Atari Portfolio - The $400 Palmtop PC from 1989
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ต.ค. 2021
- Likely the world's first palmtop, the Atari Portfolio is a computer packing a 4.92MHz Intel 80C88A CPU, 128 whole kilobytes of RAM, and a proper DOS operating system capable of running (some) PC software alongside its built-in applications. And according to Terminator 2 it even acts as a quick ATM hacking tool! To quote young John Connor: "Easy money."
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The moment he said "you aren't going to play doom on it" I heard almost a dozen crazy programmers cry out in a loud voice "challenge accepted"
Gosh I hope so
@@LGR if it (sorta) runs on that calculator you did a video about, this surely must be more capable.. Still it would only be a very limited pseudo doom obviously
@@Blackadder75 Now I'm curious as to how the capabilities of the TI-84's Z80 compares to the 80C88 of the Portfolio. If they're similar, it might just be possible.
@@Blackadder75 I bet a barebones version would run decently well, it'd mostly be wireframe ala the first version of Wolfenstein but that screen format is the real mountain to climb, playing with that would be pretty janky
The Ti-Nspire Run the original Doom (a port of Linux's ZDoom actually based on SDL actually), since it uses a 200 MHz 32-bit ARM CPU and had 64 MB of Storage and 32 MB of RAM.
"You're not gonna run Doom on here...."
Them's fightin words!
Sorry mate, Doom needs at least a 386 or 486 to play decently.
Edit: On DOS machines at least.
*YOU DARE CHALLENGE ME MORTAL?!*
@@Toonrick12 tell that to the VIC-20 :p
@@Toonrick12 Tell that to people who gotten it to run on calculators. :P
@@ThyPandora Tell that to people who gotten it to run on pregnancy test sticks!
Actually, that Portfolio was used in my local hospital. The doctors were using it for writing down patient reports and then printing it with an old dot matrix printer.
Fun fact. They used those little Atari machines till 2008 and then they upgraded to Windows Vista machines XD
that is incredible
*downgraded
One small showcase for man, one giant leap for LGR’s T2 John Connor cosplay
Easy money
You're not my real dad, TODD!
At 3:55 the portrait mode sharp thingy, reminds me of the communicators in kids tvshow "Mission Top Secret/Achtung Streng Geheim'
We got Google by the balls now, don't we.
Public Enemy still sells the shirt John wore in the movie.
I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, until you said “hacking ATM’s” and it hit me like a ton of bricks where I knew this from.
Eeeeeeasy money. 😎
*You're not gonna play doom on here*
Somewhere someone in the DooM community: *Hold my beer*
The doom community won’t stop till it runs on literally anything with a transistor and display. Including a pregnancy test by the way
@@AspynDotZip 'Your baby is a cacodemon!'
@@AspynDotZip The problem is that it's not actuallly running ON the tester. It's just being used as an awful display. Doing the same here wouldn't be too hard with the dot matrix display, but you"d need some more RAM as a kind of display buffer and the serial adapter for data I/O.
@@Dong_Harvey Aren't they all
@@AspynDotZip it's not, nobody seems to be able to read past the headline
The appearance and style of this thing has aged very well, I think. It doesn't look so dated as many of its peers
Hey, nice to see you here! Love the videos
It has a name and I think you could show a little more respect and call it Clint.
It was a piece of junk, even at the time it came out. We were all soooo disappointed.
It would be cool to have a case like this that you could throw a raspberry pi and lcd screen into.
@@MyPhobo PinePhone keyboard case is a bit like that, except instead of a raspberry pi and LCD it uses the PinePhone
"You're not gonna run Doom on here...."
What fresh heresy is this?
You know the hardware is truly limited when there's no DOOM port for the platform.
Petsci Robots, _maybe_
Someone get on that!
Yet
its possible if doom can be played on a ti86 then it can be done
Giving that this thing has a parallel port, maybe that can be used to stream some very crappy video in?
Cloud gaming on a primitive handheld, sounds about right.
As a die-hard Atari Computer fan I was intrigued with this little machine. It was clearly not an Atari design but it did seem like it might be useful, especially as a supplemental machine for a PC user. I never cared for the IBM PC or its ilk, but they were all on DOS 3.3 at the time and DOS 2.11 felt like a deal breaker.
Everyone was comparing its size to a VHS tape. We were Beta.
But it did appreciate that it ran on AA batteries, my coin of the realm at the time.
I was into low-level programming so I was wailing for an assembler. I was also waiting for the price to drop to $199 which felt more appropriate to me.
Of course "PC compatibility" was promised much more than it was delivered an awful lot in those days. You're generally better off writing your own software to pass data to a real PC.
I still think John Connor demonstrated the most practical use of this machine.
Shout out to LGR for his superb filming, editing, and writing. Each episode truly immortalizes the technology LGR presents. Such dedication to preservation deserves commendation.
Thank you!
I totally get that technology moves forward but there is just such a charm around devices like this. I'd love to do some proper dedicated writing on one and just feel like I'm stepping back in time haha
With that screen and keyboard, I'd give the average nostalgia-glasses wearer about half an hour before they finally get sick of it and go back to a standard form factor PC. As interesting as the concept is, there's a reason why devices like this died.
Wait until we move backwards.
@@r.l.royalljr.3905 Haha I was gonna say the same thing... your time travel experience will probably last about 5 minutes.
@@mercster wait so I guess smartphones should be dying pretty soon too
@@poeticsilence047 Hmm?
It seems inevitable that “netbooks” will soon be old enough to be worth considering as an LGR topic. I have an early Samsung in a fetching blue color that I would be willing to donate.
is it a model NF110 ?
@@andygozzo72 nope, NC10 from 2006-2007
Gimme
@@MichaelEilers just googled it, the design is very similar to others i've seen, maybe a cross between an acer aspire one and asus eeepc 4g, i have one each of those, plus the samsung nf110 .
Was just thinking about that, I've got an Asus eeePC with a Celeron900 that still works which I never use for anything.
0:39 I like how the OS is DIP and John Connor says "You calling moi a dipshit".
Unbelievably, my Dad had two of these!
He had some great software for them, too. I've got a photo hanging up of me using one, taken in 1991. I seem to remember he had some games you could play across a cable, connecting the two machines. Do I remember battaleships? and Pong? Awesome days.
LGR videos are definitely one of the few that, no matter how long, could never be long enough. This video could be three and a half days long and I'd still be like aww damn it's not four days? Clints voice is next level soothing fr fr lol.
So true!
And his choice of smooth jazz just helps makes the video move along faster in my opinion.
Bob Ross art ASMR
Clint retro software/hardware ASMR
^^^ All three of you hit the nail on the head! ^^^
Agreed.
Just love Clint and have been watching for a long time.
It's so good to see him getting the audience that he worked so hard building over so many years.
Who didn't want one of these things when they were in the JCPenney and Sears Christmas catalogues back in the day?
Me. I wasn’t born until 1993
@@oliverwalsh9614 there's always one! JK 😂
I want to say I saw them first in a mid or late 90s close out electronics catalog. DAK, maybe?
If only DIP had been around long enough for the mini HDMI plug PCs, we might have been graced by the DipStick
Heh.
Compromising usability for portability
Literally nothing has changed lol
I doubt we'll ever get to a point where portable devices aren't behind stationary ones, it's the nature of the thing
Every Smartphone made in the last few years seems to compromise portability for usability. An original iPhone would fit in most pockets.
Just like phone users today XD
@@MrDuncl the bloated screensizes compromise both for marketing-approved bigness. I have average man hands and can just barely use my pixel 4a (picked specifically for being the only slightly smaller model available) comfortably, or at all one-handed
@@AgentTasmania Much depends, really. Bigger screen sizes allow for better typing on virtual keyboards, especially when in public transport (where it's safe to do so).
I have a tiny 240×320px LG Optimus L3 II with Android 4.1.2; 3G only.
Despite the age of the OS, the limited RAM and storage, I can still do many things with it, but its display is so tiny, that using the virtual keyboard is not as easy as with a device nearing phablet sizes.
This takes me back to college, one of the tutors there had one (two years before T2). I thought it looked cool, but I had a Gameboy instead as I wanted to play games on the move. He also had a Yamaha SY77 synth workstation, I was jealous as they were top notch and expensive. I have two SY77s now (I bought a broken one to fix and failed, bought another then got both working) but no Portfolio, I don't think they're that useful.
I did have a Nokia 9110 communicator in 2001 and that was an AMD 486 running DOS with Geos as the frontend.
I also had a Nokia 9110 communicator and later the 9210 as well and both were excellent devices for their time. I literally wore out the 9110 and I actually dug out my 9210 a couple of months back while having a clear out but even after getting a new battery it is now sadly dead.😢
I sooo wanted a 9110, i was a teen at the time. A computer tech had one in the block of factories my mum worked in, id go to his shop and we'd play pc games over the network when he wasnt busy. But that pc phone he had was where its at. I thought it was old as hell when i first saw it, tiny screen and buttons, massive phone, then he opened it and my jaw dropped haha
As a Kid I was drooling over the yamaha catalog: sy55, sy77, sy99... today i got a mx49 fully general midi compatible and sounding awesome
@Zaydan Naufal You can buy a brand new E90 for less than £200 on eBay but why bother other than for nostalgia.
I literally dreamed about owning one of these! Unfortunately I ended up with a Casio telememo databank, that didn't stop me from thinking I could hack into an ATM though.
Easy money.
The more I watch this channel, the more I like this channel, and I've been watching for yeaaars. Good show, old chap!
We had one of these on demo at the computer store I worked at back then. It was super impressive to anyone who handled it, but nobody could fathom doing anything useful with it. It was on display with the calculators and Sharp/Casio gimmicks.
Before even starting the video the T2 atm scene popped in my head.
Eeeeeeasy money. 😎
I really wanted something like this... to play games in school! Nintendo understood me and released the Gameboy.
Yeah, this is something i'd drool over as a kid, but would have been disappointed with since nothing i actually wanted to run would run.
Disappointed I had to scroll 3 screens down to see a T2 reference. "Easy money!"
Yeah. First thing I thought when I saw the title picture was that. Though apparently it wasn't that easy money for Atari 😊
We were all sitting around, exuberantly sweating, with our thumb on the button waiting for you!
Well I didn't get here earlier to say it!
It was in the description.
It was the very first thing i was looking for! easy comment, easy comment!
I had one of these at uni in 92/93, and used it to type up lecture notes. They were great devices in their day :)
This video contains easily one of the best Tommy Tutone references in the long history of LGR. Well done, sir.
I'm a millennial so I just thought of the Less than Jake cover.
I am always subconsciously listening for alliteration in LGR videos. "Handy Handful of helpful software," is a good one.
Omg. There's a word for it.
I gotta admit, I would have been pretty pissed to find out that this wasn't a fully compatible DOS system, even if that wasn't a realistic expectation back in 1989. The widescreen display alone probably would have made that impossible. Still a nifty device regardless.
Not sure what you'd get done in 128k and 4Mhz in DOS with that display, even in 1989.
It was cool he found that old archive of software specific to the device though... that might make it slightly more capable than an unexpandable PDA.
Yeah, it's so close and yet so far away from perfection. Especially maddening because the competition that followed it would usually give you more for your money and be fully compatible assuming programs fit in the RAM of course.
It was a different era. Back then "some similar commands" meant "fully compatible". And "you can buy 2 cables, adapter and a device to connect it to a printer" meant "print directly".
It was pretty DOS compatible. But not PC compatible. Any DOS program that tried to access standard PC I/O ports could struggle - especially if they bypassed the BIOS and tried to read keyboard characters directly from port 60h. Plus it only supported an MDA video RAM format while most games expected CGA. Text mode was fine.
My father worked for Atari Mexico, and he still actually has one of those with all the accessories!
I loved my PSION II when I first got it in 1987. The EPROM programs were just too cool. And those cards were the coolest in my KORG DDD-1 drum machine from 1988.
The Psion was quite neat. But I was buying NeXT machines at the time so didn't get much chance to play with them.
I've always wanted one of these. Wishing I'd grabbed one on eBay in the early 2000s when they could be had for $40-$60 all day.
That LCD contrast is *perfection*, its so sharp! As is your camera work! Pretty awesome little device, I wanted a palmtop so bad when I was little.
I bet it was a Dream Come True for some kids to have these in 1990
Man I wish you'd cover the Zaurus, I had so many memories as a kid messing with that thing!
In a time when tech can do so much, effortlessly, I still smile like I did as a young person in the late 80s and 90s, seeing these old devices do cool stuff.
Someone needs to do a profile on Guildford. It's a small, unassuming town that has been balls deep in tech for decades now.
Wouldn’t say “small” as it is a city and county town. But yeah it’s definitely overlooked far too often in tech history. I put it down to the amount of aerospace development that goes on in the area (also nearly in Farnborough).
Palmtop computers of the 90s became the netbooks of the late 2000s - a platform of promise and supremely portable, but held back by tech limitations (and our own expectations). I still watch videos like this and might not be the only one swayed by the tech of the time. …Surface Duo, anyone?
there's something so fun about this era's devices. the form factor, the simplicity. I'd love to revive the idea with an e-ink display, esp32 soc, and a slighlty nicer shell than dos
Exactly my thoughts! That kind of form factor, maybe slightly better screen, Raspberry Pi Zero (maybe even the awesome new Zero 2) hardware and a CLI-only GNU/Linux with pimped out ZSH - oh my ZSH, power level 10k, whole 9 yards 😃
That’s all you need to be able to do semi-advanced shell-level stuff basically anywhere!
I've had a few of these over the years, the first back in 1991. Loved that little thing. Fun fact: The breakout portion of the PC Card Drive is a repurposed shell for the Atari XM301 300 baud direct-connect modem for the Atari 8-bit computers.
Just an FYI, Guildford is pronounced without the "D". It's a fairly sensible pronunciation compared to some of our other place names, for example, Cholmondeley, it's pronounced Chum-lee.
with such discrepancy, at some point one just shrugs at mispronunciation.
Man as a hardcore Atari guy I lusted after one of these so much!
Okay, the price the branding, service, compatibility and translation of this device has such a high quality for a device from 1989. It's unreal
I wanted one of these when I was a kid. Wanted is an understatement. I could not save up enough for it and it was out of reach for my parents too at that time in our lives. I see it now on eBay etc and it is so tempting, but it's just nostalgia now and good enough watching you review it. Thank you!
"Oh Atari, you tried" just about sums up the last 40 years of Atari
Marvellous! Ive been waiting for an atari portfolio to be showcased on lgr since the early days 😁 thankyou
Some friends dont get my fascination with old tech like this. I just think it's cool how people pulled stuff off like that (and it's a neat gadget, I bet it was fun to play with)
Despite the DOS compatibility issues, this was a surprisingly capable device by 1989 standards, and if anything it was slightly ahead of its time.
Man, this makes me appreciate my GDP Win Max WAY more.
Great video. Really cool to see more in depth review of the Portfolio; being a huge fan of Atari since I was a kid, this thing was always pretty intriguing.
Love these videos. Keep them coming!
This is so much cooler than I thought It could have been!
"LOCK-ON TECHNOLOGY!"
I never owned a Palmtop but I did own an Atari 800XL...my very first ever computer. The keyboard itself was the computer and you had to have a floppy drive to run anything. I used this thing to death...literally, I just kept using until the floppy died. My dad must have sent it in for repair 2 or 3 times before he gave up on it (and technology was advancing). I remember programs like "Koala Paint" where it would allow me to make printables for my bedroom door (dot-matrix style). And my dad must have gotten well over 100 games for me to play! Games like Kongo Bongo, Super Pac-Man, Gauntlet (not the Gauntlet you're thinking of), Air Support, Pit-Fall (1 and 2), Kids on Keys, Donkey Kong, Juno First, Miner 2049er, Apshai, the list goes on.
I'll never forget that system and I play an emulated version to this day.
Your videos always bring a smile to my face. 😁
Thanks for another one L.G.R ! 👍
Born in 85’ and always a tech nut, but so much of this old stuff you bring out was too expensive for me as a child, just had my Sega, Nintendo, GB, GG. So I’ve always just had to wonder… but then I found your channel ! 🙌🙌👏👏👏👍 Thank You for finding so many awesome relics and showing us in such great detail.
I grew up with this older tech, so its got a place in my heart, but I'm also really glad these LCD screens went the way of the Dodo lol
02:46 I like the way you talk about the old country. Just Birmingham not "Birmingham England" or "Birmingham UK". It makes me (native of that region) feel included 😄
I still have one of those old Star dot matrix printers in the shed. It used to work the last time I used it, there was a broken bit of plastic that kept the auto paper feed from working so you just had to guide each page in until the rollers grab them.
When you were talking about the machine's ability to produce dial tones I was getting the impression you were about to say "YEah you could this grey box into a blue box"
This was just one of those that I wanted when I saw it in a newprint ads
So cool! I didn't know all those accessories existed. Amazing job of filming the LCD. Can you show us more of your 200LX? I got the OPL3LPT running on mine, and played a bit of Planet X3.
I had one as a kid, dont remember how i got it and where it went, but the fact it ran DOS was just awesome.
I did own a Portfolio (actually, still do) and, around 1992, used it probably in the very way it was meant to be used: able to do my job (part time translator during my uni days - so, mainly using its tiny editor...) whilst on a backpaking trip with friends. I later switched to Psion 5MX and then Psion Netbook, but I'll always remember Portfolio as the first one that put me on the move.
Thank you, Portfolio, you have a special place in my heart!
The "Pofo"😂. It's OS really seems to limit it, but I can see this device being useful for light writing and note taking.
I’ll stick with my Dell AT102W for that.
I wanted one for programming and solving math problems with programs. Would MS Quick C run in 128k? hmm.
@@mgjk Would love to see Quick C or Turbo C run on this thing.
@@LusRetroSource None of those will work. I tried. But there is a compiler called Desmet C that works. The editor doesn't work because screen incompatibility, but you can just use the pofo integrated editor instead.
@@TSteffi Thanks for the info! Do you know if Desmet C was widely used for homebrew or was homebrew mostly made on Atari's PowerBASIC?
I have one of these, really neat little device.
I love retro tech. I love this era of PCs and components. I loved it as a kid and I love it now at 37. I feel like I can smell this channel.
And as always, excellent video!!!
Honestly, I'm really into its screen. I used to have an electronic dictionary with a similar screen, and it was very readable and easy on the eyes in a way that smartphones aren't as much, IMO.
I know we've come a long way, but I've always had a soft spot for quirky retro tech like this. There's a certain level of satisfaction that comes from devices like this that you can't get from a smartphone.
This thing was way before my time. I'm sure it would've been cool to use one of these back in the day.
A new video from LGR! The homebrew showcase at the end reminds me of the homebrew community of programs for TI calculators...
My Portfolio is the only piece of computer equipment from the era I never sold or gave away. I still have it, a card, the serial and parallel adapters, and the memory expansion in safe keeping, and pop some batteries in and verify its still working every year or so. Believe it or not, I took lecture notes on it in my first year of University back in the early 90s. I even got some piece of scientific equipment that had a serial interface and which would output data to import into the Portfolio’s spreadsheet for analysis at one point. TBH, I always wondered about chaining the memory interfaces - I never got to try that (only owning one), so it was good to see it 30 years later. The only note I’d add to your otherwise excellent review is that once you had the memory expander installed, you couldn’t unplug it without resetting the Portfolio (losing anything in the memory-partitioned storage), so it could get unwieldy to use. You had to be careful carrying it around that way in a bag, as the clips didn’t handle pressure from either side very well, and could partially disconnect- causing you to lose everything in volatile storage.
Oooo 80s handheld computer
16:23 I love this part that he was trapped on this computer for the love of god!
WoWWW!!! Love it! Have still got my DIP Pocket PC and last time I tried it was still working! I had the parallel and serial interfaces and something else which I can't quite remember at the moment - it's in my summer house so can't dig it out right now!
Great channel by the way - came here from Techmoan video about cassette winders.
Thanks for sharing! Always love tech like this that was around when I was alive, but not aware of all the tech around me! I was about 5 when this came out.
Almost bought one of these back in the day, with an Amiga compatible dock thing. Buuuuut even back then, it was very limited.
10:02 Her number was conveniently found on the bathroom wall.
I have one of these laying around! It belonged to my grandfather. No idea what he used it for, he put it in storage well before I was born and my grandmother and parents don't have a clue about what the thing was used for. Going theory is that he used it for his book binding business somehow.
I never got it work sadly. The most it ever did was put a garbled output on the display. Also remember it from Terminator 2 of course.
Nice to finally see one in action outside of a movie. Very neat piece of hardware for the time.
I purchased one of these devices so I could run my aviation flight planning programs on it I developed for the PC. I was taken in by the compatibility with the PC which was very disappointing. My next device to superceed the Portfolio was the NEC PC 8201. Thankings for making this video. It brought back great memories for me.
9:58 The later Psions had this ability too. To my (slight) shame, I remember there was a "free" phone installed at my university without a keypad, it had pre-programmed buttons to call a few local places instead (a taxi, pizza place, that kind of thing). Thanks to my Psion, I had the ability to call other numbers too 😊
Depending on how the phone was set up you could dial just by tapping the hookswitch, no computers needed.
@@eDoc2020 I've heard that, but I never managed to successfully "tap out" the numbers on a pulse dialing phone manually.
You're not gonna play Do--- someone ports Doom to it.
Not gonna happen. It was slower than a Trs-80 Model III.
Had one of those when I was in my early teens....I spent endless hours programming text adventures in Basic, and created pixel graphics. I remember how expensive the 64K card was here in Austria..my only birthday present :-) Later I got a serial interface as well to connect it to my 486. However, I learned DOS commands on this device and a lot more about interfaces, data transfer and programming. Thanks Atari Portfolio :-)
There is nothing better than new LGR video and hot chocolate. Thanks Clint
At the 7:44 min. mark, it shows the date.
Was this Y2K compliant?
That's hilarious.
The price of the memory cards reminds me of one Christmas when my daddy wanted to give the three of us kids USB flash drives which were just out. He asked which size we thought we could best use. I chose 256K as I was going to college. Go to Office Depot not long after Christmas and find out it was a 100 dollars. I still have it 22 years later.
You mean 256M, right? USB flash drives started at 8M.
How far we've come.
I remember having a tiny little 512 MB drive (itself a vast improvement over what you were facing) - and some floppies and CD-RWs.
Nowadays you can get tiny little cards with more storage than existed when this thing was out.
@@PG-gs5vb No, this was when they first came out in 2000.
@@KopperNeoman I know, it kinda scary but also cool.
A fresh video from LGR,there is nothing better than this!
Thanks for the history research. That was interesting!
I remember playing around with the Atari in the computer store I worked at back in the 80's. I think I remember the battery life kind of sucking, but we did have fun logging into BBS with it.
YES...LGR is BACK!
Good thing Apple had their biggest launch in decades, or I would never have made it though that second week 😉
So can I hack ATMs?
Love these man, so chill .
Excellent video. I did not know the equipment. It amazes me that so many expansions have come out like the serial and parallel ports, the additional RAM memory and the memory card reader for transferring files with a PC.
thats the coolest thing i have ever saw in here man! thank you!
wow, I was always curious about this. Great video.
This was such a childhood dream. Great to see it reviewed/presented!
such great memories. I loved that little guy, I still have mine tucked away in a closet. I also had the parallel port adapter and the technical reference manual which included schematics for example peripherals, assembly code examples for drivers and a list of the DOS interrupts and parameters. The expansion connector was actually connected to the CPU main bus, similar to the ISA bus.
I love this!!! So well done, as always! At 6:04 I had to rewind a few times, cuz something looked a bit off. Then I noticed that it looks like the cord has been swapped out with a "universal power supply" cord. It has the tell-tale reversible-polarity plug at the end, and then on my double take, I noticed the shrink tubing at the junction of the cord and the wall wart casing. Do I observe correctly, or do my eyes (and perceptions) deceive me?? Anyway, LOVE this coverage, so thorough and entertaining!
Oh the nostalgia is overwhelming. I wanted a Psion badly and a Sharp Wizard too back then. Fun video as always. I was at a hamfest (ham radio flea market) and mentioned LGR to a guy who had a Compaq 286 portable fired up and instantly had about six people saying they love LGR :-).
Incredible timing! Was just interested in this device.
Great work Sir thank you