1st Gen A Mac world inside of the Game Boy

[Fotomac]

OK, so basically, the interface of the operating systems depicted in the anime resembles that of Mac OS. Also, the PCs in the Gen I games tend to greatly resemble the original Apple Macintosh. So, I was thinking to myself, what exactly is each PC in Red/Blue/Yellow, really?

This thread's purpose is to explore the Pokémon World through the eyes of Cupertino. The guidelines to follow when guessing each PC at each location are as follows:

• The model must have been released no later than 1995;
• Markets for the original Macintosh models should be taken into consideration whenever possible;
• The look of each PC, in both Gen I and the remakes, should not necessarily be taken into account every time, but at least used as a reference;
• Both regular computers and servers should be taken into account for the guesswork; and
• Each PC that is looked at individually should have the circumstances surrounding it analyzed as closely as possible.

To those who wish to help me on this: you might want to install Mactracker on your computers, if possible.

 

[Fotomac]

RED's PC and BLUE's POWERBOOK
First, we'll take a look at Red's PC and Blue's (unseen until Gen IV) PowerBook. Now, Red is the son of a single mother (at least, his father never makes an appearance) in a small town in southwest Kanto, while Blue, a resident of the same small town, is the grandson of a renowned Pokémon Professor. The budget of a single-mother household isn't able to afford too much in terms of fancy stuff, so the family could very likely afford a single computer, and it likely came into their house as soon as it was first announced--and it's probably the family's first computer ever. For Red's PC, I'm going to guess that it's a Macintosh Performa 200, based on the fact that neither he nor his mother were worried about anything except the price. Now, Blue isn't shown to have a PC until Gen IV, when his house became a two-story building similar to Red's house, and so a laptop appears there. Based on the fact that his grandfather's a superstar, he's probably able to afford one of those new top-of-the-line PowerBooks that had come out at the time the games are set, such as... I'd say 550c, with its 68040 processor running at 33 MHz, 4 megabytes of RAM, three-quarter gigabyte drive, 10.4" active color matrix screen, and 15-bit color at 640x400 resolution (8-bit color at 640x480 resolution).

Next up, I'll examine the PC(s) in Professor Oak's laboratory.

 

[Fotomac]

PROFESSOR OAK'S PC
In Gens I and II, Professor Oak has just a single PC. It's obvious from the game script alone that he uses it to check his emails, and he also uses it to communicate with the player with the connection going as far north as Cerulean City and as far east as Lavender Town. I suspect he's using an Ethernet connection and that it's part of a network server connecting all of Kanto and Johto. Since it's probably an independent server, I'm guessing that it's either a Workgroup Server 8150 or a Workgroup Server 9150, since he's probably enough of an absent-minded professor to assume higher numbers on a server's CPU indicate superiority.

HOWEVER...

Though he retains the tower in Gen III, both it and Gen IV indicate that he's also using a pair of devices in conjunction with the single-unit server. Directly to the left would've been an oscilloscope, but the other device... would it be a supercomputer or a server farm? But I'll get back to that later. For now, I'm positive that Oak's PC is a Workgroup Server with an early PowerPC processor.

Coming up next, the equipment used by Pokémon Centers and PokéMarts.