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Last Saturday marked the tenth anniversary of the release of the original G3 PowerBook, which was one of the all-time major watersheds in the evolution and development of Apple notebook computers.

On November 10, 1997, Apple Computer, already purveyor of the fastest laptop computer in the world with their PowerBook 3400c/240, radically upped the speedstakes ante with the introduction of a machine more than twice as fast as the 3400c -- the original PowerBook G3.

With its 250 MHz third generation ("G3") PowerPC 750 processor, the original PowerBook G3, code named "Kanga" or "3500," scored 747 on the then-current MacBench 4 processor test, versus the 3400c/240's score of 337 (the 250 MHz PowerBook G3 Series (a.k.a. WallStreet) scored 881, the disparity being attributable to the WallStreet having double the amount of cache and a faster, 66 MHz frontside bus), which calculates out to the Kanga being 150% faster than the PowerBook 3400 whose POwerPC 603e processor was nominally only 10 MHz slower - a prima facie illustration of why raw clock speed is a fairly useless criterion for performance comparisons outside of the same processor family. The PowerBook 3500 also has the dubious distinction of being the only Apple G3 model was never officially supported by 0S X. At a modest 250 MHz with a 160 MB RAM ceiling, that is not a tragedy - X wouldn't perform very well on it anyway, and there is no processor upgrade path.

However, when I first heard the news from the Apple Evangelist (anyone else remember that?) it was almost unbelievable. Here I had been hankering after a speedy 3400, and now here was this new machine that could blow the 3400, as well as every PC laptop, into the weeds without breaking a proverbial sweat. The Kanga really raised the bar in laptop performance six months after the 3400's introduction. A stopgap model, the Kanga was essentially a G3 motherboard stuffed into a 3400 case, but it offered performance bettered only by Apple's own G3 desktop machines of the day.