My New Mac is an old Mac

 I've picked up an old Powerbook 1400 from eBay, for £65. It's missing a floppy drive / CD-ROM drive, so it's going to be a bit of a challenge getting data in and out of it. I think perhaps at my Dad's house there's a HDI-30 to SCSI converter, but failing that, I can use AppleTalk between my Performa 400 and the Powerbook 1400 or maybe simple serial transfer.

The PowerBook 1400 in question is the PowerPC 603e, 117MHz model without a level 2 cache. So, it's slow. But how slow, is the big question. I tried to find out from LowEndMac. It gave the performance as 

"Performance: 114/137/152 (117/133/166 MHz), MacBench 4 (also 42,076 (117 MHz) Whetstones)"

But when I tried to compare it with other Macs of the era on LowEndMac, particularly the Performa 5200, they all provided benchmarks for different test suites. The 6100/60 was given relative to MacBench 5, MacBench 2 and Speedometer 4. Performa 5200 was just xxx relative to a Mac SE. And so forth.

However, a little while later I came across this reddit page:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/q4rg86/performa_620075_benchmarks_compared_to_other_macs/

And it gave a screenshot of a bunch of early PowerPC Macs (and a Quadra 630) benchmarks for MacBench 4!!! Here's the data as a simple table:

Model	CPU	FPU	Disk	Mean*
Quadra 630	35	7	73	26
Performa 6200/75(SCSI)	93	95	94	94
Performa 6200/75(IDE)	93	95	121	102
PowerMac 6100/60	100	100	100	100
PowerMac 7200/75	102	117	107	108
PowerBook 1400/117	124	143	92	118
PowerMac 8100/80	142	138	132	137
Performa 6320/120	134	148	161	147
PowerMac 7500/100	162	164	164	163
PowerMac 7200/120	174	202	191	189
Performa 6400/180	184	207	123	167
Performa 6400/200	258	262	163	223
PowerMac 7600/132	251	243	212	235

So, I've used a Performa 5200 before - in fact this was the first PowerPC computer I used and at the time seemed amazingly fast compared with the Performa 400 I'd had previously! The Powerbook 1400 ought to be about 21% faster. I also had a Powerbook 5300 running at 100MHz for a few years when I consolidated my PowerMac 4400 + Powerbook Duo/Full dock setup and apart from the fact that the hard disk failed on the Powerbook 5300, I had found that the Powerbook 5300 was good enough. So, I think the 1400 will be fine too: faster than a first generation 6100 or perhaps even a 6100/66; a 7100/66; 6200 (5200)/75 and even the slowest PCI PowerMac.

Future blog posts will cover the progress I've been making!

[* The mean is a geometric mean where the 3 values are multiplied together, then the cube root is applied]