My So-Called Laptop
By Engadget staff 
posted May 12th 2010 1:03PM
posted May 12th 2010 1:03PM
My So-Called Laptop kicks off a new series of retrospectives where the editors of Engadget detail their first brushes with technology. Join them, won't you?
We were awkward, young, innocent, and oh-so-nerdy. They were painful times, back when being called a "nerd" wasn't exactly a compliment, and our best shot at an "internet connection" involved kicking our siblings off the phone and dialing up a BBS for our valued time slot. Still, there were bright lights at the end of the tunnel, and here we are writing at Engadget, having our passion for tech validated on a daily basis by a vibrant industry and an obsessive community. So now, with all sorts of "perspective" and "maturity," we've decided to take a trip down memory lane, remembering our very first gadgets through rose-colored glasses. To kick things off? Our first laptops. Most of us started out nerd life chained to a desk, and remember well that first moment when we were able to cut the cord and take our work (or pleasure) on the go. We've ordered these from oldest to newest, so the real "olds" get a first crack at showing up the young whipper snappers among us, but what we're most excited about is hearing what your first laptop was in comments. Don't be shy, nobody will judge. Probably.
4.7MHz 8OC88 CMOS 16-bit processor ("switch selected" up to 8MHz), 640K memory, 640 x 200 LCD, 3.5-inch floppy disk drive
"With Zenith Data Systems, the future is here today!"
I had to call my parents up for this trip down memory lane. In the most literal interpretation of the question, the first laptop I had any extended time with would be my grandfather's Zenith Z-180 series from 1987. As is the modus operandi of antiquated technology, calling this a laptop must be given the perspective of the time. It was just over 15 pounds and 4 inches thick with the display closed. I remember visiting his office quite often just after preschool, tinkering with the machine that even then was a few years past its prime.
Frankly, at this point I couldn't even tell you what I was doing on it -- probably just learning to type nonsense on a glorified DOS prompt. What does stick with me is the handcart that he had to use to carry it around. That's right, the sheer bulk of the hardware was such that for safety concerns, employees had to cart these suckers around when they needed to leave the comfort of the desk. The desire of portability far exceeded our ability to produce a compliant piece of hardware. What a difference even a few years made.
As for the first I owned all by my lonesome, that would have to be the Toshiba Satellite 110CS, but that's Tim's story. Special thanks to my grandfather for foraging through the attic and finding the Z-180 manual -- absolutely hilarious in the context of today.
75MHz Pentium, 8MB RAM, 800MB hard drive, 10.4-inch 640 x 480 LCD
Going through high school in the early '90s, computing was at the time something done at home -- probably in a rickety office chair at a narrow desk. If you were lucky you might get the keyboard and mouse cables to stretch over to the couch and, if you could make out what was happening on the 15-inch CRT from there, you might be able to get in a few games of Command & Conquer in relative comfort. It wouldn't be until entering college in 1996 that I'd get my first taste of computing on the go in the form of a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CS. Hartwick College, my alma mater, was at the time doing something rather interesting: "giving" (as part of tuition) each incoming freshman a laptop that they would then be required to use throughout their four (or five... or more) years at the school.
Given the speed of technical progression during this time you can imagine that, four years later, few would still be relying entirely on these clunky gray boxes, but we were the first class to get lots of exciting and new tech. (CD-ROM drives! Color VGA screens! Windows 95!) And, thanks to a PCMCIA NIC, we could tether ourselves into one of the many Ethernet cables that were slowly coiling their way around campus. It was never a very good gaming machine, but it was on here that I honed my programming skills, wrote editorials for the local paper, and spent a little too much time pretending to be Don Juan on IRC.
By junior year the various software development environments I was using required more horsepower and the videogames I was reviewing needed a graphics card, so I built myself a desktop and gave up on the mobile life. It'd be 10 years before I'd buy myself another portable machine, a little Eee that offers roughly 21 times the processing power and far greater battery life in a much smaller package all for a fraction of the price -- yet still felt too slow. So, I've since moved on again to a Lenovo T400s, but I have a feeling no machine will ever trump the many hours I spent clacking away on the giant keyboard of that big gray brick of a laptop.
CHANNEL EXP TM 332T P2-366 6.4GB 64MB 12.1 TFT 24X WIN98
It wasn't until sometime in early 2001 that I finally took the plunge. I was always envious of these "road warriors" with their "mobile telephony" and ability to read Suck.com in coffee shops and libraries, but for the most part laptops were large and ugly, and when they weren't they were well out of my price range. When a friend of mine offered to sell me a two year old Acer TravelMate 332T I lept at the chance! The specs, by no means heroic, were more than adequate for the novels and communiques I would be writing on the Hunter S. Thompson-esque journeys I imagined myself making: an Intel Pentium II 366MHz processor, 64MB RAM, 12.1-inch display, Windows 98. And the thing was tiny! Roughly the same thickness as my MacBook, the only concession to the antiquated storage of the time was a detachable CD-ROM / 3.5-inch FDD that communicated the thing by means of a proprietary cable. I don't believe I ever used this. The case also featured some sort of "magnesium-alloy chassis for durability," although it mostly seemed like it was made out of plastic. My friend offered to sell me the computer for $200 -- it will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that I somehow talked him up to $350 by the time the transaction was completed (it should also come as no surprise that I was a little intoxicated at the time). That said, my TravelMate was a constant companion for years in busses, planes, and hotel rooms, and I got a lot of work done on that thing! Definitely worth every penny that I spent on it.
300MHz Pentium II CPU, 128MB of SDRAM, 6GB hard drive, DVD-ROM, floppy drive, 14.1-inch 1,024 x 768 LCD
Up until the purchase of this here WinBook, I had used desktops exclusively. And my life was fine. I saw no need to take a computer with me wherever I went, and it seemed that I was always a 15 minute drive away from the nearest desktop. Eventually, however, I became hooked on Half-Life -- Team Fortress in particular. My love for this title was so strong that I began to yearn for it when away from home, and believe it or not, I began to feel that I couldn't live a week without some access to the Internet. At the time, all I knew was a 56k dial-up connection, but I figured I could dial-in from anywhere if I had a mobile machine.
I paid far, far too much for this heap. I can't even recall the exact amount (call it a self-protection mechanism), but I purchased it used from a highly enthusiastic eBayer. I remember getting it, opening the box with wide-eyes, nailing the power button and wondering what on Earth was taking so long. 'Course, I'd probably been spoiled by the boot-up power of my best bud's Alienware desktop, but still -- this thing was slow. Truth be told, I was never happy with the WinBook. The battery life was awful (1.5 hours of real-world use, on average), the screen had to be looked at directly, and my precious Half-Life was just barely playable at the lowest resolution setting. The only shining moment in this thing's life was that time it enabled me to hop online at my auntie's house; if not for that, I think I would've perished from boredom. A little over six months after this monstrosity came into my life, it was re-listed on eBay and sold to some other sucker. I always wondered how long it would take for laptops to become anywhere near as powerful as desktops, and I swore up and down I wouldn't buy another portable machine until the gap was closed. A few years later, I sunk entirely too much money into the "world's first" 17-inch laptop (a 1GHz PowerBook G4), and six months later, I sold it for the same reason as the WinBook. Some say I never learn.
Look, I stole my actual first laptop. It was a Wall Street PowerBook, with a 233MHz G3 and not enough RAM. I didn't feel bad about it at the time for a variety of reasons, but I do now... kind of. Anyway, that machine wasn't very interesting to me, because I never used it. Seriously, this might date me, but the University of Chicago didn't install its first WiFi access points until my fourth year, so having a laptop just wasn't a thing -- almost everyone I knew had some sort of giant tower with a CRT and an direct Ethernet connection. What good was a six-pound laptop that could just barely run Word 98? I left it at home, next to my Sawtooth G4 and guilty conscience. Later on I sold it -- and used the proceeds to buy a used first-gen white iBook from one of my roommates, who'd gotten himself caught up with a notorious eBay scammer named Teresa Smith, a woman who later went to jail for bilking like 350 people out of a total of $880,000.
These kinds of things just sort of happened to me in college.
Anyway, so yeah -- I got off to an ignominious start on the mobile computing tip. But let's talk about my first interesting laptop: a first-gen 15-inch aluminum PowerBook G4, for which I paid full retail using legitimately-earned American dollars, a machine I used from my first year of law school until literally the night before the Macworld 2008 keynote, when it stopped booting and I had to race out and pick up a MacBook so I could work the next day. Man, I loved that PowerBook -- most everyone in law school takes notes on a laptop, and I stuck it out with that painfully-slow G3 iBook through my first semester because I knew the titanium G4 was due to be replaced and I wanted the new model. It was painful, but worth it; I bought a 1.25GHz model with 512MB of RAM (later upgraded to 1GB) over Christmas break and never looked back.
I used the hell out of that PowerBook -- Madison wasn't great about having WiFi all over on campus until my 2L year, but I still took it everywhere in my backpack. Having access to the internet anywhere I went was simply wild -- and when Engadget launched in 2004 I found the perfect distraction from studying. By the end of its run the top part of case was almost completely unglued, the sides were dented so badly the PC card slot was unusable, and the battery had about 10 minutes of juice left in it. What can I say? I love my babies hard. Now I've got a very-similar MacBook Pro, which looks the same but just feels like a tool to me -- maybe the unibody MBP that's been sitting unused on my dining table for three months will once again capture my fancy when I finally find the time to set it up. But I doubt it.
400MHz Mobile Celeron, 64MB RAM, 5.7GB hard drive, 14.1-inch 1024 x 768 LCD
I grew up in an exclusively Dell household. There was a period of time where I'll plainly admit that I desperately wanted a ZEOS Pantera -- and a brief (and inexplicable) brush with lust for the IBM PS/1 when I was just a sprout -- but alas, we stayed true to our code. The 90s, of course, were a time when computers were still viewed exclusively as tools, not as extensions of one's personality, so it didn't bug us that we were buying nondescript beige boxes; Dells were reliable, generally speedier than many of their competitors, and could be infinitely customized to suit your needs. You couldn't say that about the Compaqs down at CompUSA.
Though I'm hardly the youngest member of the Engadget team, I was a late bloomer as laptops go; I'd always preferred desktops (or more accurately, I could afford desktops). When I needed them somewhere else, I just tucked them under my arm and away I went. My first laptop purchase was an Inspiron 3800 somewhere around 1999 or 2000 that I named Xenon (every computer I've ever owned is named after an element -- it makes finding the machines on a network a little bit friendlier) and got me through a couple years of college. I ran Windows 2000 on it -- which I still believe to be a turning point for Microsoft and perhaps the single greatest version of Windows ever made -- and occasionally played Final Fantasy III with an emulator during impossibly boring Electromagnetics lectures.
Was it cool? No, not really, but it got the job done just long enough to upgrade to that killer new Inspiron 8100.
400MHz PowerPC G3, 64MB of RAM, 6GB hard drive, DVD-ROM, 14.1-inch 1024 x 768 LCD
I longed for a laptop for much longer than is strictly healthy. As a longstanding Mac user (thanks, dad), I loved telling my PC-loving friend back in 7th grade how ugly ThinkPads were, particularly in comparison to Apple's works of art. But the price was simply unbearable, and with no decent low-end alternative to the PowerBook class, I was stuck with my dreams and a hunk of beige desktop on my desk. Finally, after saving up about $1 ,500 my sophomore year of high school, I coaxed another grand from my parents in the form of a loan and finally purchased the base model PowerBook G3. Mere months later, and after years of minor iterations of its pro-level plastic chassis, Apple debuted the all-new Titanium PowerBook G4. Yeah, I was a little peeved.
Still, I loved my dear "Pismo." I remember freaking people out by walking around with it on my hand like a platter, pecking at the keys with my free hand. Once I'd added the optional AirPort card, things got silly great. I was addicted to WiFi, using my laptop from any corner of the house that would have me, for as long as my battery would last. I'd frequently pop out the modular DVD-ROM drive and swap it with the dummy spacer to save on weight (I was too poor for the second battery), and I generally perceived myself to be the most powerful human on the planet when equipped with the machine. I think what eventually ended my reign of internet and graphics dominance was OS X. Despite the after market RAM upgrades I'd done to get the machine up to 192MB, and the 20GB hard drive I'd swapped in, I was still hardly a match for those beastly early versions of OS X. I downgraded to OS 9 eventually, but the damage was done: developers, the internet, and the "future" was going to OS X, and me and my delicious OS 9 could only hang on so long. I was eventually forced to purchase an eMachines desktop to keep up with the times and my somehow diminishing amount of discretionary income. For less than $500 I had oodles of more computing power and expandability at my fingertips, but Windows never felt right to me, and I bought a MacBook a few years later.
Looking back on my first laptop fills me with fond memories of being young, stupid, and light on money. The time was mid-2000, the place was Philadelphia. I had just moved to the city from Pittsburgh after a group of my friends had made the cross-state transition. I was in a new place surrounded by new people, and woefully in need of a laptop (though at this time, it was mainly to play network games of Myth II at my friend Damian's apartment). As a frequent shopper at 911 Records in the city, I'd made friends with some of the employees and managed to strike up fairly comfortable conversations. After sorting through a stack of records one day, I learned that a staff member was looking to unload a PowerBook G3 (a Pismo to be exact) for a shockingly small amount of coin -- maybe too small in retrospect, and I probably should have asked him just how he'd come by the device in the first place (ah, the ignorance of youth). I couldn't really afford it at the cut-rate discount, but I could afford the shame of not having a laptop of my own even less. Somehow I scraped together just enough cash to make a first installment on the then-cutting-edge notebook, and promised to pay the rest as soon as humanly possible (which luckily wasn't too long down the road). I'll never forget the day I managed to buy myself that second battery pack for extended gaming sessions (if you'll remember the laptop had two swappable bays on either side). The Pismo is still somewhere in my old studio, collecting dust on the record shelf I'd filled with vinyl from those days... one of them still seems like money well spent.
600MHz PowerPC G3, 640MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, 12.1-inch 1024 x 768 LCD
Like many young geeks, I had always wanted a laptop, but invariably wound up getting desktop after desktop. The bang for the buck was always too great to pass up and -- in my younger days, at least -- laptops were never really well-suited for gaming, which was always a top consideration. That finally changed after a year or so in university, however, when I finally got an iBook G3 (a late 2001, "dual USB" model) -- not only my first laptop, but my first Mac.
I'd used Macs previously, of course, and would have liked to get one sooner but, again, the extra cost was hard to justify for a student, and Macs had their own issues with gaming. But changing priorities led to a change in computers and, in many ways, I haven't looked back.
The dual USB iBook G3 (or "iceBook") wasn't a huge leap over its predecessor in terms of performance, but it broke completely with past iBooks in terms of style, and it still doesn't look too shabby by today's standards. In fact, I continued to use it as a backup laptop until just a few years ago, having maxed out the RAM to 640MB, added a FireWire hard drive and an AirPort card, and upgraded the OS to Panther.
I still have it tucked away, and sometimes feel like firing it up for old times. If only I could get it to boot.
1.6GHz Pentium 4-M, 256MB of RAM, 30GB hard drive, DVD / CD-RW drive, 14.1-inch 1024 x 768 LCD
It was the summer of 2002, which marked the end of my second year at my British boarding school (in the Third Form or Year 9). I told my parents that there'd be a lot of projects from then onwards, but really, I was just mightily jealous of the two guys in my year who had a laptop each, and they weren't even good machines -- both were very hot and noisy.
Back then I already had "It runs on a Celeron!" as my catchphrase (accompanied by a shaking head), but strangely I knew little about laptops, and at one point I even considered lugging a small desktop from Hong Kong all the way to the English countryside. Fortunately, in August I stumbled upon a pretty impressive laptop demo -- a salesman banging his fist onto the back of a laptop screen. It was the Fujitsu LifeBook C2010, a $1,930 Windows XP machine featuring a power-hungry Pentium 4 processor, a DVD / CD-RW combo drive, a floppy drive and some sort of tough metal alloy casing. I was sold, and I remember the excitement from watching the laptop's first-ever boot-up at the shop. "Mum, this thing is really fast!" Two weeks later I was back in England and showing off my speedy seven-pound laptop to my schoolmates. Needless to say, there were a few envious looks among the jolly crowd.
This beast lasted me the remaining four years at school, during which I performed a few upgrades (RAM, HDD and DVD drive) plus a couple of teardowns for cleaning (and scaring my friends). As I entered university I moved on to the ASUS A8Ja for its better portability plus graphics performance, and consequently my mother is now the proud owner of my C2010 back in Hong Kong -- apart from the dead battery, everything's working in fine order including the stiff hinge. That said, two years after my Fujitsu purchase I encouraged my younger brother to buy the C2210, which turned out to be a major flop -- loose hinge, dead pixels, overheat issues and faulty motherboard within the first two years. He never asked me for computer shopping advice again.
[Image credit: TaoBao]
2.0GHz Pentium 4-M, 512MB of RAM, Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB, 40GB 5400 RPM hard drive, DVD / CD-RW drive, 15-inch 1600 x 1200 LCD
In fall 2002, I was wholly undecided. Flush with cash from a successful summer job, I was advised by friends and family both that when I left for college the following year, I'd do well to invest that money in a laptop. Newspapers wrote about how laptops boosted student productivity. It sounded like a great idea. On the other hand, 2002 was the year I started to really indulge in LAN parties, and it would be generous to say my AMD K6 desktop gaming rig was getting dated. Google search and computer-savvy friends told me that on my budget, I couldn't do both. Dell Outlet proved them all wrong.
For about $1700, I found a fully-loaded, refurbished Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop that gave me not only my first personal DVD drive and my first disc burner, but also -- with a discrete Radeon 9000 graphics card and a fast Pentium 4 processor -- beat the pants off of every heavy, CRT-laden desktop my friends carried to our LAN parties. While I had to keep a pair of PCMCIA cards around to provide USB 2.0 and WiFi, the Inspiron's huge 15-inch, 1600 x 1200 screen made it a fantastic desktop replacement, and two eight-cell Li-ion batteries gave me a whole three hours (imagine that!) of on-the-go battery life.
Weighing nearly nine pounds without the AC adapter, I never once actually took it to class, but when I lived in Japan in 2005 it became my only (fiber-optic!) link to the English-speaking world, and as late as 2007 my younger brother was kicking tail and taking names with the old girl in Battlefield 2 before the GPU died. Though I've never again had quite as good an experience with Dell, I've recommended refurbished machines ever since.
1.7-GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor-M, 256MB DDR SDRAM, 40GB hard drive, DVD/CD-RW drive, 1600x1200-resolution 15-inch display, Microsoft Windows XP Home
I now feel comfortable enough with my nerdy self to admit that when I was accepted early admission to college I was more excited about getting a laptop I could call my own than the frat parties, err collegiate education that lay ahead. So after collecting close to $2,000 in graduation presents, I headed to Dell.com and eagerly configured an Inspiron 8200 with a then-state-of-the-art 1.7GHz Pentium processor, 256MB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. "Delly," as a friend of mine named her, rarely left my side over the next four years – it witnessed the churning out of a 150-page thesis, the downloading of way too much Wyclef, and the exchange of countless, not-always-sober IMs. Even despite a few hard drive crashes, screen issues and RAM upgrades it always managed to get its large, dual fans up and running again. Thank you, campus IT department.
Funny enough I pulled out eight-pound "Delly" while writing this, and there are still parts about the ten year-old, 15-inch Inspiron that best even some of the thinnest and lightest laptops / netbooks I've reviewed over the past few years. The matte keys are still molded to my fingers, and the touchpad isn't riddled with finicky multitouch features. Of course, things are downhill at boot up -- it makes an Atom Z Series netbook look like a multimedia powerhouse, and the Linksys external WiFi card to get on the net it shot, but I'm sure I'll find some use for this swappable floppy drive I've got sitting right here.
Ross Miller: Zenith Data Systems Z-180
4.7MHz 8OC88 CMOS 16-bit processor ("switch selected" up to 8MHz), 640K memory, 640 x 200 LCD, 3.5-inch floppy disk drive
"With Zenith Data Systems, the future is here today!"
I had to call my parents up for this trip down memory lane. In the most literal interpretation of the question, the first laptop I had any extended time with would be my grandfather's Zenith Z-180 series from 1987. As is the modus operandi of antiquated technology, calling this a laptop must be given the perspective of the time. It was just over 15 pounds and 4 inches thick with the display closed. I remember visiting his office quite often just after preschool, tinkering with the machine that even then was a few years past its prime.
Frankly, at this point I couldn't even tell you what I was doing on it -- probably just learning to type nonsense on a glorified DOS prompt. What does stick with me is the handcart that he had to use to carry it around. That's right, the sheer bulk of the hardware was such that for safety concerns, employees had to cart these suckers around when they needed to leave the comfort of the desk. The desire of portability far exceeded our ability to produce a compliant piece of hardware. What a difference even a few years made.
As for the first I owned all by my lonesome, that would have to be the Toshiba Satellite 110CS, but that's Tim's story. Special thanks to my grandfather for foraging through the attic and finding the Z-180 manual -- absolutely hilarious in the context of today.
Tim Stevens: Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CS
75MHz Pentium, 8MB RAM, 800MB hard drive, 10.4-inch 640 x 480 LCDGoing through high school in the early '90s, computing was at the time something done at home -- probably in a rickety office chair at a narrow desk. If you were lucky you might get the keyboard and mouse cables to stretch over to the couch and, if you could make out what was happening on the 15-inch CRT from there, you might be able to get in a few games of Command & Conquer in relative comfort. It wouldn't be until entering college in 1996 that I'd get my first taste of computing on the go in the form of a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CS. Hartwick College, my alma mater, was at the time doing something rather interesting: "giving" (as part of tuition) each incoming freshman a laptop that they would then be required to use throughout their four (or five... or more) years at the school.
Given the speed of technical progression during this time you can imagine that, four years later, few would still be relying entirely on these clunky gray boxes, but we were the first class to get lots of exciting and new tech. (CD-ROM drives! Color VGA screens! Windows 95!) And, thanks to a PCMCIA NIC, we could tether ourselves into one of the many Ethernet cables that were slowly coiling their way around campus. It was never a very good gaming machine, but it was on here that I honed my programming skills, wrote editorials for the local paper, and spent a little too much time pretending to be Don Juan on IRC.
By junior year the various software development environments I was using required more horsepower and the videogames I was reviewing needed a graphics card, so I built myself a desktop and gave up on the mobile life. It'd be 10 years before I'd buy myself another portable machine, a little Eee that offers roughly 21 times the processing power and far greater battery life in a much smaller package all for a fraction of the price -- yet still felt too slow. So, I've since moved on again to a Lenovo T400s, but I have a feeling no machine will ever trump the many hours I spent clacking away on the giant keyboard of that big gray brick of a laptop.
Joseph Flatley: Acer TravelMate 332T
CHANNEL EXP TM 332T P2-366 6.4GB 64MB 12.1 TFT 24X WIN98 It wasn't until sometime in early 2001 that I finally took the plunge. I was always envious of these "road warriors" with their "mobile telephony" and ability to read Suck.com in coffee shops and libraries, but for the most part laptops were large and ugly, and when they weren't they were well out of my price range. When a friend of mine offered to sell me a two year old Acer TravelMate 332T I lept at the chance! The specs, by no means heroic, were more than adequate for the novels and communiques I would be writing on the Hunter S. Thompson-esque journeys I imagined myself making: an Intel Pentium II 366MHz processor, 64MB RAM, 12.1-inch display, Windows 98. And the thing was tiny! Roughly the same thickness as my MacBook, the only concession to the antiquated storage of the time was a detachable CD-ROM / 3.5-inch FDD that communicated the thing by means of a proprietary cable. I don't believe I ever used this. The case also featured some sort of "magnesium-alloy chassis for durability," although it mostly seemed like it was made out of plastic. My friend offered to sell me the computer for $200 -- it will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that I somehow talked him up to $350 by the time the transaction was completed (it should also come as no surprise that I was a little intoxicated at the time). That said, my TravelMate was a constant companion for years in busses, planes, and hotel rooms, and I got a lot of work done on that thing! Definitely worth every penny that I spent on it.
Darren Murph: WinBook XL2
300MHz Pentium II CPU, 128MB of SDRAM, 6GB hard drive, DVD-ROM, floppy drive, 14.1-inch 1,024 x 768 LCDUp until the purchase of this here WinBook, I had used desktops exclusively. And my life was fine. I saw no need to take a computer with me wherever I went, and it seemed that I was always a 15 minute drive away from the nearest desktop. Eventually, however, I became hooked on Half-Life -- Team Fortress in particular. My love for this title was so strong that I began to yearn for it when away from home, and believe it or not, I began to feel that I couldn't live a week without some access to the Internet. At the time, all I knew was a 56k dial-up connection, but I figured I could dial-in from anywhere if I had a mobile machine.
I paid far, far too much for this heap. I can't even recall the exact amount (call it a self-protection mechanism), but I purchased it used from a highly enthusiastic eBayer. I remember getting it, opening the box with wide-eyes, nailing the power button and wondering what on Earth was taking so long. 'Course, I'd probably been spoiled by the boot-up power of my best bud's Alienware desktop, but still -- this thing was slow. Truth be told, I was never happy with the WinBook. The battery life was awful (1.5 hours of real-world use, on average), the screen had to be looked at directly, and my precious Half-Life was just barely playable at the lowest resolution setting. The only shining moment in this thing's life was that time it enabled me to hop online at my auntie's house; if not for that, I think I would've perished from boredom. A little over six months after this monstrosity came into my life, it was re-listed on eBay and sold to some other sucker. I always wondered how long it would take for laptops to become anywhere near as powerful as desktops, and I swore up and down I wouldn't buy another portable machine until the gap was closed. A few years later, I sunk entirely too much money into the "world's first" 17-inch laptop (a 1GHz PowerBook G4), and six months later, I sold it for the same reason as the WinBook. Some say I never learn.
Nilay Patel: PowerBook G3 (Wall Street)
Look, I stole my actual first laptop. It was a Wall Street PowerBook, with a 233MHz G3 and not enough RAM. I didn't feel bad about it at the time for a variety of reasons, but I do now... kind of. Anyway, that machine wasn't very interesting to me, because I never used it. Seriously, this might date me, but the University of Chicago didn't install its first WiFi access points until my fourth year, so having a laptop just wasn't a thing -- almost everyone I knew had some sort of giant tower with a CRT and an direct Ethernet connection. What good was a six-pound laptop that could just barely run Word 98? I left it at home, next to my Sawtooth G4 and guilty conscience. Later on I sold it -- and used the proceeds to buy a used first-gen white iBook from one of my roommates, who'd gotten himself caught up with a notorious eBay scammer named Teresa Smith, a woman who later went to jail for bilking like 350 people out of a total of $880,000.These kinds of things just sort of happened to me in college.
Anyway, so yeah -- I got off to an ignominious start on the mobile computing tip. But let's talk about my first interesting laptop: a first-gen 15-inch aluminum PowerBook G4, for which I paid full retail using legitimately-earned American dollars, a machine I used from my first year of law school until literally the night before the Macworld 2008 keynote, when it stopped booting and I had to race out and pick up a MacBook so I could work the next day. Man, I loved that PowerBook -- most everyone in law school takes notes on a laptop, and I stuck it out with that painfully-slow G3 iBook through my first semester because I knew the titanium G4 was due to be replaced and I wanted the new model. It was painful, but worth it; I bought a 1.25GHz model with 512MB of RAM (later upgraded to 1GB) over Christmas break and never looked back.
I used the hell out of that PowerBook -- Madison wasn't great about having WiFi all over on campus until my 2L year, but I still took it everywhere in my backpack. Having access to the internet anywhere I went was simply wild -- and when Engadget launched in 2004 I found the perfect distraction from studying. By the end of its run the top part of case was almost completely unglued, the sides were dented so badly the PC card slot was unusable, and the battery had about 10 minutes of juice left in it. What can I say? I love my babies hard. Now I've got a very-similar MacBook Pro, which looks the same but just feels like a tool to me -- maybe the unibody MBP that's been sitting unused on my dining table for three months will once again capture my fancy when I finally find the time to set it up. But I doubt it.
Chris Ziegler: Dell Inspiron 3800
400MHz Mobile Celeron, 64MB RAM, 5.7GB hard drive, 14.1-inch 1024 x 768 LCD
I grew up in an exclusively Dell household. There was a period of time where I'll plainly admit that I desperately wanted a ZEOS Pantera -- and a brief (and inexplicable) brush with lust for the IBM PS/1 when I was just a sprout -- but alas, we stayed true to our code. The 90s, of course, were a time when computers were still viewed exclusively as tools, not as extensions of one's personality, so it didn't bug us that we were buying nondescript beige boxes; Dells were reliable, generally speedier than many of their competitors, and could be infinitely customized to suit your needs. You couldn't say that about the Compaqs down at CompUSA.
Though I'm hardly the youngest member of the Engadget team, I was a late bloomer as laptops go; I'd always preferred desktops (or more accurately, I could afford desktops). When I needed them somewhere else, I just tucked them under my arm and away I went. My first laptop purchase was an Inspiron 3800 somewhere around 1999 or 2000 that I named Xenon (every computer I've ever owned is named after an element -- it makes finding the machines on a network a little bit friendlier) and got me through a couple years of college. I ran Windows 2000 on it -- which I still believe to be a turning point for Microsoft and perhaps the single greatest version of Windows ever made -- and occasionally played Final Fantasy III with an emulator during impossibly boring Electromagnetics lectures.
Was it cool? No, not really, but it got the job done just long enough to upgrade to that killer new Inspiron 8100.
Paul Miller: PowerBook G3 (Pismo)
I longed for a laptop for much longer than is strictly healthy. As a longstanding Mac user (thanks, dad), I loved telling my PC-loving friend back in 7th grade how ugly ThinkPads were, particularly in comparison to Apple's works of art. But the price was simply unbearable, and with no decent low-end alternative to the PowerBook class, I was stuck with my dreams and a hunk of beige desktop on my desk. Finally, after saving up about $1 ,500 my sophomore year of high school, I coaxed another grand from my parents in the form of a loan and finally purchased the base model PowerBook G3. Mere months later, and after years of minor iterations of its pro-level plastic chassis, Apple debuted the all-new Titanium PowerBook G4. Yeah, I was a little peeved.
Still, I loved my dear "Pismo." I remember freaking people out by walking around with it on my hand like a platter, pecking at the keys with my free hand. Once I'd added the optional AirPort card, things got silly great. I was addicted to WiFi, using my laptop from any corner of the house that would have me, for as long as my battery would last. I'd frequently pop out the modular DVD-ROM drive and swap it with the dummy spacer to save on weight (I was too poor for the second battery), and I generally perceived myself to be the most powerful human on the planet when equipped with the machine. I think what eventually ended my reign of internet and graphics dominance was OS X. Despite the after market RAM upgrades I'd done to get the machine up to 192MB, and the 20GB hard drive I'd swapped in, I was still hardly a match for those beastly early versions of OS X. I downgraded to OS 9 eventually, but the damage was done: developers, the internet, and the "future" was going to OS X, and me and my delicious OS 9 could only hang on so long. I was eventually forced to purchase an eMachines desktop to keep up with the times and my somehow diminishing amount of discretionary income. For less than $500 I had oodles of more computing power and expandability at my fingertips, but Windows never felt right to me, and I bought a MacBook a few years later.
Joshua Topolsky: PowerBook G3 (Pismo)
Looking back on my first laptop fills me with fond memories of being young, stupid, and light on money. The time was mid-2000, the place was Philadelphia. I had just moved to the city from Pittsburgh after a group of my friends had made the cross-state transition. I was in a new place surrounded by new people, and woefully in need of a laptop (though at this time, it was mainly to play network games of Myth II at my friend Damian's apartment). As a frequent shopper at 911 Records in the city, I'd made friends with some of the employees and managed to strike up fairly comfortable conversations. After sorting through a stack of records one day, I learned that a staff member was looking to unload a PowerBook G3 (a Pismo to be exact) for a shockingly small amount of coin -- maybe too small in retrospect, and I probably should have asked him just how he'd come by the device in the first place (ah, the ignorance of youth). I couldn't really afford it at the cut-rate discount, but I could afford the shame of not having a laptop of my own even less. Somehow I scraped together just enough cash to make a first installment on the then-cutting-edge notebook, and promised to pay the rest as soon as humanly possible (which luckily wasn't too long down the road). I'll never forget the day I managed to buy myself that second battery pack for extended gaming sessions (if you'll remember the laptop had two swappable bays on either side). The Pismo is still somewhere in my old studio, collecting dust on the record shelf I'd filled with vinyl from those days... one of them still seems like money well spent.
Don Melanson: iBook G3 (dual USB)
Like many young geeks, I had always wanted a laptop, but invariably wound up getting desktop after desktop. The bang for the buck was always too great to pass up and -- in my younger days, at least -- laptops were never really well-suited for gaming, which was always a top consideration. That finally changed after a year or so in university, however, when I finally got an iBook G3 (a late 2001, "dual USB" model) -- not only my first laptop, but my first Mac.
I'd used Macs previously, of course, and would have liked to get one sooner but, again, the extra cost was hard to justify for a student, and Macs had their own issues with gaming. But changing priorities led to a change in computers and, in many ways, I haven't looked back.
The dual USB iBook G3 (or "iceBook") wasn't a huge leap over its predecessor in terms of performance, but it broke completely with past iBooks in terms of style, and it still doesn't look too shabby by today's standards. In fact, I continued to use it as a backup laptop until just a few years ago, having maxed out the RAM to 640MB, added a FireWire hard drive and an AirPort card, and upgraded the OS to Panther.
I still have it tucked away, and sometimes feel like firing it up for old times. If only I could get it to boot.
Richard Lai: Fujitsu LifeBook C2010
It was the summer of 2002, which marked the end of my second year at my British boarding school (in the Third Form or Year 9). I told my parents that there'd be a lot of projects from then onwards, but really, I was just mightily jealous of the two guys in my year who had a laptop each, and they weren't even good machines -- both were very hot and noisy.
Back then I already had "It runs on a Celeron!" as my catchphrase (accompanied by a shaking head), but strangely I knew little about laptops, and at one point I even considered lugging a small desktop from Hong Kong all the way to the English countryside. Fortunately, in August I stumbled upon a pretty impressive laptop demo -- a salesman banging his fist onto the back of a laptop screen. It was the Fujitsu LifeBook C2010, a $1,930 Windows XP machine featuring a power-hungry Pentium 4 processor, a DVD / CD-RW combo drive, a floppy drive and some sort of tough metal alloy casing. I was sold, and I remember the excitement from watching the laptop's first-ever boot-up at the shop. "Mum, this thing is really fast!" Two weeks later I was back in England and showing off my speedy seven-pound laptop to my schoolmates. Needless to say, there were a few envious looks among the jolly crowd.
This beast lasted me the remaining four years at school, during which I performed a few upgrades (RAM, HDD and DVD drive) plus a couple of teardowns for cleaning (and scaring my friends). As I entered university I moved on to the ASUS A8Ja for its better portability plus graphics performance, and consequently my mother is now the proud owner of my C2010 back in Hong Kong -- apart from the dead battery, everything's working in fine order including the stiff hinge. That said, two years after my Fujitsu purchase I encouraged my younger brother to buy the C2210, which turned out to be a major flop -- loose hinge, dead pixels, overheat issues and faulty motherboard within the first two years. He never asked me for computer shopping advice again.
[Image credit: TaoBao]
Sean Hollister: Dell Inspiron 8200
In fall 2002, I was wholly undecided. Flush with cash from a successful summer job, I was advised by friends and family both that when I left for college the following year, I'd do well to invest that money in a laptop. Newspapers wrote about how laptops boosted student productivity. It sounded like a great idea. On the other hand, 2002 was the year I started to really indulge in LAN parties, and it would be generous to say my AMD K6 desktop gaming rig was getting dated. Google search and computer-savvy friends told me that on my budget, I couldn't do both. Dell Outlet proved them all wrong.
For about $1700, I found a fully-loaded, refurbished Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop that gave me not only my first personal DVD drive and my first disc burner, but also -- with a discrete Radeon 9000 graphics card and a fast Pentium 4 processor -- beat the pants off of every heavy, CRT-laden desktop my friends carried to our LAN parties. While I had to keep a pair of PCMCIA cards around to provide USB 2.0 and WiFi, the Inspiron's huge 15-inch, 1600 x 1200 screen made it a fantastic desktop replacement, and two eight-cell Li-ion batteries gave me a whole three hours (imagine that!) of on-the-go battery life.
Weighing nearly nine pounds without the AC adapter, I never once actually took it to class, but when I lived in Japan in 2005 it became my only (fiber-optic!) link to the English-speaking world, and as late as 2007 my younger brother was kicking tail and taking names with the old girl in Battlefield 2 before the GPU died. Though I've never again had quite as good an experience with Dell, I've recommended refurbished machines ever since.
Joanna Stern: Dell Inspiron 8200
I now feel comfortable enough with my nerdy self to admit that when I was accepted early admission to college I was more excited about getting a laptop I could call my own than the frat parties, err collegiate education that lay ahead. So after collecting close to $2,000 in graduation presents, I headed to Dell.com and eagerly configured an Inspiron 8200 with a then-state-of-the-art 1.7GHz Pentium processor, 256MB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. "Delly," as a friend of mine named her, rarely left my side over the next four years – it witnessed the churning out of a 150-page thesis, the downloading of way too much Wyclef, and the exchange of countless, not-always-sober IMs. Even despite a few hard drive crashes, screen issues and RAM upgrades it always managed to get its large, dual fans up and running again. Thank you, campus IT department.
Funny enough I pulled out eight-pound "Delly" while writing this, and there are still parts about the ten year-old, 15-inch Inspiron that best even some of the thinnest and lightest laptops / netbooks I've reviewed over the past few years. The matte keys are still molded to my fingers, and the touchpad isn't riddled with finicky multitouch features. Of course, things are downhill at boot up -- it makes an Atom Z Series netbook look like a multimedia powerhouse, and the Linksys external WiFi card to get on the net it shot, but I'm sure I'll find some use for this swappable floppy drive I've got sitting right here.
First portable I got to tool around on? IBM PC Convertible: http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibmpcconvertible.shtml
First one that I actually owned? AcerNote Nuovo 970CX. Fairly light for its day, with a battery that took up the entire wrist rest area, and a blazing fast Pentium 133 CPU, 16MB RAM, and a 1.2 GB hard drive. Ah, the freedom! The back-breaking FREEDOM!!!
It was also my first Linux system, because thankfully, everything worked out of the box.
IBM ThinkPad 760cs, in a closet in my ancestral home in north LA, I believe.
Has some kind of crazy virus-in-ram issue. At least, that's the virus scan kept telling me there was one, I don't know that it ever caused a problem. It developed cracks in the LCD cover and I accidentally blew out the first screen screwing inside of it with the power on (got a replacement via a donor 'Pad from Goodwill Computer Works in A-Town, Tx).
It's final demise was due to a crashy HD. Of course, that could be easily remedied for $5 now (came with a 160MB hd). When next I'm home I may pull it out and revive it for kicks. It bore the burden of my first attempts at playing with Linux - Red Hat, like, 5 or something...never could get it to boot from the backpack CD-ROM, though.
Yeah, that old.
Don't even ask me about RAM.
I want my phone to look like a Win 3.11 desktop.
Inspiron 1525
Practically an antique
I went into DOS on my 10 lb Sager, my first laptop, and killed it dead, all because of my curiosity, messing with config.sys or something else, I don't remember. I do remember calling up Sager support, back then it seemed every guy I talked to was oriental. I explained my dilemma in a heartbroken tone, and couldn't help but laugh when the oriental support tech responded "yah....you rearry messy op dis time...din' you..."
Ah, I remember it well... my first laptop, a Gateway 7422gx. It had a 2.2ghz AMD Athlon 64 processor, 512mb ram, a 64mb ATI Radeon Xpress 200m graphics card, an 80gb hard drive, and a 15.4 inch glossy display. Frankly, it never worked very well; it was slow, the mobile ATI gpu was grossly underpowered, and even though it had a 64 bit processor, it wasn't running 64 bit Windows (not that it had enough oomph to really feel the benefits of doing so). Hell, it could only barely run my beloved Half-Life 2.
But I loved it all the same; I was a freshman in high school, and I was already mobile, when most kids were sharing their parents clunky desktops. Better still, it was a gift from my overly generous grandmother, so I wasn't even out any money from it.
That computer survived 4 years of high school homework, robotics team shenanigans, and LAN parties spent playing Warcraft 3 and CounterStrike Source because none of my friends had good gaming computers.
I'm in college now, and I built myself a desktop to serve as my main computer. My backup is now an ASUS eeePC 100HE, but I still have the ol' Gateway, and I still find uses for it from time to time.
That Zenith looks positively advanced compared to the HP 110 that was my first portable computer. (I still own it!) Floppy drive! 8Mhz!! 640k!! Kids today don't know how lucky have it.
My wife in graduate school wrote major papers on it, then uploaded at 300baud into a line editor on a HP3000 mini.
http://oldcomputers.net/hp110.html
The HP 110 computer, also known as the HP Portable, is a portable MS-DOS computer produced by Hewlett-Packard. Probably the finest portable computer of its day, it has four-times the screen display as the popular but older TRS-80 model 100, and is screaming-fast at over 5 MHz.
The HP-110 is fairly heavy at 9 pounds, but has exceptional battery life, up to 16 hours. The operating system is MS-DOS 2.11, permanently stored in ROM. The BASIC programming language is not built-in, you have to load if from an external drive.
There is an enormous 256K of RAM, with MemoMaker, Lotus 123 and a terminal emulator built-in. Since the applications are executed directly from ROM, more RAM is available for user data.
we had one of these http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html
and one of these http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html with the controllers.
and the portable(not so) http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
Amazing how much we appreciated so little then and how little we appreciate so much now.
@Coswyn
"A big man knows the value of a small coin."
-Things Change
Does anyone remember the DEC PDP 8?
The first computer I programmed on was a Wang 2200 with a cassette tape mass storage drive and 48 K of RAM.
Then there was that IBM 029 keypunch machine for PL/1 on that 360/370 using VMS
I still have my Compaq Portable stored away. Does that count? It's keyboard folds down from the screen! It was a little heavy on the lap though.
http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
My boss bought an EEEPc on ebay. His geek friend couldn't make it do what he wanted, so I bought it. It has a hacked up ubuntu version. WOW, it does some extreme stuff.
My first laptop was bought for $10 at a hamfest. Complete with docking station. It was a 1993 AST Powerexec 4/25 SL. I bought it in high school in 2003. 25mhz 486, 20mb of ram, 200mb hard drive, 640x480 256 color 9" screen. It was a tank. Worked very well. The oldest one I have is a Toshiba T1200 from 1987.
LOL, the editors are all spoiled ;)
My first "portable" computer - laptops, per se, didn't even exist back then...
was a...
Compaq Portable
Price: US$3590 (two floppy system)
Weight: 28 pounds.
CPU: Intel 8088, 4.77MHz
RAM: 128K, 640K max
Display: 9" monochrome monitor built-in
80 X 25 text
Color graphic card
Storage: Two 320K 5-1/4" floppy disk drives
Ports: 1 parallel (expansion card)
OS: MS-DOS
And NO hard drive :o)
I worked at Lotus Development - it was my first IT job. They were so drunk with money back then with Lotus 1-2-3 pouring money into their coffers that they actually let me keep it when I moved on...
BOB BRECKLING NEC STARLET 1985
My first laptop was in 1985 - I bought a NEC Starlet with 96K of Rom and 64K of RAM. It used a CP/M Operating System and had an 8 bit word length.
I used it to track my sales customers with a database that was built in. For external storage it came with a cable to connect to any portable cassette player.
By the way, I plugged it in after seeing this article and it still works, but the screen is a little hard to read hmmmm. It always was hard to read...
I have pictures but have no idea how to send them....
My father's first laptop (I was born in the early eighties) was a HP model.
It had a 300 baud modem and weighed 15 pounds. It also played hangman, which is about the only thing I remember about it. Looked kinda like that zenith model first listed.
The rest of the laptops show me that there are a bunch of youngin's working up there at engadget...
My first 'laptop' was a Toshiba T6400DXC
i486DX-50
20MB of ram (although only 4MB actually worked, the 16MB card was non-functional when I got it)
No HDD (supposed to have a 120MB, but some greedy bastard removed it!)
1.44MB 3.5" Floppy Drive
10" Active Matrix TFT LCD (640x480)
Full qwerty keyboard, removable from the base
Built in carry handle
1 16-bit full length ISA slot
No built in mouse
No sound (aside from the PC Speaker)
Cost me $15 at a flee market
Originally cost US$16,000 back in 1992
How times have changed.
Wow, I have to think back, but I recall my first laptop you had to adjust the screen brightness, and was far away from being "active matrix", size of a suitcase.
My first "real" laptop was an IBM thinkpad at 166mhz, no wifi, had a cdr drive (no need for Nero here), 10/100mbit card that you had to slip in with a second port for modem, can you say 28.8 baud. Ram must've been a whopping 32meg and maybe 40meg HD.
When you do desktops, give me a ring, remember printer port backup tape drives, 10 inch floppy (yes 10 inch), 5 1/4 (wow so small) then the so familiar 3.5 single and high density...remember hole punching it for "more space", Adlib (then the infamous graviscard), and EGA. Mouses with balls! Command line...
Ansi graphics. Sysop. *67, 1 meg = 1 hour download on 2400baud.. Sis, no don't pick up the phone...dammit.
Now I'm just blabbing...
Oh wait
You guys with Macs should all check out www.lowendmac.com, a non-Steve Mac news site with dedicated discussion forums. Great place, great news, great discussions (and trouncing the PC troll now and then).
LONG LIVE THE PISMO!!! WHOO!!!
Fascinating article!
My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite A45-S151. It had an Intel 4 processor clocked at around 2.4gHz, 512MB of ram (later upgraded to 1GB), a CD-R/DVD-ROM drive, and a 15 inch 1024x768 display. The thing was an absolute beast, but I was ecstatic when I first got it back in early 2004.
Up until then the only computer I owned was an old beige hand me down tower from around 1995. It was the first computer my family ever owned and was shared by everyone. Over the years everyone in my family got their own brand new computers, so they let me have the old one. I was grateful to finally have my own computer, even if it was old as hell. I had a lot of memories on that thing, both pleasant and frustrating.
Anyway, the laptop I got as a graduation present and it was the greatest thing ever. It was a hulking beast, but it was all mine. It was leaps and bounds faster than my old desktop, and it pretty much replaced it because I don't recall ever going back to it again.
After a while it began showing its age, getting slower and noisier by the year, but I still kept using it even up to this day (I even managed to get the Windows 7 beta running on it!). Finally, last August I upgraded to an Acer Timeline 4810t. It's a beautiful little laptop, but I still have a soft spot for my very first one. In fact I still have the old thing in my room, and yes it still runs fine on Windows XP. I don't think I could ever part with it.
My first laptop was an IBM Convertible. The black and white display flipped up from over the keyboard to reveal the two floppy drives. The screen was not backlit and very hard to read. I had to sit in sunlight to really read the screen. But it was a laptop and portable. It was the first IBM laptop to run on batteries. I had this little printer that snapped onto the back of the machine.
AST Ascencia J30, with 10.1" SVGA screen, 32 MB RAM (2 MB shared as VRAM), 100Mhz Pentium processor ("Woohoo! We'z crushin' those 486s. now, mon!", 800MB HD, external whitebox OEM external CD-ROM. Ran the "new" Win 95!!!.
Purchased maybe 12-18 mos. before AST went bankrupt. Weighed less than 6 lbs., so, it was very lightweight--and small--for its day.
Got me through my first two graduate degrees, and into my doctoral-level work. .Still have it, in a box in storage, somewhere, with a half-finished paper on Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" on its crapped out HD. Don't ask me why. Pack rat-itis. Kinda fond of the little bugger.
,
My adolescent portable dreams revolved around the Tandy 100.
ITS THE COURIER!!!!!
Nergasm...
...rushes off to change his diapers
My first lappie was pre pentium era too - monochrome screen, had a pull out handle sort've like a sewing machine - heavy as heck, IIRC it was a Toshiba. A few years later I had a Toshiba Satellite 6000, but now prefer shuttle barebones . If I had to pick a lappie - I'd go for one of those alienware rigs with the 280M because gaming is the chief use of my PC nowdays.
The first and only laptop I ever used personally with was an old B&W screen Apple Power book (the one that had an external floppy drive)
My first experiences with a "laptop" was actually my first experiences with an x86 (actually 8088) PC. It was with the Columbia VP (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=889) which was basically a computer in a suitcase. Portable for the time, my father would often bring it home for doing work. Did everything on it, from learning Logo to playing spacequest. Now I carry around a slightly lighter netbook.
My first laptop:
Dell Inspiron 6000
1.7 Ghz Centrino, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 40 GB hard drive, 128 MB ATI Express graphics. It's still kicking to this day, although it's died completely twice in the past year, I keep reformatting and it springs back to life! Still running Windows XP and loving it! Recently upgraded to a 13 inch MacBook Pro unibody. Still love my Dell though! So many gaming memories. :)
Haha this is awesome :D Definitely Dell Inspiron 6400 (E1505) for me :)
My first laptop was also a Pismo MacBook. Replaced it with a BlackBook, and am now typing this on a Unibody. My next laptop is an iPad.
My first experience of portable computing were Compaq 486 'luggables' the size of a suitcase and the weight of a bag of cement with a VGA screen.
The sales team had them when I started working for a PC Virtual Reality software company in 1994 - I did world creation and tech support as well as the odd sale demo. Wow, I feel very old.
Kaypro II! 26 pounds of "transportable" CPM fun!
http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html
Any other Ladder fanboys out there?
I feel old.
My first laptop was the IBM Think Pad 700. Monochrome 25mhz and windows 3.1. I think it even had a 50mb hard drive.
I remember my first laptop was a PowerBook 1400c/133 my mom bought me at a computer show for about $99. It was also my first Mac. I loved that thing but not long after I got into eBay and sold that to buy a Wallstreet PowerBook, then a Tangerine iBook, then a Pismo PowerBook then my first laptop bought straight from Apple, a 12-inch PowerBook G4 which not long after purchasing fell off a table and dented the side. I think that all happened in about two years.
My first "laptop" was a Brother word processor (built in printer included!) all-in-one circa 1997. I call it a "laptop" because, well, it fit in my lap...sorta...it did have a 3.5" diskette drive that used ASCII conversion for (relatively) easy switching between PC & word processor. It came in handy for late-night paper writing after the campus labs closed.
My first LAPTOP was a Compaq Presario (how anyone remembers the model number is beyond me) circa late 2000: Intel Celeron 600mhz, 32mb of RAM (upgraded later to 96mb), 4.3gb hard drive (upgraded later to 20gb), 12.1" screen (upgraded to 13.3" upon return to Compaq due to defect), Win Me (horrid OS upgraded to Win XP as soon as it was released). It went through a lot of revisions but served me well for FPS games like UT & its various mods during slow times in tech support!
I had a carrying case for my Mac Plus and a cable so i could play Falcon 4 head to head at my friend's house.
I had the Tandy Model 100 in high school; that thing is hilarious!
The first portable computer I used was about 1990 - a Tandy Model 100. At the time it was over $1000!!!
By today's size standards it would be netbook.
My best friend had it on loan from his boss.
The Tandy 100 had a whopping 8K of RAM!! yes, folks, volatile memory - you turned it off, poof! everything gone. Unless you had the optional external Portable Disk Drive which could hold a staggering 100K per side!
It ran for hours on 4 AA batteries.
The Tandy 100 had a built in 300 baud modem. To all you young 'uns, you don't want to know how slow that is... Let's just say, that a file that was 50K in size would take a *while* to download. Like as in, go have a coffee and a smoke.
Mind you, the BBS's were just text based anyhow. It was easy to mess with the Escape codes on a BBS too. This really irked the Commodore users :)
The cool thing was, my friend and I figured out the pin-out on the modem plug. So we connected some paperclips, wires, and alligator clips. We plugged the paperclips into the modem connections and with the alligator clips we could tap into any phone line junction box. We could connect to a BBS as long as we had access to a phone line. This was considered portable! :)
The screen was dot matrix. The cursor was a blinking block. The screen was 40 columns wide by 7 lines deep. If the F-key row was turned off then it was 8 lines. 40 columns made it a little difficult to view a BBS because the screens were designed at 80 columns wide. Unless you had the adapter to port the video to a TV and get 80 columns.
Programming was in BASIC. One program my friend and I wrote was 5K in size! It was a Lunar Lander program with a force of gravity calculated. Try doing that with a screen only 8 lines deep!
What a great system. There was no boot up routine - it was instant on.
In fact these systems are still used today!
Yeah, those were the days :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
your all too young!
I had a Compaq Portable
Introduced: November 1982
Released: March 1983
Price: US$3590 (two floppy system)
How many? 53,000 in 1983, the first year
Weight: 28 pounds.
CPU: Intel 8088, 4.77MHz
RAM: 128K, 640K max
Display: 9" monochrome monitor built-in
80 X 25 text
Color graphic card
Storage: Two 320K 5-1/4" disk drives
Ports: 1 parallel (expansion card)
OS: MS-DOS
So Joanna Stern just got a laptop recently? How can she qualify to be a geek? That laptop is not that old at all. Give me a break. Girls are clueless.