With no internet

All the way to F12, impressive.

It would be 4 years or so until the public Internet was introduced even. Crazy to think about.

Had both external modem and ethernet card for the Toshiba slot!

An expensive typewriter!

AOL sends you a floppy disk

I wonder where you’d find anything to connect to. Earliest I remember a friend’s dad connecting to the internet tied up the phone line for hours and he basically just said hi to a friend. There was nothing online for the average person to do.

Be on the lookout for those workers slamming the F12 key! They know what's up.

The internet basically consisted of BBS, bulletin boards hosted by Universities and such. It was before my time though.

Ahh, a DIX ethernet connector. These were the days.

​

Trivia why DIX ?

>!Digital, IBM, Xerox!<

A friend of mine went to Japan in the late 80s, and came back with a slimmer laptop than this, with a printer built in.

Anyone remember The Globe ??

Even in 1989 they played this "battery lifetime is hard to say" game already 😂

What a weird place to put the dollar sign.

Why ?

How did they manage to have a flat screen?

I feel like thats not accurate when adjusting for cutting edge technology market deflation and manufacturing curve. Anything technology related shouldnt be treated the same as a bicycle for example, when it comes to accurate inflation.

Well I have a 3.5 inch floppy that I give away for free.

C:\ Is all you saw when you turned it on.

I’ll see your 3.5 and raise you a 5.25 floppy . A real floppy

And your page was printed out on a 9 pin dot matrix printer

I thought that was Ryan Stiles for a second.

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Doubtful. It likely needed you to load DOS.

So about that battery life…

But how long is the battery life!!!!!

That guy should be wearing an esd bracelet.

Because in America we put the $ before the number. ($1, $2, $100). ( Just in case you're not trolling 😂)

I work in IT, and my boss told me that during the 70s to 80s he had to take a bit of mortgage outta his house to buy a PC like the APPLE 3, for like almost 10grand, just for EXCEL.

I've owned laptops going back to almost that era & in current dollars the price has decreased about 10 fold & quite linearly.

Although it should be said that quality & robustness has gone down commensurally as well.

I did purchase for my SO a Panasonic toughbook some years back which was way more powerful yet only as robust as my early $4,995 Toshiba, it cost me $4,500 in 2010.

Trade Wars 2002!!!!

I’ve got an old Ibm “portable” pc that’s more of a suitcase from 1983 laying around yet. It fires up but immediately takes you to what looks like an old version of Basic. While it has a hard drive I’m sure it’s probably bad as the light for it seems to just cycle on and off over and over.

No I don't; but thanks, I didn't know.

There was lots to connect to. CompuServe was already pretty big by this time. Lots of BBSs and universities. Listserv was just getting started I think.

I got my first modem around 1982. It was 300 baud and my mom was always pissed because I would be using the phone line for hours.

I remember something similar, but it was an 8086 and had a smaller monochrome screen.

Lots of money for a listserv. I just can’t imagine being mobile and wanting/needing/being able to connect.

Apple IIIs were very expensive (not worth it). It wasn’t for Excel, it was probably VisiCalc.

Impressive, very nice. Let’s see Paul Allen’s laptop.

Those old Toshibas were great, but very expensive. I always ended up getting something cheaper.

‚It goes all the way to F12.‘

This might be my favourite quote ever.

And if you’re real nice it goes all the way to F12 ifyouknowwhatimean

The mobility was for business. My older sister needed to travel for work and had one of those suitcase Compaq luggables. She would need to dial in as well. This was around 1986 I think.

I could definitely see “fake computer salesman” as a Who’s Line game

"Battery can last 6 to 12 hours on a single charge!"

"Oh wow, so about three hours? That's actually pretty good."

Though back then they'd have said 1.5 to 2 hours, so probably 45 minutes - enough time for a lunch break or subway ride.

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1400 baud dial up- no waiting! 😂

We had a family friend who had a tech review column. I remember him showing me a ~$7000 Toshiba laptop in this timeframe - inflation calculator says $15k+ in today dollars. PCs have gotten so much more affordable!

I think by 1989, OSes were installed to local drive.

I miss that plastic

Greyscale.

I have it on good authority that it's hard to say.

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No Internet but modems were a thing. You just had to be in the know, who to connect to.

The ability to do auto calculating spreadsheets instead of manually writing them out would have been worth 12k on its own.

Ha! My first work computer!! So heavy lugging it to Mexico City every week.

I worked for a company called Entree back then ,I sold a lot of those "portables" back then. I sold a lot of 8088, 80286, and 80386 processor based computers. The black one behind it had a red Gas Plasma display.

And still a higher quality keyboard than you’ll find on any laptop produced this century!

Is the guy on the far left from CNET?

Most businessmen had laptops at the time only went to F10. But his goes all the way to F12.

winkwinknudgenudgesaynomore

Unlocked capabilities never seen before!

Back in those days, it was generally accepted that a PC would always cost about $3,000.

I was more of a lord guy myself but for mentioning any BBS door you get an upvote.

I had something very similar to this in the late 90s that I bought from a garage sale. I remember I used it to log on to BBS and through that BBS I used IRC because they had an IRC module. The first IRC chat I used on that system I told them what type of system I had and they banned me from the chat room because they thought I was lying because it was impossible to access IRC through such a system. :)

His keyboard is eggshell and the letters are Roman and embossed.

> Although it should be said that quality & robustness has gone down commensurally as well.

Except for the backlight and hinge. Oh my god there was nothing worse then that damn tube light burning out or the video cable giving out after a short time. Happened way too frequently, too early, and was incredibly expensive to fix.

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Some nerds/geeks had multiple phone lines with modems attached where folks could dial in and post messages similar to today's Craigslist or Kijiji. The first few years of the internet was pretty much about porn and Internet Relay Chat. Users who bought those Toshibas were I-T types and business people who wanted to do more work away from the office. I was in Field Service in that era, myself and many others were very impressed with that product. Networking at the office was only just beginning in that tyme as well. The floppy drive enabled users to copy or save a file to the disk, take the disk to another machine which had a printer attached and print the file. We called it sneaker net. The best part about being an I-T Guy in that era was the chicks.

Type in WIN, hit return.

It was hit and miss with those batteries. Some lasted only a few minutes, some caught fire.

I had the Compaq. It literally came in a suitcase. The screen was amber though so it was awesome.

16 address lines on the Front Side Bus. Whoa!

You could email though. My brother and I used to write one another back then from different college campuses.

r/AWKWARD

Battery? What battery? What are you talking about? Have another floppy drive, why not TWO modems! And 12 function keys, what more do you want?

Man, my 2021 Galaxy smart phone doesn't even have a thin or a thick Ethernet port. What are you even doing, smart phone manufacturers?

My first IT job gave me one of those about 1992. It was a few years old, I was brought into the shop because I was a PC nut. The rest of the shop, and the facility, used dumb terminals on DEC-Net. It was kind of sluggish already by then. I used to bring in an AOL disk and download apps, copy them to a 3.5” disk and take them home. It was still just dialup, but I could do it non-my time.

Also thin and thick Ethernet cords.

That means it's 20% better

Two serial ports.

a niner and a twenty-fiver.

Just in-case.

Interviewer: "How much life on that battery?"

Guy: "It's hard to say"

hahaha, about 10 minutes.

Worst Who's line bit ever.

Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy were pretty popular back then, with online games, chat, message boards and downloadable software. For business there was Dow Jones where you could get stock quotes and financial news.

I have two IBM P70 386 and one IBM P75, both portable computers like this one. The latter was $18,500 in 1989 when it was released. It’s a shame because I’m too computer illiterate to get any of the three running lol. They aren’t battery powered they are corded but fold into a slim package

Boot from floppy was normal. HDD was more expensive and my first pc had a 10mb drive.

Mb. Not gb.

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Today it would be considered a valuable antique of fully functional example would sell for more than $12,000

10 mb is huge for that time. The OS would have been like, what, 800 kilobytes? So after formatting and stuff, I'd figure you had 9.5 megs free.

Install DOS to hardrive, you have crazy fast boot times (probably 15 seconds instead of a minute), and still like 8.8 megabytes for all your text files.

I started computing in 1995ish with a 300ish meg hardrive (I think 320). It was reasonably sized until like 1999.

The one where the keyboard acts as a lid, with a 3” screen and twin 5” floppy drives? I remember working on one of those. Geophysics and charting.

Things were changing so fast it’s hard to remember exactly where we were in which year. 1989 would have been about Windows 1.0.

Yeah that’s it. The keyboard folds down and you have the little yellow monochrome screen on the left with the drives on the right. Keyboard connects with what appears to be a phone jack. It even has a carry case that zips up around it, but I can’t imagine lugging one of those around. Damn thing must weigh at least 20-30lbs.

Yes. More a luggable than a laptop. But we were heading into rural Norway with Land Rovers and stuff. The ability to bring a computer of any type along was mind blowing at the time.

BBS communities FTW!

I know what the kids are getting for Christmas.

Why not just make F10 two more? /spinaltap

Computer Chronicles. Been a while since my memory of Gary Kildall resurfaced. Long live CP/M.

That's incredible. I never knew things started so early.

This just makes me think of they Hey Burkie story of him giving his NHL scouts these clunky laptops and all the other NHL scouts having their minds blown and scrambling to match.

They had public internet in 1989

Incorrect. Internet became public domain in 92/93. You're talking about the commercial availability which is entirely different.

Are you thinking of the web? That’s a separate thing from the internet.

The public Internet, which your average Joe could use and sign up for in home use, was early 90s.

I was alive. We were one of the first people to get it.

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In the early 1990s the Internet was big news ... In the fall of 1990, there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet; by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized during the 1992 Clinton–Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the information highway captured the public imagination. On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks.[20]

From wiki - the internet has been around for awhile. The public Internet has not.

I was selling Apple systems back in the 80's and would routinely sell Apple II's, printers, software and some supplies ( a complete "system") for 5 to 8K. At 5000.00 that would be around 13,000.00 in today's dollars.