My First Laptop Computer

[MineralMan]

I bought this to use when I was travelling. It was what I took to the first COMDEX I attended, and actually wrote a couple of magazine articles on it, uploading them to the magazine, using the amazing built-in 300 baud modem. Revolutionary stuff, it was, to be sure.

[randome]

1. Hah! Nice one, and older than my first. My first laptop I spray-painted purple. Just because.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[Lotusflower70]

2. Omg!

Last edited Wed Mar 8, 2017, 09:44 PM - Edit history (2)

When did you buy that? I will have to show my son this. He is a computer science/engineering major. It should be in a museum. Amazing how technology has changed.

[Blue_true]

22. I have never seen a laptop that look like that. Does look like museum stuff. nt

[Blue_Tires]

3. I first learned to type on one of those in elementary school

[MineralMan]

4. I upgraded to this Zenith ZF-171

MS-DOS machine for traveling, later. With two 5.25" Floppy drives, I could work in Microsoft Word for DOS 2.0. A big step up, although it wasn't as portable and had to be plugged into 120v power. Still, it was a real PC. I got it in 1987.

[nolabels]

9. Dude, are you sure that isn't like from 1887?

I miss my old 386 with the 113-megabyte hard drive

[LeftInTX]

11. I miss my IBM 360!!!

Just joking....I never wanted a PC cuz I hated dealing with that monster. Submit a job...something goes wrong...paper spews out forever...you gotta make hand motions to the operator, "Kill the job". Submitting jobs on punch cards....make a little typo.....the program bombs...

[MineralMan]

15. First computer I ever used was an IBM 1620, way back

in 1963. Freshman year in college, and I was taking programming classes in FORTRAN. Punch cards, which became a compiler deck. I learned fast to check my code very carefully, since we had to schedule run times in the middle of the night.

[LeftInTX]

25. We were lucky, the computer lab ran our jobs during the evening.

I think they used it for official university business overnight.

[tblue37]

21. I still have an old 286 tucked away. nt

[Blue_true]

24. Do you have back problems? Surely you had a cart for that thing.

[ogsball]

39. This Zenith was the slowest

. . . slowest computer ever. The screen was also a crappy LED.

I had one and hated it.

[MineralMan]

40. Yes. It was not a great PC, by any means.

It worked, though, and that was enough. It was portable, and that was great, when you compared it to those huge portable PCs that weighed 25 lb. or so and had a CRT screen. That particular Zenith model was developed for the IRS, which bought most of them. Their field workers used them. I got mine from a discount mail-order company that bought up a warehouse full of them and sold them for cheap. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but it was about $200 in 1987 or 1988.

One of its floppy drives quit working a couple of years later and parts were unavailable, so I switched to one of the great new laptop computers. It weighed about 10 lb and had a battery life of about an hour and a half. Lots of weird stuff has passed across my desk over the years.

[hunter]

49. My first "luggable" was a Mitsubishi MP 286L

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2232/mitsubishi-mp-286l/

I used it strictly as a DR-DOS machine. It ran Spinnaker's Easy Working Writer, which is supposedly what George Will was using at the time. There were also Apple II ProDos versions of Easy Writer, which was useful to me, since I had an Apple IIc clone too, and most school computer labs were using the Apple IIc.

I gave the machine away in a fit of housecleaning during a time when my wife and I had an unspoken agreement limiting my computer "museum" to a dozen larger computers or so. I haven't counted computers lately but I have many more than that now, most of them much smaller than desktop machines and their compatible CRTs.

My first truly portable battery powered computer was a Palm Pilot with a folding accessory keyboard that I bought used. But mostly I used actual paper notebooks for writing away from home, scribbling out the first draft by hand and editing as I entered it on the computer when I got home.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

5. Been on an anthropological dig in my late dad's den and found lots of old TRS80 stuff.

[MineralMan]

7. Cool. Try some of it out.

A lot of times, those were put away, and still work OK when you power them up. It's worth a shot. It's fun to have some old stuff around, just to remind you of the old days.

[MineralMan]

6. Finally, a laptop with batteries: The Zenith 180

I'm an early adopter, I guess...

[greytdemocrat]

8. HA!!

I had some early PC's too. I had even kept them
for decades before finally throwing them out prepping
for one of my moves. Wasn't a TRS through. Good times.

[MineralMan]

17. I gave all of the old stuff away when I moved to Minnesota.

I didn't want to schlep it all around. I did bring my cocktail table space invaders game, but sold it a couple of years later. It still worked perfectly, and I got a lot more or it than I paid that bar that was closing for it.

[PJMcK]

10. I had one of those, too

I started with a Commodore VIC-20 then moved to a Commodore 64 Portable:



It had a full-color monitor and I had some excellent business and entertainment software. It was heavy and had to be plugged into 120 volts AC.

I loved the Model 100 Portable and used it until I got my first Macintosh PowerBook. I've been an Apple user ever since.

[area51]

12. Famous name advertising Commodore.

[Thor_MN]

13. Jan 12, 1908?

That was a Sunday, according to the googles...

[Demonaut]

23. that predates Apple...it survived Y2K

Last edited Wed Mar 8, 2017, 11:49 PM - Edit history (4)

[OldHippieChick]

14. TRS80 was my first desk top.

Didn't get the portable model you have. Had that thing for over 6 years.

[BlueStateLib]

16. My first computer

?w=2564

[MineralMan]

18. Very cool!

[hunter]

51. One of mine too!

Build your own...

http://www.kylem.net/hardware/hardware.html

People have also created working electronic and computer emulations of it.

[PCIntern]

19. I have a working Coleco ADAM computer

With the cassettes and instruction books. Hooked up to A tv as monitor.

[MineralMan]

20. That's amazing, considering how

fragile they were.

[PCIntern]

50. Bought it for $700 because I needed

A word processor.

[sfwriter]

26. Used it for over a decade...

I wrote half a book on that thing. I used it on commutes. I took it to my first Macworld.

Wish I had it still.

I've heard that the copy of basic on that has the last actual code Bill Gates ever wrote.

[kimbutgar]

27. How many mb of storage did it have?

[fescuerescue]

30. I believe it's 4k

Maybe 16k. A Mb of storage was about two generations away. Maybe three.

My friend in High School had one in the early 80's.

It takes 1024k to make 1mb. So it's either 1/64 of a mb or 1/256 of a mb.

[moonscape]

28. Mine was of the same era - Osborne Executive luggable!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Executive

[guillaumeb]

29. Where is the pull cord to start it? eom

[neeksgeek]

31. My first computer...

Compaq Portable! 8-bit 8088 CPU. Not quite a laptop. But it did have a handle!

(That one's not mine, which is long gone.)

[d_r]

32. That trash 80 form factor

Would be a great form factor for people that want a simplified word processor for writing without distractions. Imagine an e ink screen with that keyboard.
I had a girl friend whose dad was an engineer at IBM who had one of these. I had a loner lunch box

[littlemissmartypants]

33. Kicking.

For the data nerds and gadget geeks. Present company included. I fell asleep with my Palm pilot every night for a month after I got it. It had a black and white modular camera.

Prior to that I had wicked fun with the Apple Echo, early speech synthesis, programming it to mispronounce words when the children were learning to read and spell. They loved telling me the computer was wrong. Ahhh, memories.

Epic post MineralMan. Thanks. ♡

Echo PDF link.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/applications/misc/ECHO%2520II%2520Synthesizer.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwix6aCN2MjSAhUJYiYKHWkXDPsQFggzMAY&usg=AFQjCNGNnyJRb2uNHFV_PESM-wB2fcpkIw&sig2=VuPMBrfNDivS7NPJh7qprg

[MineralMan]

34. It's fun to look back a little in time.

I think it provides some perspective on the current state of technology. Since I started writing for computer magazines in the 80s, I got to see just about everything as it emerged. In many ways, it was a lot more fun back then, since advances came so quickly and made so much of a difference. The mid to late 80s were pretty amazing if you think about it. We went from almost nothing to some pretty major advances in a short time.

I'm glad I got to be a part of describing that technology and helping people make the best use of it.

[Orrex]

35. I think your laptop was the prototype for this one:

[MineralMan]

36. Could be, but we had what we had in the 80s

The reality was that the computers available in the mid-80s were pretty wonderful, really. Compared to the previous decade and decades before, amazing power was available on the desktop and even on the road. While all that stuff seems antiquated today, it was revolutionary then.

My first cell phone was a bag phone. Within a couple of years, I had a Motorola flip phone. That was how fast things were changing. I remember running the first version of Windows, too, and using a Mac right after it appeared. Those, too, seem so out of date now, but they were the next phase of making computers accessible and usable by anyone.

I wrote a three-part article for Computer Shopper on how to maximize the use of batch files in MS-DOS. Primitive stuff, but a whole lot of people created menus for their PCs based on the instructions in those articles, and were able to do a number of other things, using just the capabilities of MS-DOS.

I wrote several articles early on about how to get online with a PC. Back then, you had BBS systems, GEnie and CompuServe in their ancient text versions. The Internet was still something people were just talking about.

I wrote an article about installing a hard drive in an existing 2-floppy PC. A 10-MB hard drive, it was. At the time the BBS I operated had a massive 40-MB hard drive that you could fry an egg on. I had to add ventilation to the PC's case to handle it.

Other articles talked people through building their own PC clones from individual components, so they could have a PC for under $1000. Complete with step-by-step photographs.

These days, computers are commodity items. That's wonderful, but there was an intense excitement about PCs back in the 80s. I was lucky to have been able to make a career out of helping people change their lives with that technology. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

[Orrex]

37. Hey, I'm in no position to mock anyone (except good-naturedly)

I rocked the Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem like nobody's business.

Zork was the oldschool shit.

[MineralMan]

38. I know. Really.

However, there are a lot of people who have never known a world without computers everywhere and massive connectivity. Once in a while, I like to show something from the beginnings of that.

What looks old and useless today was once the cutting edge of technology. I'm an ancient old guy of 71 years, but I've been messing with computers since 1963, when I took my first programming classes. My subscription to Byte started with its first issue, and I still have a copy of the Popular Electronics issue where the first actual personal computer was on the cover.

It has been a great ride. These days, I'm just using the technology. Back then, I was helping it happen. Boomers are good for something, I guess.

[Orrex]

45. LOL--I love it!

Your experience greatly exceeds mine, but my particular favorite measure for technological advancement is memory storage. I didn't get my first PC until '91, and it was a few years old at that time. It had an internal hard drive, at least, with an impressive 20 megs of storage. It was a brick about 4" x 6" x 1.5." I contrast that with the flash drive on my desk that's 128 gigs. Of course, the chip itself is much smaller than the plastic housing, and already much larger flash drives are available.


Just yesterday I read a statistic that the passengers of a full city bus today are carrying more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1991. Can't wait to see what's coming in the next 26 years!

[MineralMan]

46. I decided to back up an image of the entire hard drive on my new PC.

It all fit neatly on a 128 GB USB thumb drive. I'm doing the same on my previous PC. It will all fit on one of those, too. Cheap backup technology. The older PC only has USB 2.0, though, so it's going to take considerable time.

I also have a bootable recovery drive on a 32 GB USB thumb drive for my new PC. All of my data files can fit on one of those, too. So, I'm actually able to maintain complete backups for the very first time.

[ksoze]

41. The "Osborne Effect"

Sometime in early 1981, had the opportunity to meet Adam Osborne with a small group at a New York airport hotel and preview the then upcoming Osbourne 1, At the time, it was a game changer and shortly became an industry darling until being done in by many factors, including pre-announcing the Osborne Executive stalling sales and creating a historical marketing lesson.

[MineralMan]

43. Tons of companies came and went quickly during the early 80s.

When I think of how many PC clone companies there were in the mid-80s and look at how many are still in existence, it's amazing. Only a few actually survived. I had a Kaypro II for a while. The Osborne was so much lighter and more portable. But then Compaq came out with its portable PC clone and that was the end of that. CP/M simply could not compete, and died.

And only a few years later, laptops became the go-to portable computing solution and everything changed again. Massive changes were an almost annual thing in the 80s.

[ogsball]

42. Love my TRS-80

I used it in graduate school. I had a professor who would allow us to bring in a typewriter to take our tests. I was the first one to use a computer. I had to bring in my own daisy wheel printer (they didn't allow papers to be turned in printed on dot matrix printers--remember the term Near Letter Quality?).

It used dot commands for formatting and I had an aftermarket module that would creatively let you check the page formatting. I also really liked the key action on this baby.

The biggest drawback. . . it had no spell checker.

It also came with basic and I wrote quite a few programs.

Gave it to a friend when upgraded.

Thanks for the memories.

Oh yea, the CIA couldn't hack this one.

[MineralMan]

44. My first printer was a Radio Shack Daisy Wheel Printer.

That was because magazines wanted typewriter quality submissions for articles. There was no Microsoft Word printer driver for that Radio Shack printer, though, and I used Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS. However, I got a copy of that program's printer driver developer kit from Microsoft and created a driver for that printer.

Naive fellow that I was, I sent a copy of the driver on a floppy disk to Microsoft, which included it in the next release of Word. I knew they used my version of the driver, because I had added a feature that allowed the printer to print in boldface by using three tiny shifts of the paper and over-typing the boldfaced characters. It made a distinctive machine gun sound when it was printing those characters, and the new version of Word's printer driver for that Radio Shack daisy wheel printer used the same technique.

Within a couple of years, I could submit manuscripts on floppy disk to most of the magazines I wrote for. A couple of years after that, I was able to talk editors through the process of downloading my articles from my BBS system. It was heady times in those days, and everyone was improvising as fast as they could.

[Occulus]

47. My first computer was a Commodore 64

I still have it, actually, down in the basement. The last time I actually powered it up (several years ago) it still worked.

[Saboburns]

48. On a somewhat related note

I still have my original ipad and original iphone. I dont use them anymore but store them in a safe place. I kind of figure they'll be worth a lot of money in 30 years or so. They both work perfectly anddont have any cracks in the screen.

[MineralMan]

52. If you want them to survive for long, keep them charged.

If they're off and had a full charge when you shut them off, just hook up the charger once a month for an hour or two. If you do that, when you want to fire them up for some reason later, they'll work just fine. If you don't and the batteries go completely dead, you may have a problem.

I rescued a couple of old flip phones that had been in a drawer for three years. I had kept some charge on the batteries, just in case. When I decided to go back to a flip phone, I just charged one of them up and called Verizon to reactivate it and shut of the crummy cheap Droid phone I hated.

It works great, fits into my shirt pocket and only needs charging about once a month, since it's off most of the time.

[Saboburns]

55. Thanks MM

Will do

[Trailrider1951]

53. My first computer

back in the late '60s:



Yes, I'm that old....

[MineralMan]

54. Yup. That's just like the one I took to college in 1963 as

an Electronics engineering major. I got lots of use out of it, too. It's a pretty good analog computer, after all. But, like all computers, how well it worked depended on the operating system of the person holding it, I found.

You can still buy that model, by the way. I'm not sure who uses them any more, but I found that I could do some pretty amazing math with mine, back when.