
Recently covered by CNET's David Carnoy, the 1987 Walkmac harks back to an age before Apple adopted a strict one-size-fits-all approach to its hardware and software.
Developed and sold by Colby Systems, with the approval of Apple, the Walkmac comes from an age far removed from the world we live in today: earlier this year,
consumers in the US risked jail if they tinkered with their phones.
The Colby Walkmac used a Mac SE motherboard, and ran on a Motorola 68030 processor, making it faster than the Macintosh Portable when it was released in 1989.
Carnoy's brother-in-law, Ken Landau, discovered his old Walkmac in his basement during a spring clean. It weighs around 6kg and has 1MB of memory.
And that's not all it had going for it. Shelling out $6,000 on the Walkmac (around £8,000 in today's money) would afford you luxuries like an LCD screen, the ability to run off a battery, 16 MHz of processing power and an integrated keyboard.
Sony later threatened to sue -- Walkmac being an obvious riff on Walkman -- and the Colby Walkmac became the Colby SE30. Years later, of course, the iPod would thoroughly destroy the Walkman -- revenge, perhaps, for this earlier snub.
Click the gallery to see the very first portable computers from the 70s and 80s.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
