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I've owned at least a dozen laptops since the 1980s (if you'll allow me to say the TRS-80 Model 100 was a "laptop.") So many I can't count.

I have yet to find a better one for its era since the 1991ish Tandy 1100 FD. 3 second bootup, run Wordperfect 5.1 off 3.5 inch DOS floppy. Single drive and swap disks between A:\ and B:\ on same drive. Had no modem, though, and 5 years before USB peripherals IIRC. :( Keyboard was one of the best I've ever typed on in a laptop, beautiful contrast slider, and who needed anything but yellow-greenish Monochrome when you could do faux-4 color CGA graphics via Hercules? :)

Why can't I find its' spiritual successor.... ? I'd take exactly the same form factor today but with color screen and a sidecar style trackman portable logitech trackball... and can you imagine how much power one might get from a 3.5 pound battery these days?

Guess I'm just sentimental today.

I remember them a long time ago. Around 1992 I got a Tandy 102 portable computer which included a 300 baud modem and a free trial for CompuServe (you can probably see where this is going...). Being able to download programs very slowly (the screen scrolling reduced the effective speed to well under 100 characters per second) was cool. Having my parents question me about a $50 bill a couple of months later wasn't. Needless to say, I wasn't a member very long.

heh, as long as we're strolling down memory lane...
I was a pretty early adopter of laptops in the classroom...
in 1992-1995 I had this pretty cheap Tandy 1100FD...no hard drive, the floppy was only 720K, but it had a decent text processor hardwired on for quick startup, was pretty durable, and the "oversized gameboy" CGA screen did its duty.

95-96 I had a tiny TIAC laptop w/ trakball, now with 16! shades of grey, good enough to run Win 3.1... i could finally do diagrams w/o resorting to ASCII! I got so good at doodling w/ the trackball I did the logo/mascot for the schools "dorm wired for net" project.

Anyway, a lot of kids had laptops even then, but you mostly saw them in the library, I was a bit of a freak for hauling mine into class. Also, I kind of worried about the distraction of the sound of the keys for the other students. Ah well, for the most part the Profs were pretty accepting. It let me take notes I could read later, and that was the important thing.

Mine started at 4K though before we upgraded it to 64K Extended. I got a pair of floppy drives as a grade school graduation present - how tech times have changed.

With all due respect, it'd be easy to fit a TRS-80 Model 100 into a backpack. Perhaps you're thinking of the Model I or III, which were desktop machines? The Model 100 was a distant ancestor of the Notebook Computer. It even had a little LCD display.

http://www.8bit-micro.com/trs-laptop.htm

Keep in mind, this was a pretty limited machine. Strangely, I remember it being released in 1984, while I see pages stating 1983 and 1985. So I guess my failing memory is splitting the difference.

I just have this recollection of the Macintosh and the Mod 100 coming around the same time, and thinking, "yeah, these computers? They're really getting pretty damn amazing. Next thing you know, we'll have megabyte disk drives."

http://www.8bit-micro.com/wp2wp3.htm

These guys function on 4 AA batteries... Seems perfect...

The '186 was a 16bit CPU which ran at 6MHz (versus 4.77MHz for the 8/16bit hybrid 8088 in the IBM PC), and, among other improvements, had a number of VLSI support chips integrated, which kept the system cost down.

I'm so getting flashbacks to the TRS-80 Model 100 "laptop" (top picture) I took with me to undergrad. It was actually rather usable - a good keyboard, decent battery life, nearly indestructible. I actually wrote text files for papers on it, dumped them to the mainframe, and proceeded from there. Having said this, the 300 baud modem was a real drag.

Unfortunately, for your needs this is a beast. However, if someone needs a simple 8x40 dumb terminal over a serial port connection, this is a good choice. The keyboard and solid construction were really ahead of their time.

http://www.8bit-micro.com/wp2wp3.htm