Don't feel so bad, Passive Matrix was the norm for StarterBooks, at least yours was Grayscale! [yep, I saved up a lot of allowance money to buy my powerbook 1400CS/117 back in the day... and ya the dual scan display suuuucked and the lack of cache made it painfully slow but it was what I could afford, and it could play C&C!
] ]'> I just did a rough check and it seems that Apple never made a low end of a model year lineup, active matrix PowerBook until the introduction of the Lombard (Second gen PowerBook_G3) in 1999! Even when the 5300 came out with an Active Matrix GS LCD, the Passive Matrix PB190 was there on the Bronze Medal step of the lineup platform.Passive Matrix BW, Passive Matrix GS, (Passive Matrix?) Dual Scan GS and Passive Matrix CS Color seem to have been at the low end of every individual model until the Lombard.