This Strange Retro Laptop Isn't What It Seems
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- Consumer demand for laptops was growing dramatically in the late 90s, but some were becoming tired of lugging around a large, heavy computer. In 1998 Microsoft hatched a plan to help drive inexpensive, lightweight notebooks -- and Sharp delivered quite a unique model.
Sources:
"Jupiter enters PC orbit," InfoWorld, January 12, 1998.
HP 360LX photo: www.cnvintage....
Sharp HC-4600 photo: www.flickr.com...
NEC palmtop photo: en.wikipedia.o...
Vadem Clio photo: collection.coo...
"Sharp Mobilon TriPad and Vadem Clio," PC Magazine, December 1, 1998.
"Vadem Clio," Maximum PC, March 1999.
"Three Looks, One Notebook," Popular Science, January 1999.
"Lag in apps holds back sexy Clio," InfoWorld, November 9, 1998.
"IBM's Winning Jupiter H/PC," PC Magazine, June 8, 1999.
IBM WorkPad Z50 photos: www.sohu.com/a...
"Smaller Isn't Better for Some Handheld Users," Computerworld, August 2, 1999.
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A product ahead of its time by about 14 - 16 years
Yep, all the caveats and price but none of the significant advantages.
These were squarely for business and you could tell simply by the price. One of the many times I'm glad I was priced out.
@@JohnDoe-wq5eu All the caveats and price too ... the 1 Microsoft Way! 🌈
Superior Japanese tech, just like today
@@allentoyokawa9068 I dunno, man, the Taiwanese stuff is pretty good too, and the Americans are killing it with processors and GPUs. Any country with a big tech space can have good tech.
@@christophernugent8492 nah man Japan just built different.
sony and the walkman revolutionising music, revolutionary ibm thinkpad and sony vaio designed in japan,
nintendo and innovating the game console/controller,
etc etc
America saw the threat and had a lil "jap scare" in the 80s-90s and fucked up Japanese tech space and made these companies today a shell of what they were back then, now they're trying to do the same to China and Taiwan too. pussycat mfs who terrorize when their hegemony is threatened.
Your videos are consistently super entertaining, thank you
Well, it does look like a surface and heck it runs windows afterall !!
Former Windows CE developer here - on an ARM chip. It was a dog, could address very limited RAM and storage, but in some ways CE was a remarkable OS. The developer tools allowed you to literally “roll your own” version of the OS by checking some boxes and choosing options from drop-downs so you could pick and choose exactly the features you wanted, to help you slim down the OS to the storage and RAM footprint you were stuck with. Ugly, slow, but still for embedded systems it was good at the time, and always better than Java, which never really materialized as a consumer ready platform despite decades of hype.
Literally Minecraft is the only reason Java still exists
These Windows CE devices were actually very useful back in the day - the were instant on, the battery lasted for several hours and were great for taking notes, drafting documents, etc. I got a used NEC MobilePro 780 and later MobilePro 900 for taking notes in class and it was much more convenient than lugging a heavy laptop and much less expensive. I got a PCMCIA card with wifi and was able to get files on and off fairly easily.
I had a MobilePro 800 for the same reason in the early 2000s
@@retrospacenet ...if you can write shorthand, or cursive
though everybody is different, so I shouldn't really be saying anything right now. uhh...ignore this please!
@@retrospacenet i used tablets when i was studying in university, don’t have to bring a ton of notes and heavy book is already a big win for me.
@@retrospacenet Your point is well taken and in general handwriting notes is better for retention. But there is a significant population of learners who have various disabilities that prevent paper notes, so using a lightweight device is helpful and in the 90s and early 00s Windows CE devices were an inexpensive option for these folks (now iPads, ultrabooks).
In modern times I specifically bought a windows tablet for my in class needs. No need for it to be powerful when I have a gaming computer at home. Just don't get the ones with only 2GB ram that struggle to run office.
The Jupiter project was a fail back then, but it did come eventually. We have devices now like the Surface laptops, iPads, Galaxy Tab tablets, and Chromebooks. So, we did get it as a regular line of devices, but not as soon as Microsoft was really hoping for.
I'd forgotten just how clean those PC magazines looked. The perfect amount of whitespace. I never read them these days. But back in the 90s, I was always had a pile of them on my desk.
This design was used by the Dell XPS 12 too. Sadly most of the screens had their glue melting including mine, so there are only a few fully working ones left.
I got some brandless laptop with Windows CE on it for my birthday once, but I couldn't tell my parents that it wasn't a real computer or even remotely usable because it was a gift (I mean the 'manual' says not to block the fan on the bottom of the unit. There is no fan)... It had no transient storage (and no backup battery to keep the ramdisk!), and booted off the read only rom every boot. And being before tech was generally allowed in school, I couldn't even use it for its notepad. Getting a CE netbook in the late 2000's was like getting a laptop in 2015 or so only to find out it runs Windows RT: Basically no software for it... At that point, it was only prey for malicious sellers to make a quick buck on people that don't know about these deep shortcomings.
I think I know exactly what you're talking about, VWestlife did a video on it back in the day. At a time when the cheapest "real" netbooks you could get were ~$300, I thought it was pretty impressive that they could produce a laptop so cheap they could sell it for under $100 retail while still being somewhat useful at the time of release
That's terrible. I'm already seeing more like this with under powered laptops from relatively unknown companies selling because they look nice but with only 2GB of Ram and sometimes only 32GB of soldered onto eMMC memory they will find out the hard way sooner or later.
I feel your pain. My mom bought me a Surface RT. It's barely usable, many apps are missing, and the office are buggy.
@@42_comes_after_the_joke Lol, don't feel too bad, Office 2013 was a buggy mess on regular Windows too
Wow that looks so small and compact, I'm surprised they managed to make something like that back then. I honestly wouldn't be opposed to owning something like that nowadays for art or note taking.
There is something available today. It's called the iPad.
@@motomike71 surface laptop studio
They are terrible. I had several CE devices back in the day. Windows CE managed to combined all that was bad from each and combine them into one awful product.
Despite being very expensive, they were built to the penny. They were all poorly built. There are probably far fewer of them left in the world working even as a percentage of their low numbers. Somewhere in my old box-o-tech I just cannot bear to throw away is a 1000 Dollar Sharp Color PDA (the one shown in this video) that just way back int he early 2000s. I have another one, a black and white one, where the keys have worn out because they are so cheap.
@@tarstarkusz
Not to mention the fact they're basically unrepairable. Any part of it breaks and you're pretty much SOL.
With modern tablet capabilities and room at the back of the keyboard for parts for storage or higher specs, I've love to have one of these today. I realize there are 'convertible' tablets that are laptop-like, and keyboards to add to just-tablets, but this is still a very good design and I miss when computer companies paid attention to the "some people just like smaller options" market, and made common things cool just because they could.
Wow that thing is the Microsoft surface of its time. Im surprised how thin it is considering it is from 1998
Definitely a precursor to the Toughbook.
I had an IBM Z50 back in the day. They went on clearance at CompUSA really cheap and I got one. I think maybe $200. It worked well enough to type up notes in college and do basic word processing for reports. The build quality and battery life was great but the performance wasn't worth the original MSRP. Also, I once gave a powerpoint presentation using it for a college class I had. The video output barely worked with the projector. The professor would have given me an F if it didn't work (luckily it did) as she said "if this was in the business world and your equipment failed, you'd lose the job".
I hate professors like that, because if you were in the business world, then you wouldn’t be penny pinching on a college student budget and would have decent equipment
@@mrb692 i also doubt you would lose your job if your laptop died/minor equipment failure.
@@mrb692 Same. So Bill Gates can have a fuckin' operating system crash when introducing the damn thing to the whole freakin' world but YOU deserve to lose your job because of a minor failure when doing a PowerPoint presentation, huh? And given how nit picky wrt hardware these projectors can be, one has to wonder what kind of bosses these professors would be.
@@Reverend_Salem yeah nobody really cares that much, they'd just hand you another laptop and move on
Microsoft in 2021: Introducing a brand new innovative design; meet the Surface Laptop Studio!
Sharp PV-6000 from the 1998: You forgot me. Rude! :(
Found this channel yesterday. Fell in love and haven’t stopped watching it since.
Thanks for bringing this obscure tech to light bro!
I'd love to see a video on that z50. The keyboard looks legit and it looks far more usable overall. I'd also love to see your take on the more contemporary (read: new) Planet Computers Astro Slide if you can get your hands on one (seems they're only out in Japan so far).
I loved my Vadem Clio. Had a Xircom wireless card in mine, felt like the future. We're so spoiled by tablets with wifi built in now, but I would buy something of this exact form factor immediately if it came back.
Right? I thought seriously about spending the time to model the case in CAD to 3D print. That way I could have the form factor with more modern guts, especially the screen. If only I had another 12 hours in each day ...
@@JoeSteele the iPad Pro magic keyboard case gets _close_ all these years later, but still isn’t quite there. No presentation/media consumption orientation for example. Wish someone would make a keyboard case with the Clio arms.
@@chronoso microsoft surface studio or that one vaio laptop 10 years ago
I'm still always having to remind myself just how far we've come in these last two decades. When I graduated back in 99 the world was a very, very different place.
The idea that computers were coming out that didn't even have 56k modems at that time blows my mind still.
I had a techie for a parent, and I grew up with devices like this, and Palm Pilots, at the very very tail end/past the point of which they actually died. Gotta say, It definitely makes me have an appreciation for the level of sophistication we have in our portables now. I remembering being like, 7, and reading book after book on my hand me down Palm 7 and playing random bit games like Rogue on our Clio.
Didn't the Sega Dreamcast have Windows CE built-in as well? If so, would that count as a Jupiter device?
What would be funny is if the Sega Saturn had Windows CE and was a Jupiter device. It'd be both a Saturn and Jupiter!
The Dreamcast had Windows CE. Iirc the logo was on the console. I don't remember an association with the word "Jupiter" tho.
The Dreamcast is capable to boot Windows CE from GD-ROM but the OS isn't directly embedded in the console itself as far as i know
The Vadem Clio was on the top of my wishlist all through the early 2000s. Had to make do with a Jornada 720 in the end.
I used to love these devices, but I definitely agree about the software shortfalls and the sketchy touchscreen. I have a Sharp Tri-pad and a Vadem Clio and I found them very capable for text work. I liked the keyboard especially compared to most of what was available in the form factor. I had a 4GB CF card inside and a Wifi card in the PCCard slot, so connectivity and storage were never issues for me. But the killer was Microsoft just not updating the OS much. I eventually managed to get NetBSD running on it and that was fun but not super practical since the device support was _very_ limited.
I loved my CE device. It was one of the folding 'palmtop' types, but man could I type up a storm on that tiny chicklet keyboard. Got me through two years of college when laptops were still expensive and bulky.
Me too.
I've had three versions of this. The Sharp Tripad, then the Vadem Clio (both hardware versions). Still have the latest Vadem Clio with me, fun to use as a text editor on the go. Have rebuilt the batteries so I have more than enough power for a day with the four batteries I got. Thanks for the vid, always fun seeing these "Handheld PC Pro's" being reviewed.
Around 2005 they were selling windows CE "laptops" for like a hundred bucks. I bought one to read on the bus as I was taking the bus to work at the time and it was an hour long trip. Even as a reader they sucked,
Windows CE married all the disadvantages of a laptop and of a PDA, rather than marrying the good parts.
Probably the single best selling windows CE device ever made was the Sega Dreamcast.
Hello, I recently bought an Vadem Clio C-1050 with a dead battery, can you give me some hints to rebuilt the battery please? Thanks.
-touch screen/kickstand
-tablet mode
-almost no io
-gimped version of windows
its a fucking surface
Damn your pfp just sent me on a total time trip. I can't remember the last time I've seen milk Chan.
I found a Vadem Clio in a free box on the street in 2017. It's pretty fun intentionally writing sloppily with the pen to see the computer misinterpret the letters, resulting in some humorous gibberish.
But does it play Doom?
Those really annoying Coke Freestyle machines still run Jupiter. It is faster to drill a well than pick your flavor. The coke machines had USB ports at least, and 10/100.
Oh man, I think they also have Sharp displays, why did that company even try to venture in to color graphics at all?
Okay that explains a lot but it also blows my mind. Old tech never dies it simply gets put into self serve drink machines.
I was fortunate enough to have owned several Sharp Mobilons including the TriPad, it was really special and way ahead of its time. The compact size, lightness, large keyboard, MS Office compatibility, solid state memory, stylus and a battery that seemed to never run out, made me the envy of all of my college classmates and the businesspeople who spent thousands for big bulky laptops of that time. The TriPad is what I used to shred through my college assignments at book stores, coffee shops, and libraries. People would always ask me about it and assumed that I had paid some ridiculous amount for it. I bought my TrPad used from Ebay in 2000 for only $200. This was one of the best productivity devices I've ever purchased. I'd like to see an updated version of this or the Surface Neo.
Windows CE was an attempt to fuse the best of both PDAs and laptops. Instead, Windows CE fused the worst of both worlds and came up with something somewhat worse than either one.
Not a fan hey? lol
so i saw this at my local free geek up here in north west arkansas in the back. about a hour later it was gone. did u somehow buy it? or is the timing just right?
“Can we have Microsoft Surface Studio?”
“No, we have Microsoft Surface Studio at home.”
Microsoft Surface Studio at home:
its basically an ipad pro with a magic keyboard
Reminds me of the Dell Inspiron Duo or Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio. I owned the duo myself.
It looks very forward thinking. It's basically the 90's version of a Microsoft Surface Pro.
Who the hell would buy a $1000 mini laptop/pda thing, as I watch this on a once $1200 cell phone
"A revolution that never came." Perhaps in that time. But if you consider the Macbook Air or the iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard and it's the same concept, just with significantly more power, storage, and connectivity capabilities. It's like Apple saw these devices and said, "Hold my beer." The real killer app that these devices needed was wifi and cloud storage.
Cloud storage: does it come with memories of Zach Fair and a Buster Sword 🤣
I wanted that so bad! Ah, dammit I still do!
Edit: MIPS though... 🥺
The Psion machines were so much better in every way than Windows CE.
holy heck, the 1990s were an extremely forward yet optimistic preview of the late 2000s.
And all for the equivalent of $1800 in 2022 dollars.
Yeah I'm not sure what the market was the time but it sure wasn't me.
Apparently for every businessman with more expendable income than brains.
I didn't realize these were ever made for use as stand alone laptops. I used one of these in the early 2000s for sales, but we just used it with company software running on top of Windows CE. They were good and rugged, but I can't imagine using CE for a daily laptop would be very useful.
There was a Sylvania laptop that ran Windows CE that VWestlife did a review of sorts a long time ago
I used one of these all through college. Loved it.
Me Too.
@@elturner7241 Good times. Miss those days sometimes.
I have two of these and use them for writing because there is no distraction at all. I like the keyboard 😇
I had a Clio that I bought from a garage sale. It had never been used. I rather liked it. I had a serial to usb connector, so I was able to connect to my pc. And I think I had a pc wireless card at one point,or at least an Ethernet card.
Ahead of its time!
This is like an iPad Pro good feature set incredible performance and convent but hindered by the software. Also that hinge design looks like the magic keyboard accessory for the iPad too
Me seeing the thumbnail: Surface Studio?!?!
This kind of design came back a few years ago only to disappear again
This laptop reminds me of Acer Conceptd 9
You don't need to use metric, those people can use google
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Netbooks before netbooks...
What an aesthetic.
Ah yes. The Windows CE - ME - NT era.
Back when old laptop are weird look than the new one
Sony and Dell ended up doing a similar flipping display convertibles with the Vaio Flip series and the XPS 12 9950 respectively. Both laptops came with a full Windows 8 and are really great to work with. The Vaio Flip is a joy to use with Windows 10 except for the very annoying fan.
Windows CE = Windows Crap Edition.
Oh my god, I want this so bad. It looks so rad!
Wow, certainly didn't think that 2-in-1 design was that old. Thought those first came out in 2012 with Windows 8!
Look up Microsoft Tablet PC, a 2001 idea from Microsoft. But in Microsoft there's different product managers and the guy in charge of Office hated the idea of tablet computers and refused to support it in Office. Microsoft could have also introduced the first eBook reader, but Bill Gates didn't like the GUI on it, he said it should use the Windows interface and so that never appeared.
@@6581punk Cool, basically a proto-Surface tablet. Also reminded me there were Windows XP convertibles, like the kind that spun around at the hinge. Still, I thought this particular style of convertible hinge had to be newer.
Vadem were a big player in the portable pc market during the 80s. They designed portables and roms for companies like Sharp, Osbourne and others. I found them while looking into the Sharp PC-7100 which had some innovative “setup” rom on an xt portable made by Vadem.
This is what Folio would look like if Palm hasn’t chicken because bad reviews of an unlaunch laptop…
Technology has come so far, now my main computer that I do all my programming, CAD, some video editing, etc on is a 2 in 1 tablet
the sub 1.5kg Lenovo Ideapad I got a month ago blows my 15+ kg Dell Precision T3600 from 2013 out of the water, with 3x the CPU performance (Ryzen 5 5500U, 6c12t@4ghz vs Xeon E5-1620 0 ) and 2 times the GPU (radeon vega 8 vs quadro 2000) . Ram is same at 16 gigs and its 512gb SSD instead of 1TB HDD
IBM had the Workpad z50 to compete in this space. It was clear from day one that what users wanted was not a cheap alternative to laptops, they wanted cheaper laptops.
Was awesome hardware for it's time. I had a Jornada 820. The problem was CE, which was worse even than Pocket PC. The office doc syncing was terrible, and the office apps were purposely crippled. Apps had to be created for each device individually by developers, an app for a Jornada CE wouldn't run on a Vadem CE device. I suspected that MS purposely disabled CE so that it wouldn't compete with notebooks with Win OS, which they certainly could have technically.
So, Jupiter devices essentially were the iPad Pro. Serving the exact same market segment as the iPad Pro does now. This machine even looks and feels a LOT like the iPad Pro with the Smart Folio Keyboard and Apple Pencil. Heck. It’s even CALLED a “TriPad”.
Did not know that MIPS CPU's were used in this era of mobile Windows CE devices, pretty cool!
The R4000 was a pretty old design though, that's a 1993 CPU which saw heavy use most notably by SGI in their workstations.
Yeah, Windows CE didn't exactly get stellar reviews back then. I did like the HP Jornada palmtops that looked like little laptops. I thought about buying one at the time.
OMG!!! Why Microsoft can't release some good things like this anymore :(
I like that hinge, and Apple copy that first with their ipad magic keyboard....
I had a Dell Inspiron Duo about 12 years ago that had the same form factor. Still really novel for the time. It had a speaker dock too. It ran proper Windows not that CE garbage. You want to know why people permanently hate anything Microsoft mobile, it was Windows CE/Pocket that established that reputation. Just like Internet Explorer. Doesn't matter how "good" it gets, people remember.
This jogged some weird memory - this and the Cleo weren’t the device I am thinking of, but wasn’t there another PDA-but-also-laptop product that was heavily featured on Oprah? I can’t say I ever watched the show but I swear they promoted some pre-Internet device so heavily that it became SNL/Meme material…
After watching this, i remember modern computer called Lenovo Yoga A940, it has touchscreen and it's suprisingly weird too
Windows CE = iPadOS
How do you make a ten minute long video demonstrating a Windows CE device and NOT use it to play NetHack!? But seriously though; great video. I remember getting a Dell PDA running Win CE or Windows Mobile back in the day because it was the only reasonable way to play NES roms on the go at the time.
Interesting that it was using a MIPS4000 series CPU... Like the N64! Although this one is apparently a NEC VR4111 while the N64 had a variant of the VR4200, the VR4300i. I wonder which CPU was more capable between a VR4111 clocked 84MHz and the VR4300i clocked at 93.75MHz. Apparently it is said that the upgraded version of the VR4111, the VR4121 clocked at 131MHz is capable of 174 MIPS, while the VR4300i would be capable of 125MIPS. So I guess the slower VR4111 would be in the ballpark of 110MIPS (can't find any source on the 4111), making it somewhat comparable, although capable of running with much less power.
HI, back in ?? early 2000's we had 2 pc's in the house, one of the engineers at work bought a cheap CE device similar to the "Sylvania models sold later on
This was approx $130-$150 AU or say $ 100USD at the time, i borrowed it for overnight and the kids liked it, so i bought one, then with 2 kids i bought another one a few weeks later.
It ran youtube at the time and yahoo mail, as well as the cut down office, battery life was not great but from memory at least 1 hour running videos , possibly 2 on the desktop only or just using word
About 6 months later i received a email from the ebay seller with link to images and update patch plus some linux or android images - and a offer to buy one at 50% of - which i did
I still have all 3 today in the cupboard, one has a cracked screen from storage, the other 2 work when plugged in, at this stage they are almost useless, but it reminds me to add some flash games and given then to pre school kids - i may try having them move over to say dos 6.22 or similar
While CE is not technologically anything great, it did run on minimum hardware and low memory and done its job, the growth of handheld and small profile palmtops / laptops ipads are as a result of a small and light format
Regards
George
That screen is awful. The 90s were such a dark time.
Yeah looking back especially it really was. We really did a lot with a little back then the fact we got some of the great stuff we did is miraculous.
Still I have to admit I prefer today's tech 100%.
That IR Transceiver used a IR LASER and there might be a warning saying not to look at the IR Transceiver port when switched on or you might lose your eyesight permanently.
I had stuffed away Windows CE in a dusty pocket of my memory. Such a terrible system. I didn't have this device but others of the time, and many handhelds that used it in Japan where I lived from 2000 to 2003.
Interesting... I never heard of these devices. Feels a bit like the netbook of the 90s, with surprisingly similar advantages and disadvantages over regular laptops.
That's surprisingly modern. If the specs got an upgrade it would fit right in the present
basically a convertible before the word even existed.
If it had proper stylus support I could totally see students working with these devices even back then, nowadays convertibles are standard in university. Maybe they should've marketed this more towards them instead of companies.
It's hard to believe there was any overlap between the internet age and the time when 16MB was a workable/sellable limitation for both RAM and storage combined, even for a mobile device (especially one this capable as opposed to a PDA)
I had a HP iPAQ with CE and it was a amazing device at the time.
It might be strange, but better strange than the 12,367,862,182nd black rectangle.
This thing is like a thin client, but without a server to actually feed it data. So weird.
Windows CE was indeed used by Wyse in a lot of terminal server client/thinclient hardware offerings. And you could get a remote desktop client on here, but using a desktop OS from these was never much fun.
I don't know if you mention it later but my iPad Pro 12.9" with smart keyboard folio - so the closest device to this on the market today - is about a pound heavier at 4.5 lbs than the Vadim.
It came with Office, but with limited functionality in each app… of course Microsoft wouldn't repeat the recipe a decade later, right?
Wow this reminds me allot of an Ipad with keyboard case accessory
I have a pair of these and the problem was the battery cover
A battery interlock switch was held down by a thin tab on the cover. That's tab would break off
DELL Model-SK8115 (that i'm using) also is a rubber dome keyboard
Windows CE, stands for Windows functionally Crippled Edition.
I kept nearly-hearing my name throughout... :D ... That was a nice little look into this machine. Very tempted to track one down...
I would like to see you take a look at non thinkpad business refurbishments... Latitude etc, if you can get your hands on one. Without the cult following/being the go-to this option for reuse goes underreported. Is the build quality on thinkpad (few years+ old gen) really so good? I want to be part of the refurbished probook revolution
I worked for Compaq and we called the Windows CE products "wince" because you would wince when you were forced to use one.
Its crazy that today an ipad air 4 with the keyboard folio and pencil does all that work today
We've come a long way...
this looks like that macbook concept that's been floating around on the internet lol
So basically Its the Google's android chromebook grandad.
Why does that laptop look ahead of it's time?
The concept was certainly ahead of its time but damn the execution was very late 90s.
If you really want to know where that issue is a big thing I have the same exact unit you're showing in this video haven't done any testing yet on it but I'm sure gladly to give you an update when I do: to see if the calibrations mess up on my device as well.
This reminds of the problems Surface 1 and 2 had.
It predated the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.