Projects

Apple Macintosh Portable M5126 (Backlit) - January 17, 2026

The Macintosh Portable was Apple's first attempt at a laptop, and it sure shows. I would say it was a solid attempt at it though- it featured a full 3.5" hard drive, a massive lead acid battery pack, a backlit display, 2Mb (yikes!) of RAM, an Alps mechanical keyboard, modular trackball/keyboard placement, a 3.5" floppy drive, and others. It is quite a chonky beast, but being from the late '80s, I think they did quite well, especially after looking at the competition. This system did not work when I bought it. The logic board capacitors were all leaking, a few traces were broken, and the main battery (necessary for powering up the laptop) was dead. I replaced all of the leaking electrolytic capacitors on the logic board with tantalum equivalents, replaced the capacitors in the power supply, purchased a new battery, installed a hard drive emulator (to conserve power and make it quieter), installed a mute switch inline with the speaker so I could disable sound, and did as any college student would do in 2026 with a laptop from 1989- brought it to class! I took notes on it in one of my computer architecture lectures, and it held up great. It ran off the battery pack for the whole 2 hours, the keyboard was great to type on, and the system remarkably didn't crash. I may bring it to class some more, but for now it waits around here for additional use, and gets brought out to write floppies for other systems on a fairly regular basis. It is also fun to use it to telnet to my servers, as the hard drive emulator (BlueSCSI) also provides SCSI to ethernet emulation with WiFi support. It is a great machine, and I'm happy to finally own one. Updated 03/04/2026