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Auntie Em! Uncle Henry! (5/17/99)
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You knew your PowerBook was rugged, you knew it was durable-- after all, you've dragged it all over the world, to hell and back, and it took a licking and kept on ticking. But has your PowerBook survived an actual tornado? You probably know about the twisters that ripped through Oklahoma and Kansas recently-- they were bad enough to be considered national news. In the midst of that tragic devastation, though, a reader wrote to O'Grady's PowerPage with a story of survival that's an inspiration to laptops everywhere.
After the tornado hit, this reader went to his office to investigate the damage, expecting to find his PowerBook 1400 (among other things) completely trashed. Instead, he found it running, despite being "drenched in water and covered in dirt, glass, and insulation." Emptying out the water and adjusting the contrast control button brought the screen up-- the system was actually working. He shut it down, removed the battery, and spent the next day taking the unit apart and cleaning the circuitry with alcohol. After reassembly, a Power Manager reset, and a PRAM zap, the system "has worked perfectly." Don't try this at home, kiddies; this guy is obviously very lucky, and throwing your PowerBook in the pool just to see if it'll survive is probably not a good move. Still, we're amazed at this PowerBook 1400's ability to take some serious abuse; they're tough little machines, and we're glad that they use their power for good instead of evil.
What's next? We're half-expecting to hear from another tornado survivor who will report that the force of the twister slammed his PowerBook G3 edgewise into a tree with enough force to embed it eight inches into the wood, but when he extracted it with the assistance of a backhoe, he found that it booted right off of battery power and allowed him to play Unreal while waiting for the insurance people to arrive. When the next worldwide cataclysm arrives and dooms the human race to extinction, we strongly suspect that the only survivors will be cockroaches, Apple PowerBooks, and Timex watches.
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SceneLink (1539)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/17/99 episode: May 17, 1999: Could it be possible? Could somebody other than Apple really be spending money to promote iMacs? Meanwhile, the world's toughest PowerBook emerges from a tornado virtually unscathed, and the junk food triumvirate joins forces with Star Wars to give away iMacs...
Other scenes from that episode: 1538: Someone Else's Money (5/17/99) The past two years have shown us lots of things happening in the Mac world that most of us may never have expected to see. For instance, raise your hand if, two years ago, you could have foreseen Apple releasing a consumer system that would become the best-selling home computer in the retail market... 1540: Junk Food For iMacs (5/17/99) We admit it-- we're not big fans of the Tricon "holy trinity of fast food franchises." Even before the AtAT staff all became vegan, the food at Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut struck us as, well, kinda gross...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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