the "good old days"?

[rbrowder]

my first 'puter was a zenith "supersport" laptop, (laptop?...the thing weighed about 15 lbs. with the battery pack!) had a 8086 cpu and 1 meg. of 30 pin ram...20 meg hard drive and a 3 1/2" low density floppy. i still had it when the original wolfenstien game came out...would just barely run that game, but it did run it....man, those were the days...lol....had Dos 3.3 as the o/s...and a 2400 baud modem....modem never did work tho'.

this was in 1989, btw......ages ago...

[NDD]

Talking about antique laptops ... what about IBM 8086 with 512kb RAM and 2x5" 1/4 floppies, no HD and no modem, total weight of about 12kg ?!

[rbrowder]

oh, yeah!...that was power!....lol....

and, there was an old o/s back in the day too...tried to compete with dos...dont remember the name tho'

what about the texas instruments TI-99?...that was a piece of work.............

[dmoltrup]

I've had two antique portables, the Commodore SX64 and the KAYPRO 4.

They were both similar in design.. The looked like a strange piece of luggage. When you opened the top, you actually had the keyboard in your hands and would reveal the screen and disk drive(s).

'rbrowder', do you mean the CP/M operating system?

[rbrowder]

yeah...i think "cp\m" was the one..

speaking of the "portables" remember the compaq "briefcase" computers? you carried them like a briefcase, or small suitcase......opened one side...that was the keybord....open the other side...that was where the i/o ports were......weighed about 20 lbs. , as i remember..

[Todddster]

Hey,

What about the Atari 400/800 with the cassette "floppy." That was a dinosaur. Also, the "trash" 80 was a good ol' computer. Or even the PET computers. Not much for gaming, though

todddster

[stylin19]

now don't laff....my first was an IBM PC jr. ..it had cartridge slots for expanded memory & GW BASIC(BASICA ?) and an Infrared Keyboard.
Man, I thought I was in the cat-bird seat !

[larryS3]

You folks may be interested in a great article in the March 12, 2002 issue of PC Magazine. It has a great article entitled "Living History: Retrracing the Evolution of the PC and PC Magazine. They give some great descriptive information on those very early PCs you've mentioned above and some historic information on how the old machines happened to be developed. They also mention quite a few machines and applications which appeared to hold great promise at the time but have faded in to obscurity.