Macintosh Portable
It’s been a bit since the last entry in my “Zscaler Logo on a Vintage Computer” series, so here’s a new one: this is a Macintosh Portable, one of the rarer items in my personal collection. Released in 1989, the Mac Portable was designed entirely in-house by Apple engineers, and it was a stunning (and ultimately, stunningly-unpopular) product. It is a fully-realized computer (with all the connectors and ports of a late-80’s Mac and 2X the speed of its desktop equivalents), all running off a huge lead-acid battery of the type more typical found in a motorcycle engine. Apple’s clever power-management system + this gigantic battery meant that the Portable could be used for up to 10 hours on battery alone. 16MHz and 16lbs, the perfect weight-to-performance ratio 😂
Getting the Zscaler Logo to display on this machine was tricky - the Mac shipped with 1MB of RAM but at some point was upgraded to 4 megabytes, but this expanded memory still doesn’t leave much room for applications. Ultimately, the best (only?) solution was to get the logo onto another old Mac and convert it to a raw black-and-white bitmap - no tricky JPEG compression for the Portable to struggle with. From there, it was a cinch - just shuttle the bitmapped image to the Portable via floppy disk and snap some pics. Fun!
Bonus anecdote: The Mac Portable was a technical tour de force for the era, but its massive size and equally-huge price tag (~$15,000 in 2021-dollars, accounting for inflation) doomed it from the start. Feeling burned by this experience, a year later Apple essentially went to Sony and said "please take this Mac Portable and redesign it to be 1/3 the size and 1/3 the weight." The resulting product was the PowerBook 100, widely regarded as the first truly modern laptop. Virtually every laptop made in the last ~30 years has been building on the PowerBook 100's design. Crazy!
