The birth of the Notebook

[Exluddite]

I found this article via Slashdot that I thought some folks might find interesting. Yes, I know some folks will say "..but what about the _____?", but all in all it's not a bad read.

After looking through the Slashdot comments, I figured I'd post a link to that too. There are some interesting links in the comments section.

 

[vic user]

good read.

i love reading about things like that, to see what companies made mistakes, which ones didn't, etc...

chris

 

[Terry Yager]

Compaq Concerto, 1993
Consumers weren't ready for a pen tablet with a removable keyboard, and neither was Compaq: From a design standpoint this machine is a train wreck.

Ha! Nice to know that it made the short list of worst-ever notebooks. I just bought one of those "train wrecks" on eBay this morning.

--T

 

[Terry Yager]

Sometimes I hate it when someone publishes an article like that one. It just serves to drive up the prices the rest of us have to pay for vintage hardware. An Osborne 1 that would've sold for $10-20 a week ago just brought down $152.50 on eBay this evening. The article is probably responsible for the sudden increase in value.

--T

 

[Terry Yager]

Now I know the writer is fulla sh!t! Been playin with my "new" Compaq Concerto all day, and I'm lovin' it. It's no Agnes, but it's pretty nice for a '486/33. I can't believe they consider it one of the ten worst portables of all time. (I do wish it used a standard type of memory tho, 4Mb just don't cut it with Win95).

--T

 

[ahm]

(I do wish it used a standard type of memory tho, 4Mb just don't cut it with Win95).

Oh c'mon. 4MB is barely enough for a decent firewall and you wanna run w1nd0ze?! :wink:

 

[joe sixpack]

man i really dig those old thinkpads but all the ones i see are broken, cracked, abused or to expensive.

But it was the PowerBook 500's curvy case that really turned heads, proving that portable computers needn't look like shoe boxes any more

What!? personally i like straight lines & symmetrical designs.
Some curve is okay just to soften the corners a little but you almost never
see a little it's always one extreme or the other.
and why do they always talk about the powerbook like it was made by god himself?

 

[Terry Yager]

(I do wish it used a standard type of memory tho, 4Mb just don't cut it with Win95).

Oh c'mon. 4MB is barely enough for a decent firewall and you wanna run w1nd0ze?! :wink:

Yeah, today's project will be to dumb it back down to Windows For Pen 1.0. The only reason I installed the 95 was that I didn't have the pen extentions for Win3.1 till I did an exhaustive google last night. Finally found the drivers I need, after searching about 150 websites. Now I'm happy. (I like the Win3.1 pen software better anyways).

--T

 

[Micom 2000]

I have a Dauphin DTR! which uses Pen-cell for Windows and while the stylus works passably well as a mouse substitute, the rest of the software is pretty abysmal. Reminds me of an early voice command program whose learning program could never get it right. But I do love this 486
sub-notebook/tablet despite that, and its miniscule tho comfortable (for a 2 fingered typist like me) separate mini-keyboard. Just don't leave the KB at home. Or a PS for that matter. The most I've gotten from the batteries is 1 hr. It does function on 12 volts tho and a cigarette lighter adaptor or
portable 12v battery pack will work. Has a miniscule 40 mb hard drive but a paralell IOMEGA drive works when needed.

So many of these guys had it right only to be crippled by marketing goofs who crippled it by proprietory gimmicks to sell peripherals like the Sharp 3000 with their nonstandard serial and paralell ports, or the Grids
locked into lousy OConner HDs in the BIOS, not to mention the ATASCI
ports on the Atari ST.

But of course a new model of computer means lots of new jobs for marketing creeps.

Swines, All.

Lawrence

 

[Terry Yager]

I'd love to have a DTR 1 or 2, just to check out PenCell or mebbe some other DOS-based pen software. Don't they have a version of Win4Pen that'll work on it? What kind of digitizer does it have? I think there's a generic Wacom driver that might work on it, if that's the kind it uses.

--T