What were your laptops in the 90s like?

Discussion in 'Laptop General Discussion' started by rootle, Jul 4, 2016.

  1. rootle

    rootle

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    I'm fairly young and I'm mostly used to laptops that are fairly recent. But I do remember some of my dad's early laptops. One of them was black and white, which is really weird to think of now. I also remember the old mouse things that were used before touchpads. They were like a little analog stick in the middle of the keyboard.
     
    rootle, Jul 4, 2016
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  2. rootle

    Corzhens

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    We had our first laptop in the early part of the 2000 millennium. It was a used laptop brought home by my father-in-law from the US, he bought in a thrift store. I don't remember the brand but what I remember is the booting which takes more than 2 minutes and sometimes it even fails to show the logo of Windows. There was no wifi yet and the only use for that laptop is the word processor where we write and save in a diskette. That did not last long though, the battery gave up.
     
    Corzhens, Jul 5, 2016
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  3. rootle

    sparkster

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    To be honest, I'm not even sure when laptops first came out but I know I've had some real old ones compared to the laptops available today. When I was younger, probably before the days of laptops, I remember having an Amstrad CPC-464 which connected to a green screen monitor and which loaded software from cassette tape. You would either use the keyboard or a joystick to play games. The graphics and resolution were so bad that even the ball on a game would be square! I also had a Commodore 64 (which had a whopping 64-kb of RAM) and then moved on to a Commodore Amiga 500 which was revolutionary at the time. We didn't have PC towers back then. The hardware was literally built into the keyboard and the system would be plugged into either a monitor or a television set.
     
    sparkster, Jul 5, 2016
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  4. rootle

    vinaya

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    I have used black and white computer. I began using computer in the mid nineties when I was a ninth grader. Our schools had 20 computers and only one of them was color monitor. During that time I did not have computer in my home. I was able to see a laptop close, even use it, only during 2000. I had my first laptop in 2004, it was color.
     
    vinaya, Jul 5, 2016
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  5. rootle

    IBMPC8088

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    Back then, I had a 286, 386SX, and 486SX laptop with 640k, 4MB, and 8MB of RAM respectively. System clock for each ran at 8mhz, 33mhz, and 66mhz respectively. 60MB, 200MB, and 1GB hard drive on each one. The 286 and 386 actually had NiCad (nickel cadmium) batteries instead of lithium-ion, and the screen of the 286 was CGA (4 colors) and monochrome, the 386SX was Active-Matrix with up to 64k EGA (16 colors possible, 64 color palette), and the 486 had a real 256 color VGA LCD monitor. Each of these had a built in floppy drive that was either 720k, 1.44mb, or 2.88mb (486). They all had parallel and serial ports, and each one had a built-in modem ranging from 1200 baud to 28,800 baud. The 386 and 486 had an external PS/2 port for connecting an external keyboard, and a vga out for an external monitor. The 286 didn't have the external monitor, but had an RS232 port for one of the original IBM keyboards to be used on it. The 286 didn't have any audio in or out, but the 386 and 486 did. The 386 had either an adlib or soundblaster chip in it (early form), and the 486 had either Soundblaster or a clone (used the same DMA channels and Interrupt request lines as SB cards did, but used a different driver and different CD driver). Oh, the 386 could use a special port for an external CD-ROM (it was proprietary), while the 486 had a 4x CD-ROM built in (it could only read CDs, not write them. The ability to write them came around 1996-1998 toward the end of the commercial market for consumers in the 90's). You could, however, use a very expensive block device over a serial port as an external CD-ROM much the same way that you could use a 100MB or 120MB ZIP drive that way through the parallel port (if bidirectional) or the serial port (standard interface).

    The laptops were heavier. Much heavier. But they were built to last and much more sturdy than some of the ones you have today, save for battery life. There were no built-in webcams on any of them, and few had any type of microphone built in unless they had a sound card (and even still, there was usually just a port for it and it wasn't built-in). There was no bluetooth, hdmi, or usb ports on them. There were no MMC/SD Card slots, either. The front side bus speed of those systems were between 33 to 66mhz on average. They were MUCH easier to take apart, work with, repair, and put together than laptops today, because the manufacturers wanted you to still get as much use out of them as possible and upgrade them, rather than soldering things to the board, hiding the battery or molding it to the case, and making the hard drive or ram soldered in or inaccessible with "planned obsolence" like we're seeing today. The 486 had an ethernet jack, but the 386 did not. Back then, the 386 and 486 laptops had PCMCIA cards too...they were like a special type of mini-proprietary ISA card you could get just for a laptop, and plug it in to do what you needed it to do.

    The laptops that didn't have a proprietary port for CD-ROM drives could use one or two PCMCIA type I or type II slots as add-in cards to provide for external CD drives, external floppies, external hard drives, digitizers, scanners, printers that you didn't want to use from a parallel port, and other devices of the time. The more complex type III cards came out toward the end and were more powerful, but took up all of the slot space available to do more. They were superceded by usb 1.0, 1.1, and then later, usb 2.0 which was the major stride forward to make things powerful enough, fast enough, and useful enough. That being said, there actually were some PCMCIA cards that gave you 2 or 4 usb ports that were either 1.1 or (much later on) usb 2.0 to make it to where you could use modern usb devices on laptops from the 90's. You can still find them out there sometimes.

    The touchpad was usually a built-in trackball mouse, or a mini joypad that was a little like what you find at the center of the ibm thinkpad (now lenovo thinkpad) laptops, which keep the traditional button piece and the newer touchpad but with dual buttons on both the top and the bottom.

    On the older laptops, you sometimes had an external ps/2 mouse port along with the external ps/2 keyboard port, too. The 386 and 486 both had a keyboard port on mine and a trackball.

    If you wanted to use an external joystick for games, just like the PC, you had to hook it up to a serial port (or use a PCMCIA card for an extra serial port or a proprietary joystick), since USB was not a thing yet.

    8 and 16 bit WAV files were big for soundblaster-enabled systems, along with 8 bit VOC and other formats for sound. MOD files were big too (basically C64-type samples of musical instruments which could be arranged similar to MIDI format, but to play real audio samples like a PC synthesizer for the music scene. It was (and still is today) pretty neat stuff! The CPUs back then could just barely crunch MP2s and MP1s, and MP3s were often choppy (even on a 486; it was possible to get them to play on a 386 with DOS players but very sparingly). WAV files were raw like VOC, and needed no decoding so they could just play as-is, but were HUGE files. MP3s were compressed to 40% or less of the size of a WAV or VOC file, and made it possible to store many of them on a 400mb or 500mb hard drive (if you were lucky), but you always had to convert them back to a wav one file at a time to play them, which took a lot of space, more time than people would put up with today, and power. The 286 had a math coprocessor in it still, which helped speed up things a little, but that was integrated from the 386 on out. One of the two laptops had a Cyrix CPU in it (not sure which) and the other was Intel.

    They did have docking bays though for desktops, but they were usually really expensive. Dell and other systems had a "docking bay port" on the side or on the bottom to do that with.

    Oh, and you rarely needed a fan for anything. The systems didn't get hot enough to shut down usually, and there was no such thing as the bogus "Direct X" or GPU to worry about. It was all one item, and you could do everything quickly and neatly without worry just by using DMA to the video card at &HA000 if using VGA, or &HB000 or &HB800 if using CGA or EGA. I think &HC000 was monochrome? It was all memory-mapped and standard for you. So was the sound card, and everything else on the system. It was beautiful. You could always know that if you wrote an OUT value to a hardware port or requested an INP, it would return exactly what you requested or send out perfectly to that address every time for realtime hardware updates or monitoring. Things were universal WITHOUT any type of "plug and play" which messed a lot of stuff up, and made it only work correctly with Microsoft after that. I liked it how it was before, and it could have been changed or upgraded built on what it was, rather than that. Now, with Microsoft ever since, IRQs and memory-mapped devices get assigned different values to where only Windows knows where they go or what they are, and a programmer using an API or a hardware request call has to figure out which are which, which ones are sharing IRQs now, and other funky stuff that never had to be there before.
     
    IBMPC8088, Jul 5, 2016
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  6. rootle

    something back

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    Laptops in the 90s were very expensive, possibly up to 4 months wages.
    I believe they were mainly made for the business community.

    They were slow, heavy, and the battery life was pitiful.

    Parts as they are today were hard to come by

    Ram were 10/20 times the price of todays ram.
     
    something back, Jul 5, 2016
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  7. rootle

    Brian8gbSSDLinux

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    RAM was 10/20 times what it is today... TOO TRUE.

    I bought a Brand new 386 in 1989 then sold it again, because (as it turned out it was set up incorrectly AND therefore) SO SLOW

    I returned to my 286... which had 2 Mb of RAM,
    upgrading it to 4 Mb by buying 2 MORE Mb of RAM at £35 per Mb...

    My first REAL 'Modern' Laptop was a SAMSUNG VAIO 14"
    purchased in 2001 for around £400
    which had a HUGE 64 Mb of RAM and a 60 Gb HDD.

    My current 'Toy' is an
    Acer 14" with 4 Gb Ram a 1Gb HDD
    (that was swapped for a 250Gb SDD)
    And it ONLY COST £145 (plus the price of the SSD)
     
    Brian8gbSSDLinux, Jul 6, 2016
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