Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first personal computer with a bitmapped color GUI, using a version of Digital Research's GEM from February 1985. The Atari 1040ST, released in 1986 with 1 MB of RAM, was the first home computer with a cost-per-kilobyte of less than US$1.
The Macintosh Portable is a laptop designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to October 1991. It is the first battery-powered Macintosh, which garnered significant excitement from critics, but sales to customers were quite low. It featured a fast, sharp, and expensive monochrome active matrix LCD screen in a hinged design that covered the keyboard when the machine was not in use. The Portable was one of the early consumer laptops to employ an active matrix panel—only the most expensive of the initial PowerBook line, the PowerBook 170, had such a panel. The machine was designed to deliver high performance, at the cost of increased price and weight. The Portable was discontinued in October 1991.
The Macintosh SE is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, from March 1987 to October 1990. It marked a significant improvement on the Macintosh Plus design and was introduced by Apple at the same time as the Macintosh II.
The PowerBook G3 is a series of laptop Macintosh personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from 1997 to 2001. It was the first laptop to use the PowerPC G3 (PPC740/750) series of microprocessors, and was marketed as the fastest laptop in the world for its entire production run. The PowerBook G3 was succeeded by the PowerBook G4.
The Zenith MinisPort is a subnotebook based on an 80C88 CMOS CPU running at two software selectable speeds: 4.77 MHz or 8 MHz. It was released in 1989 by Zenith Data Systems (ZDS).
The Atari TT030 is a member of the Atari ST family, released in 1990. It was originally intended to be a high-end Unix workstation, but Atari took two years to release a port of Unix SVR4 for the TT, which prevented the TT from ever being seriously considered in its intended market.
The Atari Mega STE is Atari Corporation's final Motorola 68000-based personal computer in the Atari ST series and the second to last model overall. Released in 1991, the Mega STE is a late-model STE mounted in the case of an Atari TT computer. It was followed by the higher end Atari Falcon in 1992.
The PowerBook 100 is a portable subnotebook personal computer designed and manufactured by Sony for Apple Computer and introduced on October 21, 1991, at the COMDEX computer expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Priced at US$2,500 with external floppy drive, the PowerBook 100 was the low-end model of the first three simultaneously released PowerBooks. Its CPU and overall speed closely resembled those of its predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. It had a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz, 2-8 megabytes (MB) of RAM, a 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome backlit liquid-crystal display (LCD) with 640 × 400 pixel resolution, and the System 7.0.1 operating system. It did not have a built-in floppy disk drive and was noted for its unique compact design that placed a trackball pointing device in front of the keyboard for ease of use.
The Toshiba T1200 is a discontinued laptop that was manufactured by the Toshiba Corporation, first made in 1987. It is an upgraded version of the Toshiba T1100 Plus.
TOS is the operating system of the Atari ST range of computers. This range includes the 520ST and 1040ST, their STF/M/FM and STE variants and the Mega ST/STE. Later, 32-bit machines were developed using a new version of TOS, called MultiTOS, which allowed multitasking. More recently, users have further developed TOS into FreeMiNT.
The ST BOOK is a subnotebook released in 1991 by Atari Corporation. It is based on the Atari STE. The ST BOOK is more portable than the previous Atari portable, the STacy, but it sacrifices several features in order to achieve this: notably the backlight, and internal floppy disc drive.
The history of laptops describes the efforts, begun in the 1970s, to build small, portable Personal Computers that combine the components, inputs, outputs and capabilities of a Desktop Computer in a small chassis.
IBM ThinkPad 760 was a notebook computer introduced in 1995 by the IBM corporation into the market as part of the ThinkPad 700-series. It was succeeded in 1998 by the ThinkPad 770 series.
The Compaq Portable 386 is a computer released by Compaq Computer Corporation in 1987. It was equipped with a 20 MHz Intel 80386 CPU, 1 MB RAM, 16 KB ROM, 1.2 MB5¼-inch floppy, 40 or 100 MB hard disk drive, priced at US$7,999 or 9,999 respectively, and a 10" amber gas-plasma display.
The XF551 was the last floppy disk drive produced by Atari for the 8-bit series home computers. It was the first drive from the company that officially supported double-density, adding double-sided support, providing 360 kB of storage per disk. It also introduced a faster transfer speed when used in double-density mode, doubling performance. It was packaged in the new gray-colored design language of the XE series computers.
The Toshiba T1000LE was a laptop manufactured by Toshiba starting in 1990 as a member of their LE/SE/XE family. It used a 9.54/4.77 MHz Intel 80C86, with the clock speed being switchable by using function keys on the keyboard. The laptop came with a 20 MB hard drive, 1 MB of RAM, a 1.44M/720K switchable 3.5" floppy drive, and a blue-on-white, back-lit, "Toshiba Graphics" 640x400 STN LCD. The laptop came with a choice of either MS-DOS 3.3 or 4.01 stored in a socketed ROM. The laptop's RAM was expandable to 2 MB, 3 MB, 5 MB, or 9 MB with 1 MB, 2 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB proprietary memory cards, respectively.
The IBM Thinkpad 350 series was a notebook computer series introduced in 1993 by IBM as part of their Thinkpad laptop series. It was the successor to the IBM ThinkPad 300. With only 2 models ever made in the series, it was succeeded in 1994 by the IBM Thinkpad 360 series.
The PB286LP, released in 1989, was Packard Bell's first laptop computer. The laptop featured an 80C286 processor clocked at 12 MHz and 1 MB of RAM, along with a single ISA expansion slot. Packard Bell released the PB286LP in 1989 among a slew of products aimed at the corporate market. Technology writers gave it mostly positive reviews, although some noted its 16-lb weight as hefty and its monochrome LCD as somewhat flawed. Originally only capable of CGA-mode graphics, the laptop was updated in 1990 to support VGA. Packard Bell discontinued the PB286LP in 1991, in favor of more-compact, notebook-sized computers.
The LTE, LTE/286, and LTE/386s were a series of notebook-sized laptops manufactured by Compaq from 1989 to 1992. The three laptops comprise the first generation of the LTE line, which was Compaq's second attempt at a laptop following the SLT in 1988 and their first attempt at a truly lightweight portable computer. The LTE line proved highly popular—Compaq selling hundreds of thousands of units between the three—and gave way to successive generations of the line, including the LTE Lite, the LTE Elite, and the LTE 5000 series. With its use of industry-standard floppy and hard drive technologies, the LTE was the first commercially successful notebook computer and helped launch the fledgling notebook industry, which had seen earlier attempts fail due to the use of novel but nonstandard data storage.
The Walkabout is a family of notebook-sized laptop computers introduced by Data General in 1989 and discontinued in 1993. The first entry in the line, simply named the Walkabout, was a battery-powered portable terminal capable of emulating multiple protocols; as well, it contains a rudimentary word processor, an autodialer utility for placing phone calls, and a real-time clock display and timer application for setting reminders. The successor to the first model, the Walkabout/SX, released in 1990, was an architectural redesign allowing the laptop to be used as a general-purpose IBM PC compatible. The penultimate entry, the Walkabout/320, increased its predecessor's i386SX processor clock speed from 16 MHz to 20 MHz, while the last entry in the line, the Walkabout/386SL, replaced the processor with Intel's portable-centric i386SL processor clocked at 25 MHz.
