The Duo 280 is my all time favorite Mac. Active matrix greyscale screen worked great without backlighting turned on. Even better in full daylight.

In the mid-1990s, I could work most of the day on batteries with a super lightweight notebook. Allocate enough RAM Disk space to for a minimal Mac OS system and WriteNow for word processing. Only spin up the hard drive to save data.

Oh yeah it was a great computer. I used it to make my band's first album art using Photoshop 2.0 (using the DuoDock and a colour screen, of course). Networked with the studio's Mac IIx (running Studio Vision and Sound Tools II) using serial AppleTalk...

WriteNow! 2.2 was a word processor of wonder. I do still miss its speed and simplicity. I may have used more than 90% of its features too!

> Even better in full daylight.

Reflective LCD screens are magical in daylight.

ditto. i spent all of my money and then some to get one.

> which mechanically injected and ejected the Duo like a VHS tape

Or a Macintosh floppy disk.

> you had to click and drag the floppy icon to ... the trash can

You still can! Except now the trash can turns into an "eject" icon.

But I've heard that on the original Mac and Lisa 1) there was also an eject menu item and a keyboard shortcut and 2) there was actually a somewhat sensible purpose to Apple's madness, specifically:

Early Macs (and Lisas?) kept a greyed-out icon of an ejected floppy on the screen so that you could drag and drop files onto an ejected disk (at which point it would ask you to insert the disk.) This made single-floppy systems without hard drives somewhat usable. To clean up ejected disk icons from your desktop, you could drag them to the trash (or possibly use another menu command). Dragging a mounted disk to the trash was simply a shortcut for the two steps.

At least Macs abandoned the Lisa feature where moving a file to a floppy actually moved the file and deleted it from your hard drive. Logical in terms of the "desktop" metaphor perhaps, but obviously something that led to confusion and data loss (or at least misplacement).

yeap, this PowerBook was a real gem, I had the 230 model, with dock etc, used it as subnotebook will mid 2000s - light spreadsheets and note taking! The monochrome screen was really a plus. I really miss that.