Slashdot Mirror
A History of Portable Computing
PCM2 writes "MobilePC magazine is running an exhaustive history of portable computers, going all the way from the IBM Portable 5100 to last year's OQO. Do you remember the three-pound Epson HX-20 from 1982 that boasted a 50-hour battery life? Or that the first color portable came from Commodore? Interesting stuff." They have the compaq luggable I learned BASIC on in middle school in the 80s. 28lbs of power baby!
I would include them as well in the list.
I think the military definition of portable is if two people can move it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
No sig for now.
my dad has an old IBM portable from the early 80s somewhere... doesnt have a mouse, just the F keys. i think the screen is kinda orange as well :)
Three rings for the Elven-kings in the sky
What about the Model 100/102/200? Those were some pretty good computers, and iirc sold quite well.
or at least it was my first laptop, and I have many fond memories of downloading games off of a bbs on a 300bps modem
Extra points if you post from the OQO.
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
Anyone remember the good old UNIVAC PDA?
Back then, it was considered clever to quip, "Is that a UNIVAC in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Pioneering nerds may not have had Starbucks tables to occupy with their PowerBooks for hours on end
Nerds? Starbucks and powerbooks don't remind me of nerds. They remind me of metrosexuals.
I think every laptop I have ever owned is basically a very similar variant of that simple design! Way to go Apple.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
They make no mention of modern laptops and their current capapbilities. They mention Mac Laptops, and jump straight into the newfangled devices that aren't laptops (a la tablet PCs...), but they make no mention of current "desktop replacements."
They have the compaq luggable I learned BASIC on in middle school in the 80s.
I remember being a wee kid, and doing some simple programming on an 80s Compaq behemoth as well. I had a floppy disk (5 1/4", of course) that held roughly 20-30 games on it. Nothing like launching up Frogger and staring at the miniscule 6"x6" green-monochrome screen for hours. I'm surprised I don't wear glasses today.
Anyhow, imagine my surprise when I took a job a few years back, and noticed that we are using said Compaq as a status/communications monitor in one of our test machines.
Good times.
And i quote from the article, "ThinkPads were red hot, but IBM was still a corporate brand for corporate users. College kids and aspiring hackers wanted portables, too: They bought the Apple PowerBook. Apple had just come off one of the worst beatings in computer history: The Newton had bombed miserably, and the 16-pound Macintosh Portable (see "The Worst Notebooks of All Time") was a laughingstock of computing."
Considering that the Newton wasn't released until 1993, it seems difficult to believe that it preceded the Powerbook 100. Mobile PC needs an editor who can fact check.
That there color's called "amber", son. ;-)
We really don't want to hear about what you envision while masturbating.
I used to work on an Olivetti "portable", which was a clone of the IBM portable PC. It weighed about 15kg, and had a small yellow/black screen. The best thing about it was that closed, it was quite good as a seat.
I carried that machine home and back to work for a year or so, before I finally convinced my boss to pay for a PC for me at home.
Great times. Now I use a Sony X505, which is just about the lightest notebook every made.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I remember a mate of mine used to take his Amiga 600 with him everywhere in a rucksack. Pretty cool little machine that...
Bleh. Wow. What a waste of webpage. I'm typing this on a laptop. ibm thinkpad I've seen laptops. My teacher at my las school had a big heavy one. Acutally, we did have a Apple IIc, which could be lugged around!
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
...which I still remember getting as a high school graduation present, the Atari Portfolio.
i +portfolio& hl=en&btnG=Google+Search
e rs/pccomputers/p ortfolio.html
Images:
http://images.google.com/images?q=atar
Information:
http://www.atarimuseum.com/comput
http://www.atari-portfolio.co.uk/
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
I guess I should RTFA, it's on page 2.
I *loved* IBM's butterfly keyboard. I didn't understand ( being a Mac guy, and not actually owning a computer but instead using the ones at my university ) why it quietly died.
I had thought it was ahead of its time, now I know it was an anemic machine, just with a brilliant keyboard.
What a waste.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Every few months, another magazine which focuses on portable computing runs another "history of portable computers" story, and Slashdot links to it.
Last time I checked, this history has not changed, so why is it news that yet another publication is rattling it off?
I smell a Slashvertizement.
Here's an 1802 based handheld computer from 25 years ago, complete with specs and schematics.
The first computer I programmed on...
Thanks to a school assitant that managed to get a bunch of hx20 to teach us BASIC.
Great guy.
Where can I buy a notebook with > 8 hr battery life?
I'd give up the CD/DVD, the color screen, the ghz proc. I'd give up most things to get a decent battery life. Now the ideal would be about 40hrs.
Any ideas?
Real geeks (and their laptops), metrosexuals and artists are likely to be found at the funky coffee shop with the free wireless.
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
When you say that simple design, you mean the Thinkpad, I hope.
The Apple design on that link is the Thinkpad with a few more curves.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They reminds me of nerds who spend too much money on coffee and puters. They probably got the 4x4 option on their SUV just in case they need to drive over a curb at the Office Depot parking lot.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
In 1968, Xerox PARC's Alan Kay came up with a bold idea: Saw those legs off the table and shrink the computer down to more manageable chunks that could be stitched together and tucked under your arm. His Dynabook was originally envisioned as a computer for children. Inspired by the design of a regular hardback book, the Dynabook featured a flat-panel display, wireless connectivity, and the full capabilities of a modern computer. Oh, and it weighed 2 pounds. The only catch was that the Dynabook didn't exist. The technology it required simply hadn't been invented yet. At the time, only primitive LCD and plasma displays were being tinkered with, and the technology for one wireless modem took up half of an Econoline van.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
My old 1986 IBM PC Convertible was listed as one of the worst laptops of all time. I guess they were right though. But I liked the commercials with Charlie Chaplin (OK, so those were bad too).
Somewhat off topic, but, a neat side bar to the story would be "how long can you compute with out being plugged in".
Seems that batteries havnt really improved much in the last 20 yrs. The only thing that seems to have greatly improved is power-consumption with better, low power chip designs.
I wonder how long an old Apple ][e could run if it was re-designed with low power components? (not that I'd want to actually use it!) Could I run it for a couple days on flash-light batteries?
Anyone have any info on how many amps the old "Lugable" PCs would draw?
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
.. I remember those hot, sweaty days, at the back of the typing class, me and the fold-up newly-donated Osborne sitting together, watching the sweaty backs of all the schoolgirls in class adjusting their bra-straps .. hooh boy .. I was 15, the only guy in the class of 30, and I selected the class because of the Osbourne straight up, without even thinking, ignoring the other 'none of my friends are gonna take it' factor completely, honest. My first day of class, when I realized it was just me and pretty much every hot chick in my year, *plus* the Osbourne sitting there for me to hack on, every afternoon ..
.. highest accuracy, highest rate, document writing, etc. The Osbourne was 'special', because it wasn't really typewriter-standard keys, or so the teacher said, bless her .. but it wasn't long until it was just me n' Wordstar, totally horny for each other, watching sweet teenage girls of my year doing their typing drills on crappy old hard-core typewriters, in the desert sun, paper, ink and sweat. In uniform.
...
..
I was only allowed to touch 'the wordprocessor' because I'd already mastered the drills and homekeys of every other typewriter in the class (Typing A, Senior High School)
Good times, good times
I'd love to have an Osborne around, but alas the oldest computer I ever owned that I still have is a lowly Oric-1, whose treasured spot in a box in the attic at home is right next to the "Local Boy Wins in State Typing Championship" newspaper article, cheesy photo and all
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Yep, I have two of these, actually. One I just purchased. They both are in 100% working order, though the first one has a home-made wood and aluminum handle on it, and I'm still looking for another keyboard cable. They both have JiffyDOS, and system reset buttons (to accompany the serial reset buttons). Great little machines. Was thinking about converting one to an internal LCD if I can do it without making any permanent mods to the inside of it.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Look at this timeline and tell me who had the idea first.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
ssia.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It doesnt even mention Strongbad's Lappy 512..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
and now look what you can get, http://www.apple.com/macmini/ (finally one i can afford!)
I still own a Hewlett-Packard HP-110. I used one back in the late eighties to perform calculations for phase-matching cables based on electrical length. The built in Lotus 1-2-3 and a lead-acid battery were plusses at the time (I still like a lead-acid battery over the junk they make batteries out of now.)
Here's a brief description.
They're now accessories, mostly for PDA's, but pretty much shortly for all kinds of things. Folding keyboards with integrated battery/power management, and your average cell-phone
Targus make wicked foldables for all sorts of computers
With these two 'accessories', I've got a worthy system for work. I love the Targus foldables, I can't wait for them to get even smaller
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Beanscene? (if you borrow someone's MAC address)
Follow me
I thought my Timex Sinclair was pretty portable.
Carrying around a TV was harsh though.
Timex Sinclair Emulator
Timex Sinclair Picture
"well, you see, son, daddy has a computer. And mommy has a data center."
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
They missed so much. TRS-80 model 100, the handhelds like the MS-DOS HP-95LX, and the quasi MS-DOS Atari Portfolio, the first laptop with a color display (NOT A THINKPAD). Libretto! Atari STacy!
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
The Kaypro was a direct competitor to the osborne. And there was a Kaypro II (?) that ran DOS. The thing I remember about Kaypros is that they had a bigger screen that the osborne.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
I still have at least one working good quality HX-20 around somewhere, in its rugged plastic carry case, with power adapter, etc. It's in pretty good condition as well, includes a Text-To-Speech module and a mini-thermal paper module. I think I'll take it out of storage soon and take it to a coffee house and see how long it takes for someone to ask what OS it runs, or if it has wireless...
-Cavorite-
Look at this timeline and tell me who had the idea first.
Uh, Sony? They designed and manufactured the 100 for Apple (to Apple's specs, of course).
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Okay, I remember lugging a tty terminal home over the weekends to play zork back in 1979. Not an ideal arrangement, a significant waste of paper, but it did make it easier to generate a map of the game! Oh, and the telephone kept popping out of the acoustic coupled modem (running at 2400 baud) all the time... Portable?
They have the compaq luggable I learned BASIC on in middle school in the 80s.
We were learning how to glue paper and write in complete sentances in middle school. Mmmm... Glue...
10.00 Ghz 2000MB Ram and 30000GB HD AND, it runs DOS, wohoo!
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
the DG/One http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/dg-1/.
It may not qualify as 'clam shell' due to having it's hinge more toward the centre but to my mind it set the design that all others followed. It was a full laptop pc in 1983!
I remember back in the day when I carried My UNIVAC portable computer! It was sooo unreliable, i constantly had to replace those hot microtubes and the battery was only 200Kw/hr. It got way to hot, when ever I wanted to add a number, I need to get a laptop cool pad :(
The "degaussing slot." Located above the built-in floppy drive (or was it below?), this space provides an inviting location to store your floppies when you're on the move. What they didn't tell you is that any floppy left in that space when the unit gets turned on has a better than average probability of being wiped by the degaussing circuit of the monitor.
Here come da fudge!
where the body of the post continues the subject line
The Radio Shack Pocket Computer, which had a miniature keyboard, a one-line display, and all of 1k of memory. It was about $200 and released in 1981.
The Toshiba T3100, with its gas plasma display, had a clamshell design three years before the NEC ultralight (it also weighed 15 pounds instead of the NEC's 4.5 pounds).
What you ascribe to greed, I ascribe to plain old laziness. If this had been a link to Roland Picky Pail, which then linked to the article, I'd me much more inclined to agree with you, although it could be argued that it wasn't pure greed but the lust that Roland inspires in Commander Taco.
I remember by first two laptops battery life.
.. with no backlight or moving parts, a battery life of weeks .. I think I remember it running on D cell batteries.
.. so when it finally did succumb to ni-cad memory .. I had to take it completely apart to replace it. Incidentally, the battery was physically larger than the one in my baby UPS that is hooked up to the router and cable modem at home.
.. a Compaq Contura Aero .. one of those no-floppy, no cdrom, no color screen 486sx boxes that only weighed 3lbs in 95.
First one was a TRS80 model 100 'laptop'. Had a 12 line / 40 column LCD display and
My next laptop (of this story) I got in 1991. It was a Toshiba T1100+.
7.16mhz 8086 processor
640K of memory
two 3 1/2 inch floppies
80/24 CGA (mono) LCD screen.
At the time I got my boot profile so heavily optimized that I could load a DOS 3.3, a minimal word processor and a couple of utilities onto about 200k of ramdrive, thus obliviating the need for using the battery hogging floppy drives.
I used this thing for college, I charged it once a week and never did completely drain them down.
Ah those days, thing weighed a good 9 lbs and had the distintion of having a screen that folded over the keyboard, which in and of itself is not noteable. What was notable was the fact that it felt and sounded like a old car door closing.
Only drawback to this tank was weight and the fact that the battery was internal
All of this was replaced with the exact opposite laptop
Programmable calculators, especially the gems created by HP in its calculator hey-day, do below on the list. The HP-65, introduced in 1974, was billed as the "smallest programmable computer ever" It had mass storage (magnetic cards), assembly language, a stack, registers, everything you need for basic computing.
Early programmable calculators were surprisingly powerful for their day and you could learn all the basics of computing from them. (Plus on ones like the HP-67 and HP-25 you could write a program that flashed "ShELL.OiL" "SELLS" "BOILED.OIL" when you held the calculator upside down)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
SL-C3000 has a 400 MHz processor, 64 mB RAM, 4 GB HD. It's probably more powerful than Slashdot's first server was.
Best Slashdot Co
I'm currently selling those great and very mobile Psion notebook PDA kind a things. You can write emails or work on your spread sheats for months, with 2 simple AA batteries!
Yes, I'm shipping to the US.
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
What's more, they also say that Apple stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox, which is completely false. Anyone who'd done the slightest fact-checking beyond "well my buddy Bob on the interweb told me" wouldn't make mistakes like these. I also don't remember the Portable being a laughingstock. It was big and heavy, yes, but so were ALL the portable machines of that time.
This guy is their Editor-in-Chief too.
The Apricot Portable was significantly drool-worthy back in my day, though I guess it was only in Europe. Speech recognition, wireless keyboard and mouse (via infrared), and folded up into a small suitcase that fit into even the most modest of family saloons. 'Twas a thing of beauty.
It had an undocumented feature that allowed programmers to easily port programs from the old mainframe standard to the more modern UNIX.
Patents... a topic which I guess slashdotters feel strongly about.
Editor, spreadsheet, BBC Micro compatibility, about 10 lines of screen space IIRC, what more could one want? I still have fond memories of my first laptop.
Example: the Hyperion pre-dated the woefully under-powered Compaq portable by almost a year. Invented in Canada by Murray Bell's organization, it was a far better machine.
There's no mention of the KayPro family of machines, either.
And the ultimate portable, the Timex/Sinclair gets no treatment, either.
Such are the problems with historians. Limited core.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I had one of those Osborne 1's. CP/M, now that is an OS! I even wrote a rudimentiary Hold'em game for it in pascal - text based, but it worked. I thought I was really cool lugging that thing around airports with me.
My
Another vote for the Tandy Model-100 family. A highly functional portable computer that ran forever on batteries. My teacher had it when I was a kid in school and got to use it. The thing was perfect.
http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html
My '79 Pinto couldn't. I put a hole in the gas tank.
This Aluminium crap is too fragile. I'm eyeing the Toughbook line + Linux after my pbook got shaken to death.
I remember ads that touted it's 'portablity' in that it had a handle... They even pimped a nifty soft carrying case for it.
ZEOS had a nice 386 laptop out years ago but apparently they weren't around for a long time. I only know about it because I found one in our inventory storage and promptly set it up as a clock. It's running Windows 3.1 and works great as a clock.
If this link works, here's a picture of it: ZEOS Clock
I'm Suprised they left out Kapro systems: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?s t=1&c=550
My professor at University had one in his "museum of ancient computing".
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
...you couldn't actually fit 5.25 inch floppies in that space without taking them out of their paper sleeves.
Good move, Commodore. If the degausser doesn't get your data, the dust will.
I still want a Vulcan FlipStart. It will probably come bundled with Duke Nukem 3D.
Speak truth to power.
...in the "crappy laptops" section at the end of the article.
I think whoever wrote this wasn't actually using PCs in the 80s, because I know for a fact that even though the DG/One had a damn near unreadable screen, it was still the coolest piece of computing hardware you could get for any price at the time.
The first computer I got to screw around on, back in 1975.
It came with a cassette of cheesy text-based games like Hunt the Wampus and Star Trek. After I got bored playing them, I printed out the BASIC and figured out how to re-write them for my Apple ][. That was my introduction to programming.
http://www.portablefreeware.com/about.php
This site is dedicated to the collection and cataloguing of freeware that can be extracted to any directory and run independently without prior installation. These can be carried around on a memory stick / USB flash drive, or copied / migrated from PC to PC via simple copying of files. Hence the term portable freeware.
The IBM 5100 is the fav' of time travelers!
Visit, http://www.johntitor.com/ to see why!
That said, the reason he states is The 5100 has the ability to easily translate between the old IBM code, APL, BASIC and (with a few tweaks in 1975) UNIX.
This makes little sense to me, it can translate between 2 languages and an operating system? Perhaps this is a hoax *grin* Still, hundreds have read this guys postings, and he has been the topic of coast2coast more than once. The inconsistencies in his story lead little credence to his claims, as for Art Bell's show, that's for you to decide.
Man, oh man, I accomplished a TON of work on the Poquet PC. Imagine a portable PC with a fully-functional OS, keyboard and display in a form factor about the size of a VCR TAPE, with batteries that would last for WEEKS, not hours.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/poqet_pc/
I ran Framework, an early DOS-based outliner/database/pda/writer application on my Poquet. The thing was so small and so quiet that I could keep it in my lap sitting at the conference table, and take notes without anyone noticing.
Those were the days, my friend!
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The Osborne 1 wasn't built by Adam Osborne. He hired Lee Felsenstein to design it. Felsenstein was the epitome of a hardware hacker and designed the computer to be cheap and durable.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
No idea what the original battery was like - I had to build my own battery from old cellphone ni-cads, and had to mod the case a bit to get it all to fit. I also managed to get the docking station (where you could add EISA cards and such). But the real treat was the keyboard...
It was detatchable! You could detatch the keyboard and it had a cord so you could position it how you wanted. In reality, it used a PS/2-style mini-connector (not sure how compatible it really was with PS/2 stuff), so the keyboard was like a mini-keyboard of sorts.
It was a great computer, and I played around with it and such a lot - even managed to use a form of Linux on it (my first Linux experience - it was Monkey Linux which ran on top of the DOS filesystem!)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
There is no degaussing circuit for a CRT that small. Perhaps you mean the deflection coils?
The NEC computer looks pretty much the same, and that was before.
If the paradigm is fold up screen, then the GRID is the first one like that.
If the paradigm is the computer being stored under the keyboard, instead of in back of it, then they probably get the credit.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Another trip down memory lane. For good grades in 8th grade I recieved my first computer, an Epson Geneva PX-8 bought from a DAK catalog. I feel so old.
The Mac Portable sucked, but at least you could look at it and know right away it was awful. I can't believe the PowerBook 5300 didn't make their "Worst laptops ever" list - other than being slow, unstable, and stylistically a step back from the previous PBs, they would actually burst into flames sometimes due to a defective battery - a friend of mine personally saw one start to melt on a woman's desk. I mean, bad performance and too much weight is one thing, but when your laptop starts trying to actively murder you, it seems like it deserves a special place in the annals of portable history.
Not only that, but the Newton didn't really "bomb". They sold over 100,000 units in the first year - far more units than Apple IIs or Macs in their first years of introduction.
The reason why so many people think it "bombed" was because they spent too long a time and too much money on R&D, they set their expectations too high, and later when the Palm Pilot entered the market, they looked bad by comparison. Before the Pilot came out, they were the best selling PDA by far.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Very likely, though I thought the problem only occurred when first turning on the unit. Leading me to believe there was a degaussing circuit.
Here come da fudge!
Here is a nice web site that discusses ultra portables pcs : http://www.ultrapotrables.net/
Brings back fond memories.
I guess we all hope they get it right for a change. Nope.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
1984. First IBM-compatible battery-powered dual-floppy laptop with full-size LCD screen. The following year they brought out a model with an EL screen (not battery powered) and added a hard disk option. Also available was a battery-powered thermal printer.
Do you remember the three-pound Epson HX-20 from 1982
Yes! That was a neat machine. A built-in printer! And a BASIC interpreter in ROM. I developed some programs on that computer for a biotech company. But I quickly ran out of memory for the BASIC programs. To save memory, you could stack several BASIC commands on one line and use one or two-letter variable names. Ugh!
So I wrote a program translator on the VAX/VMS system that the company had. (The VAX had a gigantic 2 megabytes of main memory!) The translator took my readable BASIC programs and compressed them to barely readable but compact programs for the HX-20. Computing was much more interesting in those days!
)9TSS
Another vote for the Tandy Model-100 family. A highly functional portable computer that ran forever on batteries. My teacher had it when I was a kid in school and got to use it. The thing was perfect.
... efficient. At least I don't remove all whitespace for speed of execution any more!
;-)
I acquired the NEC equivalent of one of those some years ago - it's one of the reasons my programming to this day is a bit
Bastard evil thing went and died recently, and now just displays flickering, corrupted rubbish on the screen. Bah...
I also had one of these, but it wouldn't die. Chucked it out recently, after getting GEM and Windows 1.0 to run on it. I'm so cruel...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
> It wasn't until 1989 that someone had the bright idea that the power of a luggable and the portability of a laptop didn't have to be mutually exclusive.
:) Borland Turbo C and FoxBase worked too. Batteries were completely dead in 1996.
Ten years ago, I owned an old PC laptop manufactured in 1987. I don't remember its name but in was 8088 (4.77 MHz) equipped with 512k of RAM and 720k 3.5'' floppy drive. The last OS that worked on it was MS DOS 6.22. Qbasic was amazing
I had an Apple IIC with a handle and a nylon case to put it in. Doesn't that make it portable?
hack a day
I had a GRiD a few years ago I had bought off of ebay. True to the adverts, that thing endured a helluva lot. I used to to take notes in class on, and because I'd paid $30 for it and had heard about its durability, I treated it as such. I dropped it on cement more than once, left it in the car when it was below freezing - and it kept on working.
That is, until I left it on the floor in the room where we kept our ferrets. The next day when I went to use it, I noticed that one of our ferrets had taken more luxury with it than even I had and taken a leak on it.
It didn't work. After freezing temperatures and cement impacts it was ferret pee that did my GRiD in.
The Data General One was only mentioned on the "worst" page and I don't agree at all.
l ?computer=dg1
It was ahead of its time - 1983, when Compaq was still shipping 30 lb briefcase systems.
See:
http://www.sinasohn.com/cgi-bin/clascomp/bldhtm.p
I know the Retro Computing Society of Rhode Island has a Mac Portable and a Lisa in its collection. Both are actually functional.
The collection can be seen at http://www.osfn.org/rcs
There it was, on page 1, my good old pal the Osborne 1.
My dad bought the Ozzie for his business to do spreadsheets and word processing and quickly outgrew it. Then I got it. All of my high school term papers and essays got cranked out on that thing (WordStar). The little screen (and any accessory monitor you might attach to it) would not accommodate 80 columns, so you had to press ctrl-<left/right_arrow> to scroll the viewable area around to see the hidden portions of the display.
It was a lot of fun. It ran CP/M and you could load "Microsoft Basic" (MBasic) or CBasic on it. I remember many nights spent writing file and disk utilities on it, and playing one of the three games it ran: Microsoft Adventure ("You are at Witt's end, passages extend off in all directions"), MyChess, and Invaders. I also learned all the ASCII codes and wrote a couple dopey driving games using those ASCII graphics blocks. The thrill of it!
That little Osborne 1 lasted me 9 years and got replaced by an IBM PS/2 in 1991. Years later, in the late 90s, my then wife was cleaning out the closets and came across old Ozzie. Since I had not used it in so long, I finally agreed that it should be "donated" to a charity scrap heap. I've never regretted anything so much since then. It was a fine machine, even if it was a bit quirky. I miss it.
-=sniffle=-
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Let's see, been there for all of it... started with my dad's Kaypro II (Osborne clone) which I used to get my programming assignments done while hanging out with my girlfriend (at a different college). It was the days before Internet...But it had a Pascal comnpiler and I could dialup to the University upload programs and submit them using kermit. I remember reading Chaos Manor in Circuit Cellar very Jerri Pournelle talked about his Osborne, during those days. Of course those portable computers had to be plugged into the wall for power... I graduated to a Tandy Laptop around '89 or so, which I took with me to Switzerland to work at the ETH in Zurich. I seem to remember the battery time was something like 30mins or so. After that, I owned a Newton and a number of Thinkpads, including one with the butterfly keyboard. My current notebook is a thinkpad X21, which is dated, but runs Linux, has WiFi, weights close to 3lbs, has a comfortable keybaord and I bought it for $300 on Ebay, which is a bargain compared to what I paid for the Tandy Laptop. Any smaller than this, and I won't be able to use the keyboard with my big hands. Next technology ? I'm hoping fuel cells will finally extend operating time closer to a day in a 2lbs notebook.
Before the Pilot came out, they were the ONLY real PDA.
I talked my Boss into buying a Mac Portable for the group.
You heard the sound of a dozen Jaws hitting the floor when I was asked what I was doing with the machine, I replied "taking notes in FrameMaker". That I could carry a machine into a conference room, turn it on, and run FrameMaker in 1989-1990 was simply unbelievable.
The NEC UltraLight still had the keyboard at the bottom. The PowerBook was the first computer with the keyboard at the top, so that the body of the computer could hold a pointing device and serve as a palm rest.
Huh? What about the Scion, or the Sharp PDA's. There were plenty of PDA's out before the Newton. Of course they had at best handwriting capturing, not recognition, and weren't generally programmable, but they were PDA's.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Probably the first sucessful laptop PC clone. Sold like hot cakes. For years Toshiba had around 40% of the laptop market.
I wonder, did the TI SR-52 appear before or after the HP-65 (and later, the HP-67)? It too, boasted magnetic card mass storage, and 224 programming "steps".
You could've hired me.
without mentioning Tablet PCs?
The eMate (which I still have) was essentially a Newton laptop; flash memory, instant on, keyboard and handwriting interfaces, word processor, simple web browser, etc. Lots of great design ideas in that little puppy. (It was also the design precursor to the original two-tone iBook, which is not viewed as a good thing in all quarters...)
I think the reason they're remembered as a "bomb" can be traced to one throwaway line from "The Simpsons."
Behold, the power of satire.
Actually, if I remember, the manual said something about that slot was for storing pencils and pens or something.
:-)
I don't remember a warning about floppy damage, but I don't remember them saying it was for floppies either.
Actually, you could fit floppies in there in the sleeves, but only 1 or 2 at an angle.
(Maybe a bit of curving, but they were floppies!
I'd love to get another one of those. Was a great machine!!!
D
Yeah, I loved my PowerBook 140. I'd carry it around to meetings and to the coffee shop, it was awesome.
And what about 1984? The original Macs? They were the most portable and most functional computers around for a while. Before I got the powerbook I hauled my Classic to client offices when I wanted to show them designs I was working on, it was the best way to carry around a lot of info.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Bah, if they want to go "all the way", they should mention the so called minicomputers from early 70's. They were compact enough to fit into a car trunk and proto-nerds of that age carried them to be able to work in outdoor situations. Jef Raskin, the father of Macintosh, was carrying a DG Nova 1200, and used to freak out waiters, wheeling this equipment into restaurant complete with console to compute the bill.
On a side note: TFA dissimiates the stupid meme about "Apple stealing GUI from Xerox". If you take something with the owner's consent and pay for it, I wouldn't call it stealing.
I very nearly bought one of these Commodores,
except that the dealer never could get the
CP/M-8085 Module and S/W for it.
It surprises me that you lived to tell the tale!
No sig for the moment.
Uh, Sony? They designed and manufactured the 100 for Apple (to Apple's specs, of course).
Manufactured, yes. Designed - not at all. It was designed by Robert Brunner, head of Apple Design Group of that day. He scored many awards for his powerbooks (powerbook 500 was also a huge success).
I used to haul my 128k, the printer, and second drive across campus to write papers during slow tutoring hours . . .
hawk
I used to have an Epson HX-20.
I wrote my English essays on it at school. The only trouble was the printer was receipt-roll sized, so I made up an RS-232 cable to connect it to the BBC Microcomputers we had at school, so I could type up what I was doing, transfer it to the Beeb and print it on a proper (9-pin dotmatrix) printer.
There was the time the English teacher wanted to see my work but accused me of not having done it (well, I was sort of notorious for not doing school work). So being caught short, I printed it on the HX-20's in built printer, at which point the teacher then moaned at me for printing it on "a bus ticket", despite pointing out the fact the final product would be printed on the school's A4 dot matrix printer and I only printed it on the receipt printer because she wouldn't believe I had been working on it. I couldn't win, dammit!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Believe me, after I hauled it through an airport, I was far from laughing.
.
I was in *pain*.
Macportable, spare battery, power supply, and carrying case weighed 26 lbs . .
Right now it's sitting in pieces in a bag in the corner of the playroom waiting for me to solder a fuseholder in, as it's blown another one. After that, it probably goes in the twins' room to run old kids software.
hawk
We had two of these quite lovely machines in 1984: 256kb memory, two 5.5 floppy disk drives, 8 mghz processor, dos 2.11 (a vintage release) and wordperfect 4 (iirc). Built in Kanata, Ontario by Dynalogic.
You could max out the memory to 640kb (and no one would ever need more we were told).
There was a even a guy in Toronto who put together a hard drive that you could plug into the expansion port. What a bargain: 20 megs for $700.
Had an Osborne before that too. Like an idiot, I sold the Osborne but still have the hyperions. For some more info on this negelected classic, see this site.
An interesting article. Unfortunately, I found it to be very lacking. In 1992, I was a dirt poor college student. Strapped for cash, but needing a computer, I bought a KayPro portable computer. It had a 10MB hard drive and ran MS-DOS. Total cost at the time was $100.00 used. It was the first DOS-based computer I owned.
It's also sad that the Atari Portfolio wasn't mentioned. I'm not sure when it actually sold (sometime between 1997 and 1989). However, at 15.87 ounces with batteries and running a DOS compatible operating system, I'd say this piece of technology should stand out! A bit of notoriety: It was used in Terminator 2 when John Connor hacked an ATM. Full specs can be found at old-computers.com with a nice blurb at atarimuseum.com
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
In 1987 (or thereabouts) I had a Toshiba T1200 - it was very advanced for its time:
First use of back-lit supertwist LCD screen that I am aware of (CGA 640x480 4 color monochrome graphics - it had a very bright easy to read screen as a result; I used to play the flight simulator game 'Flight of the Intruder' on it without any problems). It also had built-in ramdisk management functionality (you could allocate a certain amount of the 1mb of ram as a ramdisk) - and had the ability to hybernate (to save battery juice you would put it in hybernate mode - everything would remain active - including the ramdisk).
DOS was already onboard in the form of a ROM chip - and it would boot into DOS directly without having to insert a floppy disk (I had the model that did not have a hard-drive - it was cheaper, and I was a student at the time...)
Here is a link to a write-up of at OLD-COMPUTERS.COM for more details.
It was a great little workhorse - I used it to learn Assembly and C programming - as well as taking notes in class, and playing video games.
I traded it in for a 386 desktop; I wish I had kept it instead now - I would still be using it today for note taking/writing. Sadly, the battery technology was its shortcoming (really all portables from that era); refurbished batteries with more advanced technology would have made that machine useful into the present time (it was built like a tank - but very light compared to its peers).
There was nothing on the market that could touch it until the early '90s (believe me - I shopped around at that time). It always seems to be overlooked in these historical teatments. The best bang for the buck from 1987 thru 1989 IMHO.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Granted that it couldn't play your mp3's or DVD's or pr0n avi's, but at its time, it was state of the art.
OTOH, its battery never needed re-charging. Its hard drive never crashed. ...no blue dump screens. ...no M$ tax.
Also, in kung-fu movies, their rate of fire rivaled assault rifles on full auto.
"Portable computing begain when MIT hackers tried to move the PDP-11 to thier local coffee shop to have a WLAN party."
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Yes, the Blackbirds were sweet. I wanted one so badly! Tell me, did Robert Brunner and his team design the case? Who designed the layout of the components? Was that Apple or Sony?
I don't doubt you because I know Brunner was the head of Apple's Industrial Design Lab at one time (and I think the "founder"), but I got my information from Lowendmac.com's PB 100 page, which states, "Sony designed the 100 by starting with the Mac Portable and reducing the size and weight of components as much as possible."
I'm not at all denigrating Brunner's design; I'm not one of those who slam aesthetics, especially when they serve (or at least compliment) functionality. I've loved every Mac that I've owned, even the ugly Centris 650 and the Beige G3. Do you know if Brunner designed the TiBook I'm typing this on, or had he already left Apple?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I wonder if the Hip-Top Computer are on the list.
Some of team carried the enitre computer case from one client site to another. Seeing someone walk through the airport with one of these babies under your arm giving rise to the nick name: Hip-Top computer.
I am just glade the client site would usally have a monitor to hook the hip-top to.
Ah the days before laptops...
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Prior to the Palm, the Newton had quite a number of competitors.
I think it's generally accepted that the Newtons bombing can be attributed not to the Simpsons but to a single week of Doonesbury mockery. Trudeau crushed Apple like a bug.
Actually, Apple did a massive bellyflop with the Macintosh Portable, then had Sony's design team come in and rescue them with the redesign that became the Powerbook 100.
The Mac Portable was a huge heavy disaster, similar in many regards to IBM's first 'Laptop', the PC Convertible.
Disclaimer: I own a Powerbook 165c, it's a great little machine. Also have a PC Convertible. Would pick the Mac over it anyday. But the machine that RULED in that era was the Toshiba 1000.
My SE/30 is STILL loaded in it's big soft carrying case, with shoulder strap. I should go out with it more often.
The Mac portable was considerably heavier than the good third-party laptops available from Zenith, Toshiba, etc.
People who were wholly wedded to the Mac probably didn't notice the bad press, though.
When did Frame abandon the Mac platform? I only remember Framemaker on Solaris and Windoze.
And, of course, the abandoned 'trial' version on Linux...
To me it seems that older IBM Thinkpads make some of the absolute best portable computers. Strong, durable, and the hardware is of the highest quality.
I picked up a 365 XD from an old warehouse that would have otherwise gone into the trash. Squeezing Debian onto the 800 mb hard drive was not much of an issue. Aside from bumping the screen too hard [my fault..], the machine works without as much as a hiccup. It chugs along like a valiant little demon and works great with PCMCIA network cards. Even wireless!
I also grabbed an ancient IBM [model number slipping my mind] from around 1994. The thing that surprised me most about it was that the hard drive [all 120 megs] was in perfect working order. Cooked together a Busybox/uClibc concoction and it now serves as a portable dumb terminal for whatever headless servers I may come upon. Unfortunately, with 4 mb ram, it isn't quite practical to run cardmgr. But she sure flies with a SLIP connection..
Contrary to what TV may have lead you to believe cars do not randomly expolde from leaking gas tanks.
Yes, gas is dangerously flammable, but like all things flamable it needs an ignition source. And I'm sorry, but your sidewalk is not an ignition source, not even if it scraped a hole in your gas tank. the tank wall is too thin, and lacks the sparking qualities needed to generate sufficient sparks at 1-5 mph on collision with concrete. your gas tank would need to be composed of over 70% flint, to generate sufficient sparks at those speeds to be a potential ignition source. now at a 100 mph, it would make a lot more sparks, but if you're going 100 mph over the curb at the office supply store, you've got a lot more to worry about, than if your gas tank is scraping on the sidewalk.. like for instance, figuring out why your gas pedal won't come up and why your breaks don't work.
And although gasoline can, in the right conditions explode, generally, it just burns. really hot and really fast. This is why you can chuck a lit molitov coctail from your hands and whip it at the oppressor, because gasoline likes to burn, not 'spontaneously explode' if you want something that spontaneously explodes, I highly suggest you consider switching to nitro glycerine As your internal combustion fuel. As nitro glycerine does not need an ignition soource to explode, once it has destablized, any sudden jolt, such as hitting the curb, could indeed provide you with the exploding car you so desire, and even then, barring an unlucky bit of shrapnel, or a very poor placement of the fuel tank (such as directly underneath the foam of your seat) you're unlikely to die as a result of said explosion. you really need much stronger explosives, such as 25 lbs of plastic explosives, wired to a sensor mesh on the fuel tank, programmed to explode, should the tank become ruptured in any way shape or form. placed correctly the high explosives will completly obliterate the car, and all passengers within, and if you're lucky a few passerbys.
The NewBrain - a laptop by every measure of the word - I got mine sometime in late 1980 or early 1981 which means it pre-dates everything in the referenced article except the IBM behemoth.
p ?s t=1&c=176
The Newbrain ran BASIC or (later) CP/M, had a reasonable keyboard and two of their three models had on-board displays and ran off batteries. It had primitive networking and memory expansion up to 2Mb.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.as
It was of course a piece of junk - but that wasn't the question! It was the FIRST piece of junk - and that definitely counts!
I still have one of these and use its as a serial terminal to my linux box.. still works perfectly. Really the first "laptop" :) well it and nec and whatever the other one was. they were all the same machine more or less.
The article appears to omit the Morrow Pivot II machine, circa 1985. Back in those days, laptops normally came with 3-1/2" floppy drives which were a major problem because they were virtually non-existant on desktop machines. This means you also needed to carry an external 5-1/4" drive to transfer data thus ruining the portability of your laptop. An example of just how un-portable laptop computers could be at that time was the Data General DG/One. A "usable" configuration of this machine included: the laptop, external AC adapter, external battery charger adapter (battery was charged inside the laptop but not from the AC adapter!), HUGE external 5-1/4 floppy drive, and maybe a separate AC adapter for the floppy drive. You needed a suitcase to carry all that shit and could use up half a desk in seting it up (which was slow). The Morrow Pivot II included one or two 5-1/4 floppy drives. Unlike the typical laptop, this machine was in a vertical configuration with a fold down keyboard. The only external component was a single AC adapter. Was a little top heavy for lap top use but worked fine on a desk or airplane tray table. There were two versions, the first of which did not have a full 25 line display. This was also sold as the Zenith Z-171 and the Osborne 3 appears to have a similar design. While modern laptops don't share its design, it was the most practical machine until desktops embraced 3-1/2" floppies. The vertical configuration is still used by lunchbox computers, however. Lunchbox machines normally have a vertical configuration, tilt out LCD or plasma display, standard motherboard, standard hard drive/floppy/CD/DVD/tape drive bays, built in power supply, no battery, detachable keyboard, and full length ISA or PCI expansion slots and were handy when you needed a portable machine with the full power of a desktop including the ability to use specialized expansion cards. These are modern equivalents of the osborne one or other luggable computers but with flat panel displays and standard components. Flat panel computers such as the I-opener also resemble the Pivot in some respects.
This comment has been cross-posted to wikipedia
I think the definition is something that has an internal battery and its own screen.
On the other hand, the Apple //c did have a battery option and an LCD screen option as well. My memory is hazy, but I think the movie 2010 (Space Odyssey 2) showed one on a beach.
So, that was about 1983? Perhaps the article could have been better researched.
Apple powerbook shouldn't even be on the list. It looks just like a thinkpad. Hardly innovative. Reminds me of an article on /. awhile ago that rated the powerbook 100 as the best portable gadget ever. Give me a break. The only interesting thing about the powerbook 100 is that people who liked MacOS back then finally got a portable to run it on.
Vote for Pedro
continued the series started with the model 5100 from the article. Its model number was the 5150. You can find out more about this series of IBM computers at the IBM Archives..
The IBM 5110 was the second small IBM computer I worked on back in the 70's and I can remember the IBM rep pulling the 8" disk drives out of the back of his station wagon so we could use them on one occasion. If you look at the picture at IBM 5110, you will see just how portable that was.
I guess in retrospect, you might think that. However, at the time, they were competing against the Palm Zoomer, AT&T EO, Atari Portfolio, General Magic/Sony MagicCap, Sharp ExpertPad, Penergy, Telxon, Microsoft Windows with Pen Extensions, and several other companies.
It was by no means a slam dunk for Apple.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Do I remember them? Hell, I still have one.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
Exhaustive nothing; they left the Dynalogic Hyperion off the list. Remember the Hyperion?
... the CompaQ meant I didn't have to spend all night at my office! (Thanks again, Leo.)
I had a CompaQ Portable "sewing machine"; the guy in the office next to mine in grad school had a Hyperion: amber monochrome monitor instead of the ubiquitous green, two 5-1/2" floppy drives and still 7 lbs lighter than my machine. Came with a nifty padded carrying case too! But I wasn't complaining
licet differant, aequabitur
It completely omits the Amstrad luggable... which were among the first usefully portable PCs - maybe excepting the PPC640.
The 80386 one was revolutionary for having a full spec 386 with cache etc - it outperformed the majority of desktops in its day. The PSU was integrated so no need for a seperate power brick but it was essentially modern with VGA colour LCD display.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
I think the article did mention several "luggables" that did not have batteries, they did have their own screen, but the IIc could be plugged into a TV. (I still have the IIc color monitor)
hack a day
Well judging by the way people drive as if they don't see the road right in front of them, they do need a 4x4.
Before the MAC's, there was no need for a mouse. Windows computers didn't really exist until the 90's. So, Grid really was the first. They only hand to resort to the current clamshell to allow for bigger screens and additional space for a mouse. That would have happened eventually.
Besides, early screens were text only.
Degaussing circuit? Hahah... not on computers that old. Monitors didn't start having degaussing features until the early 90's, last I remember.
Damnit, this post screwed up my perfectly good =0 score I had going for so long.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.