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Vintage IBM 1984 Laptop - The mother of all..

post #1 of 37
3/10/06 at 5:52pm
Thread Starter 
Just happened to go to the museum last week with friends, and my eyes suddenly stuck with this amazing thing, a 1984 IBM laptop, the mother of all the laptop it looks cool and sturdy... Sorry for the bad quality, as I'm only using my mobile to take the picture



Also there's an interesting advertisement about first laptop, so enjoy the history guys...

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post #2 of 37
3/11/06 at 2:03am
Nice find. That ad is just hilarious, but surely boggled peoples' minds back in the day.

Btw, for a camera-phone, those sure are some nice pics.
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post #3 of 37
3/12/06 at 1:26am
WHOAAA that brings back memoriess...>_<

oh yea, its totally bothering me aswell..who is the girl in your avatar..she looks really familiar..i need to know now since its driving me crazy
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post #4 of 37
3/12/06 at 5:39pm
Thread Starter 
She's Colleen Haskell, star of The Animal (with Rob Schneider) and Survivor.... Now you can sleep well....
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post #5 of 37
3/12/06 at 9:13pm
Wow, i actually owened one of those back in perhaps 1990 when i was a kid. It had 512kb of ram and even a 5mb hard drive. i played a lot of games on that machine, flight simulaters and everything.

I never thought of it as a laptop before, lol.
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post #6 of 37
3/12/06 at 9:22pm
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/...asp?st=1&c=446

Quote:
This computer was the portable version of the PC XT.
It was also the second IBM's "transportable" computer. The first one was the IBM 5100, the first personal portable computer ever built that was released in September 1975

The OS was the PC-DOS 2.1, first delivered with the PC Junior.

The portable was equipped with a 9'' amber screen which could display texts and graphics.

It offered 7 extension slots, 5 being free (4 shorts and only 1 long).

The main drawback of the Portable is that it was not delivered with a hard-disk, and it weights a lot (30lbs) !. On the other hand, it used the same mother board as the IBM 5150 (the classic PC form factor). This enable an such enclined person to be able to upgrade this computer up to a Pentium II !
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post #7 of 37
3/13/06 at 12:15pm
My family also had one of these. I remember playing Superbowl Sunday on it over and over. Nice green monochrome screen and all. Lets see I also had Adventure(text based) and star trek(absolutly horrible, and still played the hell out of it.) It was replaced with a Comodore 128. I still have the 128 lol. I need to hook it up and play with it for old times sake. I spent WAY to many hours on the 128, my first real computer addiction.
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post #8 of 37
3/14/06 at 11:27pm
I actually used two of these. They were both made by Compaq in 1986 - the first had no hard drive and ran solely on the 5.25" diskettes.

By the way, they were not called laptops. These were called luggables.

The real laptop of the time was the Tandy 100 (which I also owned) with a 300 Bps accoustic modem - it came with the deskmate software and ran on alkaline batteries.

Good find.

regards;

MS
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post #9 of 37
3/15/06 at 1:39am
Few people know this, but around the same time the Osborne came out, there was already a clamshell-style laptop available called the GRiD Compass.



This was 1982, and the thing cost about $10K, which is why nobody ever heard of it. But it was way cool. Mg-alloy case (like my 9400), and it's about the same size as my 9400....
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post #10 of 37
3/15/06 at 1:47am
I still own PB 150 .... Was a revolution at that time
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post #11 of 37
3/15/06 at 6:33pm
Click here for a comparison of my IBM 5140 and my Alienware Sentia m3200

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post #12 of 37
3/21/06 at 12:12am
Quote:
Originally Posted by dellbert
Few people know this, but around the same time the Osborne came out, there was already a clamshell-style laptop available called the GRiD Compass.



This was 1982, and the thing cost about $10K, which is why nobody ever heard of it. But it was way cool. Mg-alloy case (like my 9400), and it's about the same size as my 9400....
Those look like the ones that were used for a deleted scene in the film Aliens, where the character Hicks sets them up as remote terminals for the robot sentry guns.
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post #13 of 37
3/23/06 at 5:20am
I used an old Mac Portable back in grade school. Definitely not something I'd put on my lap. It was nice to be able to use my newer SCSI Zip drive on the computer to run larger programs off disk.

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post #14 of 37
3/23/06 at 2:36pm
I used to carry some old lappy kinda like the above Mac laptop. I don't remember the brand but it had a 40gb hd and was great for backing up people's data using laplink (remember that?)
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post #15 of 37
3/23/06 at 2:49pm
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/...asp?st=1&c=524

C64 forever!
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post #16 of 37
3/28/06 at 11:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jasonlava
1 MHZ
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post #17 of 37
3/29/06 at 7:30pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by eminem3150
1 MHZ
Yeah, but that 1mhz kicked BUTT back in the 80s . C64 was THE gaming rig, period. Until the Amiga came out. Took PC's until the mid 90s to catch up.
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post #18 of 37
3/31/06 at 12:56am
Holy crap, I think I actually still have one of those. We also had a C64 and a 128, but I never used the 128. Played Cruisin' USA and some side scroller Indiana Jones type game.
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post #19 of 37
4/8/06 at 12:17am
I had a Data General laptop similar to those pictured above. It had a HUGE 12" LCD but unfortunately no OS. I liked it but with little concept of computers at the time (1994, fourth grade) I was unable to truly enjoy it. My dad and I took it apart and unfortunately it died then since we coulnd't put it back together and threw it out shortly thereafter.

My first 'real' laptop was an AST clamshell, 386 (25MHz) with Win 3.1 and no built-in mouse. Bought at a yard sale in 1996 for $65. It was wonderful until the hard drive failed.
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post #20 of 37
4/9/06 at 1:54pm
just some up to date info on current laptops
http://www.atarimagazines.com/comput...8_Test_lab.php

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