The great thing about Doom is that it doesn’t even need a sound card. If you’re of a certain age then the soundtrack automatically plays in your head anyway!
There are a few I recognize right away. Doom is one, but it doesn't stick in my head. The ones that do are Pitfall II, Bubble Bobble and Popeye. Great, now a mish-mash of those are going to loop in my brain...
Hey Adrian! Could you dump that PCMCIA Cardwizard diskette, please? Early versions of that software are not really around, So it can be potentially something useful or rare. Thanks! And, yes, thank you for a great video, as usual :)
@@thedopplereffect00 I'd say 0.5 mm is closest, but I'd wager any of them works fine. Nothing rotates, so as long as you can do leverage and not collide with the neighboring pins, it'll do.
I LOL'd when Adrian said it wouldn't work outside...I can't remember any laptop/notebook from the 95-97 era that you could use outside...In fact I think I remember screen shades even being not just a thing but a necessity back then, and having to setup your office so you weren't in direct sunlight if you were a notebook user. Laptops sucked back then, but it was what we had and we were happy for them. I am so glad that we have made it to where we are today.
Yep, the passive matrix ones were at least 3 times as bad. I'd not sell those as I worked at Gateway, and it just stood out too much. You would buy a cheaper B-brand with an active matrix one I suppose - possibly this one :) I remember we had one one with passive and the one with active display, and we simply hid the one with passive matrix behind the pillar that held the shelves.
I owned a 90s laptop and had friends who also had similar and I can tell you that is the way they used to sound and look. Tinnie sound and dim blurry screens was absolutely the norm from my experience.
The second I saw the box, I knew exactly what the laptop would look like. Back when they were new, I worked at a computer store, and like yours, they would come "bare bones" (no CPU, no RAM, no harddisk) and complete them to customer specs. I probably could still install a CPU in one of those while being blindfolded... We had a few corporate customers back then who ordered them in bulk for their employees.
bulk...ugh....i once had to assemble and load 71 identical P5-100 mini towers...still have an occasional nightmare where i'm lost in a maze pushing shopping carts full of computer parts around....
I imagine the corporate IT departments bought such ODM laptops to save money compared to buying stuff like IBM ThinkPad 500 or 700 series, Toshiba Satellite or Satellite Pro 400 series, or Compaq LTE 5000 series.
@@kbhasi that's most companies here in Germany for you. The people in charge have no clue what they are doing and will always decide for the cheapest option. Just yesterday, I learned that the IT department of my current employer now wants to upgrade our monitors from 22" to 27". For cost reasons, they did not go for monitors capable of displaying 4k tho - they will be full HD like the ones we use now. 🙄
@@Colaholiker Oh! They were in Germany! Ouch. I was thinking of the US. 27" monitors but 1080p. Ouch, that sounds cheap, like when I attended secondary school in Singapore in 2011. At the time, the MOE had launched the first iteration of SSOE (which used Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Enterprise) and when it rolled out to the school I attended, I noticed that they or the individual school IT departments decided that schools should have 18.5" 1366×768 monitors with their education model ThinkCentres. They were a bit of a pain to run modern software on (because I could only fit 1 app on the screen at a time and the Windows 7 taskbar that I couldn't hide because IT locked out access to Windows settings), but they're great for retro software from before developers made their UI elements huge, especially if they had 4:3 aspect ratio modes to allow them to replace 15" XGA LCD monitors. I was also reminded of when I had to borrow a monitor from my stepdad when I stayed with him for a while, as it was a BenQ monitor that was a 27" 1080p but I can't remember the model number. To cut a long story short, I returned it to him when my sister bought a used LG L246WHX (which was basically high-end for 2008, if I recall correctly) from an auction at the company she worked for in 2018 and it was an improvement as it has a tolerable pixel density and resolution.
We in high level support (we wore many hats) got to deal with the brand new Toshibas and Thinkpads that were dealt out to the execs and the sales force. I always loved setting up machines for the sales guys, but the execs were usually jerks and high maintenance. But man was it fun to play with a $5000 laptop in the 90s! My first laptop was a used Toshiba Tecra 8000 I got for $500. I used that with Windows 98 up to 2004, then I got a new Thinkpad A31p (Pentium 4). That was just heaven. I used that thing for 8 years. It got replaced by a Thinkpad W520 and I'm still using that one!
Me, 1995 ICT guy, just fresh out of school, i always got the fancy Toshiba models, needing the Pentium and GTX card models. All $ 10k models, normal Toshiba ThinkPad was only $4 k. This 'Medion ALDI' Taipei Laptop was only $1k Why service i cheap laptop in 1996 ? Trash it please
@@s.guttmann6625 Can you not load W98 off a standard W98 CD, & get any necessary drivers via eg. Driverscape ---> Tecra 8000 using "sneakernet" (USB stick)
One of the things I remember for laptops of that era was that the controls for display, audio and other functions did not always work without having drivers installed. Some laptops of today do that but not as common. I had a Micron version that even had the rolling fingerprint scanner off to the right of the keyboard. The display was always a little on the annemic side for images but they did the job. It was never an expectation to be able to use the laptop outside. I got the experience to use Itronix Laptops since my Dad had worked there. They did better in outside usage and also the keyboards did not melt. They tested for that with their own heating oven with the laptop running and holding the temp at 120F. Then they would switch the temperature all the way down to -15F to do extreme cold testing. Then it was onto the cycling test. That showed bad solder joints nicely. Primary purchasers of these laptops was Military and government services. They did the job and lasted. Cooling of the processor was handled by it being pressed to the magnesium case under the keyboard and the whole case would warm up from it. You could even drown the laptop while running with all service doors closed and it would keep working for the most part. Interconnect board did not like being wet and having high voltage present to run the display.
That carry case is gorgeous. I was 12 or so in the mid-90s and I was absolutely sure that having a laptop with a PCMCIA modem and a leather carrying case was what it meant to be a professional.
My parents had this laptop!!! I've been trying to find another one for years! I think they tossed theirs and I'm really sad about that. I'm glad you found one, it was honestly a great computer from what I remember. That said, yours has the better screen...
Sounds like the volume is set too low for decent line level output. The keyboard controls usually require a driver for volume as these were expected to mainly run Windows 95.
Nice review! I used to have a Green 759 laptop from the early 2000's. I was excited when I purchased it as It was my first laptop. It too has numerous input / output features. The DVD drive was a bonus (although it was not powerful enough to play DVD movies). Otherwise, the features were one of the reasons I purchased it. To be honest, it was very unreliable. Within a year it began to exhibit problems. It would power off by itself. The vendor I bought it from insisted that it was my fault and refused to repair it even though it was under the warranty period. I ended up selling it on eBay and I still have the photos and auction content.
The cost estimate that I used to give in the '90s was "laptops cost 2.5x what comparable desktops cost, while offering half the screen size. Only buy one if you absolutely need portability."
Dont forget that the backlighting in the early colour LCD screens were flourescent tubes mainly.. They may need to be worked a bit to get them up to full brightness.
Speed isn't automatically set you have to adjust the multipliers in the bios (possibly jumpers depending on design). The screens on most of this generation laptops were not great new.
I have my Dad's old Sharp Laptop that he used for his Matco Tools business, It's design is so similar to that laptop. The hinges where just fine back in the day but they are super stiff now and it even cracked the plastic when I opened it last.
Nostalgic, I did have an even worse one for my job, just need the terminal function, not games. The backlight is a fluorescent tubes (flexible) and it goes dimmer over use, also it's quiet normal this 199x TFT did not have enough brightness since the backlight did consume lot of power (so they set it even dimmer when power up), except reach the age of ACTIVE TFT it's dim. The ESS chips back then did famous for bad sound due to unknown reason, but it's normal sounds bad. ESS got "quality chips" only after 2010.
It's extremely cool that it's NOS, but i'd pass it by, or wouldn't pay much for it. Being NOS it would make for a dangerous eBay impulse purchase only to be disappointed when you actually get it! The cost cutting of laptops at that time was very high, and as you said they were still stupidly expensive.
Watching you open this brings back so many memories. I was running an ISP/computer repair shop in high school in 96. We got so many of these big honkin' laptops on trade-in from people who wanted a desktop.
My dad had a Micron from this era. He let me borrow it and I installed Slackware on it. It ran great, the screen was nice and the keyboard seemed pretty good. It seemed to be a much higher quality build. He was a school administrator so maybe they had a little money to spend. I loved it.
Brings back memories of the first new laptop I ever ordered for myself, a Sager 820. Had a 166mhz desktop Pentium that cooked my lap to medium rare, and then eventually cooked itself to death.
My 2407WFP-HC has a cathode and that thing takes like 30min to fully warm up, and that thing gets used daily. With it never being used, just like a CRT (if never used) needs to be run for awhile to fully "warm" up. May never reach as fully bright as it could've been, but better than how it is out of the box now.
I expect that the LCD is perfectly normal for that era. It's unlikely the tubes are bad it's just how the were back then and we're used to modern screens. You can adjust the gamma of doom in the configuration file. It's always set too low imo.
Adrian. The major jump on the notebooks was when in a certain year of the eighties Taiwan made a design of notebooks sponsored by the Government where they design the notebook in a very similar way it is still today. Size and weight. Before that the notebooks were identical to this one. I happened to have ordered a relatively big quantity of Sharp notebooks ( similar in size and weight to this one ) and 2 months later the entire Hannover Fair was full of the taiwanese small size and weight notebooks ... I big loss to my company because the sharp units had been expensive, big and heavy. I was not able to sell them and the only use was in the company for internal use.
This reminded me of my first laptop ever: The Thinkpad 720c. Terrible construction. Hinges were falling apart. Power board used to blow the fuse, and had to keep replacing it. And it was just a slow 486, but oh that Doom goodness, Shareware Doom! Knee Deep in the Dead.
With that gameport on there, this is a sweet retro gaming laptop for someone if they landed one that is NOS. That old CCFL, you're just going to have let it warm up. There probably is a way to get MMX capabilities if you wanted it. An IDT WinChip2 runs at standard 3.5v, no more than 11W TDP (P5-133 non-MMX runs at 11.2W), and almost always worked fine even with Intel BIOSes. I used to use them all the time on Intel Socket 5/7 systems that only ran standard voltage. They were down on raw FP peformance but if you could leverage MMX, they were better. Those ESS sound chips always worked better installed under Windows in my experience, even in DOS mode. Put Win95 on there and install the driver and you will probably get better results. I have a Compaq Presario 1247 that I use for things like this, but it's a late 1998 model with better capabilities, can run AMD K6-III+ and take 288 megs of RAM.
I used to have a little museum of this kind of thing along with manyals and drivers. I gave away several rubbermaid tubs of the stuff to a local computer club when i retired. The only thing i miss is the full size 80MB MFM Seagate. You could actually make an IBM AT dance. Oh no, i forgot the old debug sequence for formatting the drive. 😢😢😢.
My first laptop was one of those generic ones that looks a LOT like that one (branded as Ultra, had that LCD panel between the hinges and same place and size for a brand sticker... I bet it's the same company!), a 486SLC-33, in 1995. I was the first (and only throughout my high school career) student at my school to bring a laptop to school for note taking when I was in the 9th grade. That's how I learned to use Excel so I could keep an accurate grade average for each one of my classes each time an assignment was handed back to me. The screen was black and white and I believe passive matrix, but that didn't stop me from playing Doom whenever I had a chance ;) Once 11th grade rolled around and I upgraded to a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, I was able to plug into each classroom's ONE Ethernet jack. I remember buying a RAM upgrade for it during class one day as well as downloading MP3s when they first started becoming popular... 1997-98 I believe. Good times...
Laptops back then were a brand new technology.... things were just getting small enough to really have a laptop in the way we think of them now.... no one really knew what a laptop should be yet either... didn't know that latches, hinges etc needed to be more robust...they were meant to be more word processor and do regular computer things in a pinch type machines still....I'm just amazed that it's in such good condition...I remember most used machines had been "customized" quite a bit, after the movie hackers people were actually spray painting their laptops 😂 to the point that the keys would stick 😂 one laptop I think they should make a serious water resistant and tough case for is the tough books and similar models...they would be absolutely indestructible...not very fast but you could probably beat a bear into submission with it then finish it off with your Nokia cell phone 😂
@@wilfredpayne433 The plastic was reasonably robust when new, but not when old, because plastic fatigue is a thing. There are also cases with latches like that, when people don't always know or have the care to look which way the latch would go. I think the manual would have contained the correct directions.
Be cool to see some more of the inside, see if recapping can improve the audio and display brightness? I just won an auction for a 486 laptop motherboard for £1 so I was interested in this as I'm not really sure what I'm doing with it yet!
It might be fine just letting it run. You could notice the screen getting brighter and more evenly lit as it was on, but I imagine it was never particularly exceptional brightness. I remember seeing people's laptops back then and they were noticeably dim compared to CRTs. Same with sound. Laptop sound was remarkably bad, but yeah maybe this is exceptionally bad, but it might just be worth letting it play for a while.
Perhaps, but modern systems are much more end user friendly then the older systems. You saw how much trouble and time it took him to just simply set up the sound. You could rarely use one of these older DOS based laptops right out of the box. The software set ups were much more involved and complicated with autoexec.bat and config.sys issues, IRQ conflicts and constant software compatibility issues even on platforms like Windows 3.0. I honestly don't miss those days at all and am glad PC technology has advanced beyond all that nonsense but, having said that, the issues with Windows 11 feels like the industry is reverting back to the old days. I still have a system that is running Windows 7 because it was such a stable OS and very easy to use. My first system was an Everex Step Intel 386 DX-20 massive tower with 512MB of RAM and an 800MB hard drive. It came with a Zenith 15" flat panel monitor, keyboard and mouse and cost almost $3000.
@@walterlegere1403Don’t agree. Many things today are software dependent upon ‘updates’, then things break! Many items were baked in and mission specific, like phones.
@@Channel567-7 To a point ,you're right but come on, how easy is it to go to Wal-Mart, buy a phone, pop in the SD card, register the number and you're off and running. I purchased a legacy desktop PC from E-Bay, opened the box, hooked up a monitor, keyboard and mouse, plugged it in and it worked flawlessly right out of the box. My main desktop motherboard died. I ordered a used one off E-Bay, installed it and the system booted up and worked like it always did before. See what I'm getting at here?
Laptops before the early 2000's were very special and premium devices. You can see the quality and how much care went into just the packaging and accessories. I absolutely love that laptop bag! If you weren't going to use it with the computer it came with, you could easily use it as a tablet case, etc.
Adrian I would keep that unit. I have found them very useful for making 3.5" Disks in DOS for test and measurement equipment when modern PC's with USB floppy drives won't work for utilities that need direct access for specialized disk copying. Finding a new one is a real find. My other goto retro laptop is a Dell D630 that can have a real 3.5" Floppy drive and has a DB-9 RS-232 and if you have the docking station you can get a true parallel port or use the PCMCIA port to insert a parallel port card for driving things like EPROM programmers. I use it mainly for development/ Bullet proof machines that will run Linux or WinXP thru Win7 or DOS or a VM.
We never had a laptop in the 90's, but the couple I used here and there sucked lol. My childhood computers were a Commodore PC40-III running dos and Windows 3.1. We later on got a HP Pavillion with Windows 98 which I think was a Pentium 2? But my dad always was winning raffles of old computers from his engineering company. We had old IBM's, Epson's, Packard Bell, Hewlett Packard. You name it! For most of my childhood, we also had a monochrome NEC monitor that was outrageously heavy, but it was a pretty good size. Excellent sharp display.
Your experience with this laptop is the same as mine from that era. Although I never purchased any, I did use laptops of that era for work purposes. Due to that experience, I avoided buying them for myself because I also found them underwhelming overall. It wasn't until 64-bit CPUs that laptops gained my attention. By that point, technology had reached a decent plateau for portable computers with lithium ion batteries and decent back lighting. I've owned two laptops and I still have them both, but one is sitting generally unused now and occasionally serves as a guinea pig for OS experiments.
I had a "Pro-Star" laptop that was one of these OEM laptops. Mine was a bit later...circa PII or III, IIRC. Was a good laptop and lasted quite a long time til the motherboard failed. It weighed just under 10lbs, so it was a beast to lug around. Did some gaming on it and it worked OK for that.
23:54 You would set it for monochrome if you were using it with an LCD overlay for an overhead projector! That would be one of the possible uses for the composite video output 😊
Right! I remember seeing a UA-cam video about a Sharp LCD overlay that was in colour (I think it used a DSTN LCD), but considering the time period, there probably would've been monochrome ones too (that probably also used a DSTN LCD but with white subpixels instead of RGB). Besides that, I had also seen DIY LCD overlays that used modified 15" LCD monitors too, but that only came about in the late 2000s or so.
Yes, my past. I worked for a German Computer Distributor as a technical product manager. I had to test all the new stuff modem ISDN and yes Notebooks. This notebook in Germany was sold by Yakumo. The dealer price of this backbone with CPU 133, 8MB was about 1300.00 German Mark in 1996 without tax. Would be 800 Euro. I agree with your opinion about the housing, we call it yogurt cup because of the thin plastic. But in one year the distributor sold around 15000 units in different configs and we really had no real problems with them. Less then 1% broke while they had warrenty. They were to expesive, so every owner handelt them with care. Nice video, thanks Harro
dont 'twist' the screwdriver when locking/unlocking the cpu on those sockets but bend/lever the screwdriver downwards, so it 'pushes' the cpu, (hold the cpu down as well while doing it) or it may risk breaking the slot off the socket and then you'll never be able to use it again
Sounds like there are more variance of that type of mobile Socket 7 ZIF socket than I was aware of; I’m pretty sure the ones I have seen that require a twist would be broken by side to side levering as you describe.
@@brianellison8744 ones that NEED a twist usually have screw, ones that dont, just leverage have a slot, i have a few of each type , and its not 'side to side' levering but down across the cpu so it pushes it and the movable part of the socket, one slot to lock the cpu, the other side/end to unlock it
I have an old Epson ActionNote laptop from this manufacturer, but much older. It has a Cyrix 486slc 33mhz and overall, I have found that it is the vintage laptop that has less fallen in pieces, that I own. Others are all broken, but this one is still running perfectly fine. We have to remember that these were inexpensive compared to other options. This test doesn't do it justice, as it is clearly a Windows 95 machine. With all the right drivers, it must be about as good as the others from its era were, especially considering the price point.
I remember early CCFL like this, it would take about 20 minutes or so for them to reach full luminosity. And yeah they were really dark but some of those LCDs were slightly reflective so if the sun was really bright you could read text by having the sun shine onto it but the colours were all a bit off, white looked green and dark blue from title bars looked black.
9:30 I remember being a teenager in the 1990s and using old hand-me-down IBM desktops like an XT and a 286... until my parents got a P2-class Celeron desktop in 1998... And the price tags of laptops just made my eyes water. It felt like you could get a desktop PC for about CAD$1,200, but a laptop would set you back about CAD$3,000. You could buy a brand new car the same price as just 3 or 4 laptops. It kinda blew my mind how anybody but absolute VIPs could justify spending that much on a computer knowing that it would be painfully obsolete in just 2 years.
My 1997 Micron XKE (233 MMX) is still running ! It was pricey but got a huge discount on it when they started the transition to Pentium II machines. It has more ports than any computer I've ever owned. Game port, AV out, even a USB 1.0 port! I had no idea Micron's machines were re-badges of generic devices.
It is extremely similar to the Texas Instruments "TravelMate" before Acer's acquisition. I've seen some laptops with a very similar design but in other specs and at other times, with the name of cheap manufacturers, something like "Wallmart brand laptop". Their problem (and the reason you don't find them today) is because they broke the plastic fairing very easily, some had hard hinges, and one day you open it, and everything breaks. Later, during the pentium 3 era, these manufacturers adopted terrible cooling solutions, which caused these laptops to die prematurely, and this lasted until the middle of the core2duo era.
I don't think the sound is faulty, I can almost imagine what the speaker (does it even have stereo? I seem to remember Toshiba or Gateway laptops that only had one and the sound software configuration was even set as mono for internal.) I swear though that speaker has to be one of those round, super thin, black plastic frame voice coil speakers with a clear plastic/cellophane cone, super thin magnet, cone crackles when you push on it even a little, yeah the response range of those you can be sure doesn't cover anything below like 500khz much if at all. I'm super curious about the composition of the gas in the lighting, they also have trace amounts of mercury but I forget why but I can't find much that points to what the shelf life should be, and IIRC it's not uncommon for people to fire up vintage fluorescent tubes (talk about a weird hobby, collecting CCFL lights, people do it.) The inverter / ballast / driver may have bad electrolytic caps but in all of the examples I could find its only like one or 2 that you would actually have to replace. Compile AROS and build the native installer for i386-pc and see if you can get xf86-video-cirrus to build for it, they have libdrm in the source tree for it. Check out the AROS build instructions and start there it is pretty easy.
The display and sound of laptops of that era were just that anemic. You could see the display at full brightness in an office, but you could forget about taking it outside or into a room any brighter than an average cubicle. ...and of course, if you had any ambient noise around you, the sound was impossible to hear.
I agree. That’s why no one had laptops then unless you absolutely had to move around. The trade offs were extreme. High cost. Bad performance and a 30 minute battery use.
@@the_kombinator I assume that has an active matrix display. That was a major improvement for laptops at the time. Passive matrix was so lousy, they probably quit using them completely by '98.
I'm somewhat into old Laptops for about 20 years or so, mainly Toshiba, and in my experience those cheapo STN/DSTN-type Display don't age well. Being not great as they were new they get dimmer and smeary when they get old and sometimes they get those orange "hot pixel islands" you often see on old laptops. Therefore, when I'm looking for a specific model to add to my collection, I always look for the variant with the TFT-Display you could buy as an option back then. Those are mostly in a good condition even after 30 years (my oldest Laptop with an active matrix Display is a Toshiba T3400CT from 1993). But you should also remember which great advancements have been taken place in the last few years and nowadays we're used to see the modern UHD-Monitors with their perfect brightness and high pixel density. On our "1990s eyes" the displays dind't look THAT bad. ;-)
I have the same laptop branded as Portocom, and I have installed AMD K6-2 333, and it could be configured, and working. Though I had to stick a heatsink and fan on that thing and got rid of the factory one.
for most things to work right on a laptop you really need the drivers, i had a laptop of the same era as this the sound was very quiet until the sound driver was installed, but then it was just ok
By the late 90s though the laptops were comparable in performance to a 2-3 year old desktop. I have a Compaq Armada 1750 PII for portable retro gaming and it does that job fantastically - decent speakers, very nice screen, just plug in a PS/2 mouse and you've still got an hour per battery to play Settlers 2 Gold on your flight to the tropics. :D
Reminds me of when I bought a cheap UMAX laptop around 1999 or 2000. I had it for a day and my dad wanted it, so I sold it to him. I remember a distinct plastic smell.
In 1997 my work bought a fully loaded Toshiba Tecra 520CDT for me that cost over $6000. However, unlike lesser machines it was quite the little powerhouse. Like the Compaq Deskpro on my desk it had a Pentium MMX @ 166MHz and performed nearly as well. The only real advantage the desktop had was it's faster HD. I still have that Toshiba and it still runs. The HD has been replaced with a Compact Flash card and it runs Windows 98SE considerably faster than my Lenovo T480 runs Windows 11.
@adriansdigitalbasement2 The backlight of most notebooks of this era (Thinkpad 380, Toshibas etc) were fluorescent light with a micro ballast. So after a while they become very weak, just like common fluorescent lamps. I have a ThinkPad 385 which was pretty bad, I ended up adapting a blacklight led
Back in the day we were excited every time computers got better, because deep down we knew the best ones were not very good yet. But that didn't stop them from being expensive!
All of the old CCD laptops I’ve had did the same thing. They were basically so dim on start up that the screen was unreadable, they got brighter as they warmed up but never really got bright. LED backlit LCDs were a massive improvement.
I think I had one based on that exact model. Couple others. I found a lot of the "white box" ones like this will randomly have interesting features and ports that high end branded ones don't have like the game ports and composite out this one has for example but fall short elsewhere. Being able to swap around some of the hardware and have a bit of control over it is missed too.
I love how your videos always take me on a trip down nostalgia lane. We used to have these very laptops to control the milling machines in our local branches. They had the same logo as our CNC's back then, which we made fun of (because of the outrageously high prices we were charged). And we tried (disappointingly) to play on them when none of the bosses were around.
Well, in the mid 90s, laptops generally did not have very good sound, nor were the screens very bright. Don't forget that the best flat panel screens were plasma.
In early 1993 I was sitting in a EE lecture, when Marc Andreessen sat down in the row behind me with a chunky laptop, and showed off some new program called "Mosaic" to my lab partner. This stood out to me because laptops were not that common at the time, not because I had any clue who we were talking to.
I had a Sanyo suitcase computer in about 1989 it had a 8088 processor with 640 k ram , 20 MB hard drive with a 8 inch colour monitor . That Sucker must have weighed 30 to 40 pounds. I sold it quick for $1200 a year after I had paid $1300 . It played Leisure Suit Larry and was real joy to own. Nostalgia is always better after even a longer time period. Lucky you getting that baby new in the box.
Re: tinny sound. Just a shot in the dark, but it's possible that the audio out has a high-pass filter wired in. This may be to filter out noise from the computer's internals. Switching supplies, power regulators, hard drives, and even just wall AC, are noisy in the audible range at lower frequencies.
I'm going to have to agree with your opinion on this one Adrian. I was SO against buying something like that for $2,000 if you got one with a CPU and hard disk. It was really the growing pains of 'portable' computing. The IBM ThinkPad was probably the best of the best for a PC laptop back in the day. I know there are some older portable 286 and 386 especially (man they were terrible!!) my friend collects, but I really had no interest in those things then OR now! (I have a few that people have given me and I have an OLD Macbook but eh)
What are those LCD status displays are called? It's difficult to search for those because the main screen itself is LCD. When I was a kid, a buddy of mine's father had a laptop around 1996 and it also had a status bar display thingy and I really liked it. That machine was really nostalgic and tried to find one like that but sadly I don't remember much, I don't even know the made. We played Duke Nukem 3D and Mortal Kombat 3 a lot on that machine :) I still remember the weird looking screen and the hum of the vents.
It is still an LCD, and you can have TN LCD panels in cheap monitors/screens. I think you'd have better luck searching for reflective LCD segment displays
“Monochrome reflective LCD” is probably the best… but each layout is often unique, the circuitry can’t tell if it’s lighting up an error icon or a segment in a 7-segment display. They’re all just on/off zones as far as the controller is concerned.
I assume the dim screen is to conserve battery, especially with the battery technology of the time, you'd only need it to be bright enough to see indoors under office like lighting.
I have an old 486 powered Bondwell compuiter, and also an old Toshiba. Both of these are still working, and both are very well built. The Toshiba portable, had an underboard that added all the connections. The most undesirable feature, is the the mouse is a little green button, that is located on the keyboard. Why I have kept them I do not know. I also have four Thinkpads, that were given to me by a friend, but I have not attempted to get any of them running.
Looked up some PC ads from 1996. Here are the specs and price. March 1996 Newspaper Ad for the Portable Power Laptop from Acer 950c Series Pentium 75 8mb RAM 540mb HDD 2x PCMCIA type 2 slots All for the low price of $3200 in 1996 and adjusted to today that's $6187!
We were selling something similar during 98-99 in the shop I was working back then. I vividly remember the one-line LCDs. Some customers actually liked these.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
The great thing about Doom is that it doesn’t even need a sound card. If you’re of a certain age then the soundtrack automatically plays in your head anyway!
My daughter (She is 6.) yells, "DOOM!" every time she hears Master of Puppets! 😂
Duke Nukem soundtrack started playing in my head when you said that. Blasted confused brain!
Damn that’s true !
There are a few I recognize right away. Doom is one, but it doesn't stick in my head. The ones that do are Pitfall II, Bubble Bobble and Popeye. Great, now a mish-mash of those are going to loop in my brain...
Hahahahahaha😂
Hey Adrian! Could you dump that PCMCIA Cardwizard diskette, please? Early versions of that software are not really around, So it can be potentially something useful or rare. Thanks!
And, yes, thank you for a great video, as usual :)
they`re in the comments
I always use the tip of a mechanical pencil without the lead in it to straighten CPU pins. It’s the perfect size and allows for precision tweaking.
Wow... neat tip! 👍
I do that too!!
Works great 😅
Yup! I discovered that oh so long ago out of desperation.
.5, .7, or .9 mm?
@@thedopplereffect00 I'd say 0.5 mm is closest, but I'd wager any of them works fine. Nothing rotates, so as long as you can do leverage and not collide with the neighboring pins, it'll do.
That laptop’s actually got one of the really nice screens from the day. That thing is loaded.
Yeah it's nice for its age - I just find myself automatically reaching for my screen wipes 😀
I LOL'd when Adrian said it wouldn't work outside...I can't remember any laptop/notebook from the 95-97 era that you could use outside...In fact I think I remember screen shades even being not just a thing but a necessity back then, and having to setup your office so you weren't in direct sunlight if you were a notebook user. Laptops sucked back then, but it was what we had and we were happy for them. I am so glad that we have made it to where we are today.
Yep, the passive matrix ones were at least 3 times as bad. I'd not sell those as I worked at Gateway, and it just stood out too much. You would buy a cheaper B-brand with an active matrix one I suppose - possibly this one :) I remember we had one one with passive and the one with active display, and we simply hid the one with passive matrix behind the pillar that held the shelves.
And compare that keyboard with the modern junk that gives almost no feedback... I think back with nostalgia, just because of this
I owned a 90s laptop and had friends who also had similar and I can tell you that is the way they used to sound and look. Tinnie sound and dim blurry screens was absolutely the norm from my experience.
The second I saw the box, I knew exactly what the laptop would look like.
Back when they were new, I worked at a computer store, and like yours, they would come "bare bones" (no CPU, no RAM, no harddisk) and complete them to customer specs. I probably could still install a CPU in one of those while being blindfolded... We had a few corporate customers back then who ordered them in bulk for their employees.
bulk...ugh....i once had to assemble and load 71 identical P5-100 mini towers...still have an occasional nightmare where i'm lost in a maze pushing shopping carts full of computer parts around....
I imagine the corporate IT departments bought such ODM laptops to save money compared to buying stuff like IBM ThinkPad 500 or 700 series, Toshiba Satellite or Satellite Pro 400 series, or Compaq LTE 5000 series.
@@kbhasi that's most companies here in Germany for you. The people in charge have no clue what they are doing and will always decide for the cheapest option.
Just yesterday, I learned that the IT department of my current employer now wants to upgrade our monitors from 22" to 27". For cost reasons, they did not go for monitors capable of displaying 4k tho - they will be full HD like the ones we use now. 🙄
@@Colaholiker
Oh! They were in Germany! Ouch. I was thinking of the US.
27" monitors but 1080p. Ouch, that sounds cheap, like when I attended secondary school in Singapore in 2011. At the time, the MOE had launched the first iteration of SSOE (which used Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Enterprise) and when it rolled out to the school I attended, I noticed that they or the individual school IT departments decided that schools should have 18.5" 1366×768 monitors with their education model ThinkCentres. They were a bit of a pain to run modern software on (because I could only fit 1 app on the screen at a time and the Windows 7 taskbar that I couldn't hide because IT locked out access to Windows settings), but they're great for retro software from before developers made their UI elements huge, especially if they had 4:3 aspect ratio modes to allow them to replace 15" XGA LCD monitors.
I was also reminded of when I had to borrow a monitor from my stepdad when I stayed with him for a while, as it was a BenQ monitor that was a 27" 1080p but I can't remember the model number. To cut a long story short, I returned it to him when my sister bought a used LG L246WHX (which was basically high-end for 2008, if I recall correctly) from an auction at the company she worked for in 2018 and it was an improvement as it has a tolerable pixel density and resolution.
We in high level support (we wore many hats) got to deal with the brand new Toshibas and Thinkpads that were dealt out to the execs and the sales force. I always loved setting up machines for the sales guys, but the execs were usually jerks and high maintenance. But man was it fun to play with a $5000 laptop in the 90s! My first laptop was a used Toshiba Tecra 8000 I got for $500. I used that with Windows 98 up to 2004, then I got a new Thinkpad A31p (Pentium 4). That was just heaven. I used that thing for 8 years. It got replaced by a Thinkpad W520 and I'm still using that one!
Me, 1995 ICT guy, just fresh out of school, i always got the fancy Toshiba models, needing the Pentium and GTX card models.
All $ 10k models, normal Toshiba ThinkPad was only $4 k.
This 'Medion ALDI' Taipei Laptop was only $1k
Why service i cheap laptop in 1996 ?
Trash it please
Any chance you still have the recovery OS for the Toshiba 8000? I'd like to revive mine with Win 98
@@s.guttmann6625 Can you not load W98 off a standard W98 CD, & get any necessary drivers via eg. Driverscape ---> Tecra 8000 using "sneakernet" (USB stick)
One of the things I remember for laptops of that era was that the controls for display, audio and other functions did not always work without having drivers installed. Some laptops of today do that but not as common. I had a Micron version that even had the rolling fingerprint scanner off to the right of the keyboard. The display was always a little on the annemic side for images but they did the job. It was never an expectation to be able to use the laptop outside. I got the experience to use Itronix Laptops since my Dad had worked there. They did better in outside usage and also the keyboards did not melt. They tested for that with their own heating oven with the laptop running and holding the temp at 120F. Then they would switch the temperature all the way down to -15F to do extreme cold testing. Then it was onto the cycling test. That showed bad solder joints nicely. Primary purchasers of these laptops was Military and government services. They did the job and lasted. Cooling of the processor was handled by it being pressed to the magnesium case under the keyboard and the whole case would warm up from it. You could even drown the laptop while running with all service doors closed and it would keep working for the most part. Interconnect board did not like being wet and having high voltage present to run the display.
Yes to the point that the Windows installer had an option to use a floppy disk to install drivers lol!
That carry case is gorgeous. I was 12 or so in the mid-90s and I was absolutely sure that having a laptop with a PCMCIA modem and a leather carrying case was what it meant to be a professional.
lool
My parents had this laptop!!! I've been trying to find another one for years! I think they tossed theirs and I'm really sad about that. I'm glad you found one, it was honestly a great computer from what I remember. That said, yours has the better screen...
You could probably buy one yourself, sounds like the person who sent it to Adrian has more.
Send him an email, maybe he can ask the guy if he has more and can put you in contact with him.
CF Cards usually dont support multi sector transfers if they are not DMA capable
Sounds like the volume is set too low for decent line level output. The keyboard controls usually require a driver for volume as these were expected to mainly run Windows 95.
Nice review! I used to have a Green 759 laptop from the early 2000's. I was excited when I purchased it as It was my first laptop. It too has numerous input / output features. The DVD drive was a bonus (although it was not powerful enough to play DVD movies). Otherwise, the features were one of the reasons I purchased it. To be honest, it was very unreliable. Within a year it began to exhibit problems. It would power off by itself. The vendor I bought it from insisted that it was my fault and refused to repair it even though it was under the warranty period. I ended up selling it on eBay and I still have the photos and auction content.
The cost estimate that I used to give in the '90s was "laptops cost 2.5x what comparable desktops cost, while offering half the screen size. Only buy one if you absolutely need portability."
Dont forget that the backlighting in the early colour LCD screens were flourescent tubes mainly.. They may need to be worked a bit to get them up to full brightness.
Speed isn't automatically set you have to adjust the multipliers in the bios (possibly jumpers depending on design). The screens on most of this generation laptops were not great new.
I have my Dad's old Sharp Laptop that he used for his Matco Tools business, It's design is so similar to that laptop. The hinges where just fine back in the day but they are super stiff now and it even cracked the plastic when I opened it last.
I liked the parade of heatsinks even though it was for naught.
Nostalgic, I did have an even worse one for my job, just need the terminal function, not games.
The backlight is a fluorescent tubes (flexible) and it goes dimmer over use, also it's quiet normal this 199x TFT did not have enough brightness since the backlight did consume lot of power (so they set it even dimmer when power up), except reach the age of ACTIVE TFT it's dim. The ESS chips back then did famous for bad sound due to unknown reason, but it's normal sounds bad. ESS got "quality chips" only after 2010.
I rocked an 486SX33 at my first job which barely ran win95(floppy installed). It was all about serial cables and console.
It's extremely cool that it's NOS, but i'd pass it by, or wouldn't pay much for it.
Being NOS it would make for a dangerous eBay impulse purchase only to be disappointed when you actually get it! The cost cutting of laptops at that time was very high, and as you said they were still stupidly expensive.
Watching you open this brings back so many memories. I was running an ISP/computer repair shop in high school in 96. We got so many of these big honkin' laptops on trade-in from people who wanted a desktop.
My dad had a Micron from this era. He let me borrow it and I installed Slackware on it. It ran great, the screen was nice and the keyboard seemed pretty good. It seemed to be a much higher quality build. He was a school administrator so maybe they had a little money to spend. I loved it.
Brings back memories of the first new laptop I ever ordered for myself, a Sager 820. Had a 166mhz desktop Pentium that cooked my lap to medium rare, and then eventually cooked itself to death.
My 2407WFP-HC has a cathode and that thing takes like 30min to fully warm up, and that thing gets used daily. With it never being used, just like a CRT (if never used) needs to be run for awhile to fully "warm" up. May never reach as fully bright as it could've been, but better than how it is out of the box now.
"New old stock." Music to the ears of a retro enthusiast!
Congratulations on becoming a full time YouTub-er.
I expect that the LCD is perfectly normal for that era. It's unlikely the tubes are bad it's just how the were back then and we're used to modern screens.
You can adjust the gamma of doom in the configuration file. It's always set too low imo.
you are exactly right. they were all like that and CCFL lamps do get brighter as they warm up.
Adrian. The major jump on the notebooks was when in a certain year of the eighties Taiwan made a design of notebooks sponsored by the Government where they design the notebook in a very similar way it is still today. Size and weight. Before that the notebooks were identical to this one. I happened to have ordered a relatively big quantity of Sharp notebooks ( similar in size and weight to this one ) and 2 months later the entire Hannover Fair was full of the taiwanese small size and weight notebooks ... I big loss to my company because the sharp units had been expensive, big and heavy. I was not able to sell them and the only use was in the company for internal use.
This reminded me of my first laptop ever: The Thinkpad 720c. Terrible construction. Hinges were falling apart. Power board used to blow the fuse, and had to keep replacing it. And it was just a slow 486, but oh that Doom goodness, Shareware Doom! Knee Deep in the Dead.
With that gameport on there, this is a sweet retro gaming laptop for someone if they landed one that is NOS. That old CCFL, you're just going to have let it warm up. There probably is a way to get MMX capabilities if you wanted it. An IDT WinChip2 runs at standard 3.5v, no more than 11W TDP (P5-133 non-MMX runs at 11.2W), and almost always worked fine even with Intel BIOSes. I used to use them all the time on Intel Socket 5/7 systems that only ran standard voltage. They were down on raw FP peformance but if you could leverage MMX, they were better.
Those ESS sound chips always worked better installed under Windows in my experience, even in DOS mode. Put Win95 on there and install the driver and you will probably get better results.
I have a Compaq Presario 1247 that I use for things like this, but it's a late 1998 model with better capabilities, can run AMD K6-III+ and take 288 megs of RAM.
I used to have a little museum of this kind of thing along with manyals and drivers. I gave away several rubbermaid tubs of the stuff to a local computer club when i retired. The only thing i miss is the full size 80MB MFM Seagate. You could actually make an IBM AT dance. Oh no, i forgot the old debug sequence for formatting the drive. 😢😢😢.
My first laptop was one of those generic ones that looks a LOT like that one (branded as Ultra, had that LCD panel between the hinges and same place and size for a brand sticker... I bet it's the same company!), a 486SLC-33, in 1995. I was the first (and only throughout my high school career) student at my school to bring a laptop to school for note taking when I was in the 9th grade. That's how I learned to use Excel so I could keep an accurate grade average for each one of my classes each time an assignment was handed back to me. The screen was black and white and I believe passive matrix, but that didn't stop me from playing Doom whenever I had a chance ;) Once 11th grade rolled around and I upgraded to a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, I was able to plug into each classroom's ONE Ethernet jack. I remember buying a RAM upgrade for it during class one day as well as downloading MP3s when they first started becoming popular... 1997-98 I believe. Good times...
Laptops back then were a brand new technology.... things were just getting small enough to really have a laptop in the way we think of them now.... no one really knew what a laptop should be yet either... didn't know that latches, hinges etc needed to be more robust...they were meant to be more word processor and do regular computer things in a pinch type machines still....I'm just amazed that it's in such good condition...I remember most used machines had been "customized" quite a bit, after the movie hackers people were actually spray painting their laptops 😂 to the point that the keys would stick 😂 one laptop I think they should make a serious water resistant and tough case for is the tough books and similar models...they would be absolutely indestructible...not very fast but you could probably beat a bear into submission with it then finish it off with your Nokia cell phone 😂
@@wilfredpayne433 Yes, indeed!
@@wilfredpayne433 The plastic was reasonably robust when new, but not when old, because plastic fatigue is a thing.
There are also cases with latches like that, when people don't always know or have the care to look which way the latch would go.
I think the manual would have contained the correct directions.
Be cool to see some more of the inside, see if recapping can improve the audio and display brightness? I just won an auction for a 486 laptop motherboard for £1 so I was interested in this as I'm not really sure what I'm doing with it yet!
It might be fine just letting it run. You could notice the screen getting brighter and more evenly lit as it was on, but I imagine it was never particularly exceptional brightness. I remember seeing people's laptops back then and they were noticeably dim compared to CRTs. Same with sound. Laptop sound was remarkably bad, but yeah maybe this is exceptionally bad, but it might just be worth letting it play for a while.
I feel like a kid Xmas morning just by watching😊
Laptops (like phones) used to be way more interesting back in the day. Modern ones are more or less from the same mold.
Perhaps, but modern systems are much more end user friendly then the older systems. You saw how much trouble and time it took him to just simply set up the sound. You could rarely use one of these older DOS based laptops right out of the box. The software set ups were much more involved and complicated with autoexec.bat and config.sys issues, IRQ conflicts and constant software compatibility issues even on platforms like Windows 3.0. I honestly don't miss those days at all and am glad PC technology has advanced beyond all that nonsense but, having said that, the issues with Windows 11 feels like the industry is reverting back to the old days. I still have a system that is running Windows 7 because it was such a stable OS and very easy to use. My first system was an Everex Step Intel 386 DX-20 massive tower with 512MB of RAM and an 800MB hard drive. It came with a Zenith 15" flat panel monitor, keyboard and mouse and cost almost $3000.
@@walterlegere1403Don’t agree. Many things today are software dependent upon ‘updates’, then things break! Many items were baked in and mission specific, like phones.
@@Channel567-7 To a point ,you're right but come on, how easy is it to go to Wal-Mart, buy a phone, pop in the SD card, register the number and you're off and running. I purchased a legacy desktop PC from E-Bay, opened the box, hooked up a monitor, keyboard and mouse, plugged it in and it worked flawlessly right out of the box. My main desktop motherboard died. I ordered a used one off E-Bay, installed it and the system booted up and worked like it always did before. See what I'm getting at here?
Laptops before the early 2000's were very special and premium devices. You can see the quality and how much care went into just the packaging and accessories. I absolutely love that laptop bag! If you weren't going to use it with the computer it came with, you could easily use it as a tablet case, etc.
Adrian I would keep that unit. I have found them very useful for making 3.5" Disks in DOS for test and measurement equipment when modern PC's with USB floppy drives won't work for utilities that need direct access for specialized disk copying. Finding a new one is a real find. My other goto retro laptop is a Dell D630 that can have a real 3.5" Floppy drive and has a DB-9 RS-232 and if you have the docking station you can get a true parallel port or use the PCMCIA port to insert a parallel port card for driving things like EPROM programmers. I use it mainly for development/ Bullet proof machines that will run Linux or WinXP thru Win7 or DOS or a VM.
This is just how they were. I had a few laptops in the 90s and they were all dark and slow. But this is still a really nice machine for it's day.
btw one of the function keys might pull the display to full screen. I remember having to do that with most things.
We never had a laptop in the 90's, but the couple I used here and there sucked lol. My childhood computers were a Commodore PC40-III running dos and Windows 3.1. We later on got a HP Pavillion with Windows 98 which I think was a Pentium 2? But my dad always was winning raffles of old computers from his engineering company. We had old IBM's, Epson's, Packard Bell, Hewlett Packard. You name it!
For most of my childhood, we also had a monochrome NEC monitor that was outrageously heavy, but it was a pretty good size. Excellent sharp display.
Your experience with this laptop is the same as mine from that era. Although I never purchased any, I did use laptops of that era for work purposes. Due to that experience, I avoided buying them for myself because I also found them underwhelming overall.
It wasn't until 64-bit CPUs that laptops gained my attention. By that point, technology had reached a decent plateau for portable computers with lithium ion batteries and decent back lighting. I've owned two laptops and I still have them both, but one is sitting generally unused now and occasionally serves as a guinea pig for OS experiments.
I had a "Pro-Star" laptop that was one of these OEM laptops. Mine was a bit later...circa PII or III, IIRC. Was a good laptop and lasted quite a long time til the motherboard failed. It weighed just under 10lbs, so it was a beast to lug around. Did some gaming on it and it worked OK for that.
23:54 You would set it for monochrome if you were using it with an LCD overlay for an overhead projector! That would be one of the possible uses for the composite video output 😊
Right! I remember seeing a UA-cam video about a Sharp LCD overlay that was in colour (I think it used a DSTN LCD), but considering the time period, there probably would've been monochrome ones too (that probably also used a DSTN LCD but with white subpixels instead of RGB). Besides that, I had also seen DIY LCD overlays that used modified 15" LCD monitors too, but that only came about in the late 2000s or so.
Yes, my past. I worked for a German Computer Distributor as a technical product manager. I had to test all the new stuff modem ISDN and yes Notebooks. This notebook in Germany was sold by Yakumo. The dealer price of this backbone with CPU 133, 8MB was about 1300.00 German Mark in 1996 without tax. Would be 800 Euro. I agree with your opinion about the housing, we call it yogurt cup because of the thin plastic. But in one year the distributor sold around 15000 units in different configs and we really had no real problems with them. Less then 1% broke while they had warrenty. They were to expesive, so every owner handelt them with care.
Nice video, thanks Harro
dont 'twist' the screwdriver when locking/unlocking the cpu on those sockets but bend/lever the screwdriver downwards, so it 'pushes' the cpu, (hold the cpu down as well while doing it) or it may risk breaking the slot off the socket and then you'll never be able to use it again
Sounds like there are more variance of that type of mobile Socket 7 ZIF socket than I was aware of; I’m pretty sure the ones I have seen that require a twist would be broken by side to side levering as you describe.
@@brianellison8744 ones that NEED a twist usually have screw, ones that dont, just leverage have a slot, i have a few of each type , and its not 'side to side' levering but down across the cpu so it pushes it and the movable part of the socket, one slot to lock the cpu, the other side/end to unlock it
I have an old Epson ActionNote laptop from this manufacturer, but much older. It has a Cyrix 486slc 33mhz and overall, I have found that it is the vintage laptop that has less fallen in pieces, that I own. Others are all broken, but this one is still running perfectly fine. We have to remember that these were inexpensive compared to other options. This test doesn't do it justice, as it is clearly a Windows 95 machine. With all the right drivers, it must be about as good as the others from its era were, especially considering the price point.
I think a full recap would really do wonders for this guy, probably not very practical though
My 1st, was a Radio Shack model 100, used it for field work in Dairy records testing.
i use these videos to show my child what walking to school uphill in the snow both ways was like...
I remember early CCFL like this, it would take about 20 minutes or so for them to reach full luminosity. And yeah they were really dark but some of those LCDs were slightly reflective so if the sun was really bright you could read text by having the sun shine onto it but the colours were all a bit off, white looked green and dark blue from title bars looked black.
9:30 I remember being a teenager in the 1990s and using old hand-me-down IBM desktops like an XT and a 286... until my parents got a P2-class Celeron desktop in 1998... And the price tags of laptops just made my eyes water. It felt like you could get a desktop PC for about CAD$1,200, but a laptop would set you back about CAD$3,000. You could buy a brand new car the same price as just 3 or 4 laptops. It kinda blew my mind how anybody but absolute VIPs could justify spending that much on a computer knowing that it would be painfully obsolete in just 2 years.
My 1997 Micron XKE (233 MMX) is still running ! It was pricey but got a huge discount on it when they started the transition to Pentium II machines. It has more ports than any computer I've ever owned. Game port, AV out, even a USB 1.0 port! I had no idea Micron's machines were re-badges of generic devices.
It is extremely similar to the Texas Instruments "TravelMate" before Acer's acquisition. I've seen some laptops with a very similar design but in other specs and at other times, with the name of cheap manufacturers, something like "Wallmart brand laptop". Their problem (and the reason you don't find them today) is because they broke the plastic fairing very easily, some had hard hinges, and one day you open it, and everything breaks. Later, during the pentium 3 era, these manufacturers adopted terrible cooling solutions, which caused these laptops to die prematurely, and this lasted until the middle of the core2duo era.
I grew up in the 90's so I have a soft spot for 90's desktops / laptops.
I don't think the sound is faulty, I can almost imagine what the speaker (does it even have stereo? I seem to remember Toshiba or Gateway laptops that only had one and the sound software configuration was even set as mono for internal.) I swear though that speaker has to be one of those round, super thin, black plastic frame voice coil speakers with a clear plastic/cellophane cone, super thin magnet, cone crackles when you push on it even a little, yeah the response range of those you can be sure doesn't cover anything below like 500khz much if at all. I'm super curious about the composition of the gas in the lighting, they also have trace amounts of mercury but I forget why but I can't find much that points to what the shelf life should be, and IIRC it's not uncommon for people to fire up vintage fluorescent tubes (talk about a weird hobby, collecting CCFL lights, people do it.) The inverter / ballast / driver may have bad electrolytic caps but in all of the examples I could find its only like one or 2 that you would actually have to replace. Compile AROS and build the native installer for i386-pc and see if you can get xf86-video-cirrus to build for it, they have libdrm in the source tree for it. Check out the AROS build instructions and start there it is pretty easy.
HaikuOS would probably also be interesting but if you're more of an Amiga fan you'd probably really like AROS given how easy it is to build / modify
I've have that style of CMOS battery pack leak and destroy a laptop, definitely should replace those.
The display and sound of laptops of that era were just that anemic. You could see the display at full brightness in an office, but you could forget about taking it outside or into a room any brighter than an average cubicle. ...and of course, if you had any ambient noise around you, the sound was impossible to hear.
I agree. That’s why no one had laptops then unless you absolutely had to move around. The trade offs were extreme. High cost. Bad performance and a 30 minute battery use.
My Armada from 1998 is perfect for portable retro gaming - plenty of backlight, plenty of sound, and even enough battery power for 2 hrs.
@@the_kombinator I assume that has an active matrix display. That was a major improvement for laptops at the time. Passive matrix was so lousy, they probably quit using them completely by '98.
@@cpm1003 It is. I also have a Compaq 4/25 with a backlit mono VGA TFT. It's actually usable though, you CAN Doom on it.
yes I can testify that pirateship is a great shipping option
The screen and sound issues scream caps IMO, would love to see another video looking into this.
I'm somewhat into old Laptops for about 20 years or so, mainly Toshiba, and in my experience those cheapo STN/DSTN-type Display don't age well. Being not great as they were new they get dimmer and smeary when they get old and sometimes they get those orange "hot pixel islands" you often see on old laptops. Therefore, when I'm looking for a specific model to add to my collection, I always look for the variant with the TFT-Display you could buy as an option back then. Those are mostly in a good condition even after 30 years (my oldest Laptop with an active matrix Display is a Toshiba T3400CT from 1993). But you should also remember which great advancements have been taken place in the last few years and nowadays we're used to see the modern UHD-Monitors with their perfect brightness and high pixel density. On our "1990s eyes" the displays dind't look THAT bad. ;-)
I have the same laptop branded as Portocom, and I have installed AMD K6-2 333, and it could be configured, and working. Though I had to stick a heatsink and fan on that thing and got rid of the factory one.
for most things to work right on a laptop you really need the drivers, i had a laptop of the same era as this the sound was very quiet until the sound driver was installed, but then it was just ok
By the late 90s though the laptops were comparable in performance to a 2-3 year old desktop. I have a Compaq Armada 1750 PII for portable retro gaming and it does that job fantastically - decent speakers, very nice screen, just plug in a PS/2 mouse and you've still got an hour per battery to play Settlers 2 Gold on your flight to the tropics. :D
Thanks a lot for your always enjoyable videos 👍 All the best, Per (DK)
Used to buy the "Green" computers from FOSA computer back during this time.
Reminds me of when I bought a cheap UMAX laptop around 1999 or 2000. I had it for a day and my dad wanted it, so I sold it to him. I remember a distinct plastic smell.
It's possible the latch plastic shrunk over time and cracked ?
Thanks, Adrian! I'm wondering, maybe shooting on your Pixel is gonna be better?
OMG!!! When you found the heat sink on the tin plate AFTER you stuck one on with the tape..... I fell off my couch laughing!!!
In 1997 my work bought a fully loaded Toshiba Tecra 520CDT for me that cost over $6000. However, unlike lesser machines it was quite the little powerhouse. Like the Compaq Deskpro on my desk it had a Pentium MMX @ 166MHz and performed nearly as well. The only real advantage the desktop had was it's faster HD. I still have that Toshiba and it still runs. The HD has been replaced with a Compact Flash card and it runs Windows 98SE considerably faster than my Lenovo T480 runs Windows 11.
omg it includes a carrying case that mustve been well expensive, its unheard of to have a carrying case included.
Looking forward to a Linux video for this lil notebook :)
At my first job in 1999 we had an ancient "portable" 286 that was mainly only used for running one program.
echo ^G still works to get a beep/sound, even in Windows 10, prob. 11. 😁
Maaaan, I wanna hug that laptop! it looks adorable!
@adriansdigitalbasement2 The backlight of most notebooks of this era (Thinkpad 380, Toshibas etc) were fluorescent light with a micro ballast. So after a while they become very weak, just like common fluorescent lamps.
I have a ThinkPad 385 which was pretty bad, I ended up adapting a blacklight led
I can relate, as I have a ThinkPad R52 that had the issue, and the backlight was yellowing, but it eventually stopped working entirely.
Back in the day we were excited every time computers got better, because deep down we knew the best ones were not very good yet. But that didn't stop them from being expensive!
I love how the holding foam hasn't changed. The shape is still used on a PS2 and PS4 console.
It's Polyethylene.
Still used today. Will last forever.
Made from "shopping bag plastic" LDPE 4
All of the old CCD laptops I’ve had did the same thing. They were basically so dim on start up that the screen was unreadable, they got brighter as they warmed up but never really got bright. LED backlit LCDs were a massive improvement.
Just wanted to say I spent the last few weeks binge watching all your videos, thanks!
I think I had one based on that exact model. Couple others. I found a lot of the "white box" ones like this will randomly have interesting features and ports that high end branded ones don't have like the game ports and composite out this one has for example but fall short elsewhere. Being able to swap around some of the hardware and have a bit of control over it is missed too.
Having been stored for 27 years and still looking so new, it's really something.
I love how your videos always take me on a trip down nostalgia lane.
We used to have these very laptops to control the milling machines in our local branches.
They had the same logo as our CNC's back then, which we made fun of (because of the outrageously high prices we were charged).
And we tried (disappointingly) to play on them when none of the bosses were around.
Well, in the mid 90s, laptops generally did not have very good sound, nor were the screens very bright. Don't forget that the best flat panel screens were plasma.
Love how it came With a carrying case, that's extra today
In early 1993 I was sitting in a EE lecture, when Marc Andreessen sat down in the row behind me with a chunky laptop, and showed off some new program called "Mosaic" to my lab partner. This stood out to me because laptops were not that common at the time, not because I had any clue who we were talking to.
I think the image go all to the edge of the screen to meet the gray bezel of the laptop?
I had a Sanyo suitcase computer in about 1989 it had a 8088 processor with 640 k ram , 20 MB hard drive with a 8 inch colour monitor . That Sucker must have weighed 30 to 40 pounds. I sold it quick for $1200 a year after I had paid $1300 . It played Leisure Suit Larry and was real joy to own. Nostalgia is always better after even a longer time period.
Lucky you getting that baby new in the box.
Re: tinny sound. Just a shot in the dark, but it's possible that the audio out has a high-pass filter wired in. This may be to filter out noise from the computer's internals. Switching supplies, power regulators, hard drives, and even just wall AC, are noisy in the audible range at lower frequencies.
Really like the two-tone grey keys. Why are grey keys so rare now?
I'm going to have to agree with your opinion on this one Adrian. I was SO against buying something like that for $2,000 if you got one with a CPU and hard disk. It was really the growing pains of 'portable' computing. The IBM ThinkPad was probably the best of the best for a PC laptop back in the day. I know there are some older portable 286 and 386 especially (man they were terrible!!) my friend collects, but I really had no interest in those things then OR now! (I have a few that people have given me and I have an OLD Macbook but eh)
What are those LCD status displays are called? It's difficult to search for those because the main screen itself is LCD. When I was a kid, a buddy of mine's father had a laptop around 1996 and it also had a status bar display thingy and I really liked it. That machine was really nostalgic and tried to find one like that but sadly I don't remember much, I don't even know the made. We played Duke Nukem 3D and Mortal Kombat 3 a lot on that machine :) I still remember the weird looking screen and the hum of the vents.
Do you mean TN (twisted nematic) Display Technology?
Very dependent on viewing angle... :(
@@Bergi2000 Ohh, maybe that's where I was wrong, I called it an LCD. TN it is, thanks!
It is still an LCD, and you can have TN LCD panels in cheap monitors/screens. I think you'd have better luck searching for reflective LCD segment displays
I love laptops with those status displays.
They were only a thing for a short period.
“Monochrome reflective LCD” is probably the best… but each layout is often unique, the circuitry can’t tell if it’s lighting up an error icon or a segment in a 7-segment display. They’re all just on/off zones as far as the controller is concerned.
I wonder if those speakers have foam rot. I've come across that on several old computers including the original CRT iMacs.
I assume the dim screen is to conserve battery, especially with the battery technology of the time, you'd only need it to be bright enough to see indoors under office like lighting.
I have an old 486 powered Bondwell compuiter, and also an old Toshiba. Both of these are still working, and both are very well built. The Toshiba portable, had an underboard that added all the connections. The most undesirable feature, is the the mouse is a little green button, that is located on the keyboard. Why I have kept them I do not know.
I also have four Thinkpads, that were given to me by a friend, but I have not attempted to get any of them running.
You're absolutely right about laptops of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
That's super cool. I love the mid to late 90's laptops. They were so unique in many ways.
I've got a few Toshiba Satellite & Compaq Laptops from that Era. I wonder if they are falling apart as bad as that one?
i have 4 mid 90s toshs and theyre ok apart from you need to check/remove any cmos/hibernate nicads in case they leak, if not already done so
Looked up some PC ads from 1996. Here are the specs and price.
March 1996 Newspaper Ad for the Portable Power Laptop from Acer 950c Series
Pentium 75
8mb RAM
540mb HDD
2x PCMCIA type 2 slots
All for the low price of $3200 in 1996 and adjusted to today that's $6187!
We were selling something similar during 98-99 in the shop I was working back then. I vividly remember the one-line LCDs. Some customers actually liked these.
Love this episode.