OT: Your Earliest Laptop Experience

My earliest laptop memories are of ones that my dad had for work (asphalt mix design). He used to let me enter numbers into spreadsheets for him when I was ~7 years old or so.

There was a white model with a white-on-blue monochrome screen, followed by a grey one with a black and white screen, and a white one with a color screen.

The one I remember the most as the grey.. It had a 386 and DOS 5.0, which meant there was DOSShell to be played with. It was a Northgate, and my dad didn't need it all the time, so I got to play with it a lot. Our family PC at the time (this was uhh, around 93, my family was technology challenged for a long time) was an Original IBM PC, complete with Single Sided and Double Sided disks.. So the Northgate was a big upgrade for me.

The Northgate had a broked floppy drive, so my dads company bought a big honking external 3.5" drive that connected through the parallel port. The drivers for the external drive loaded in config.sys, as was standard for the time period.

One day 9 or 10 year old Jumper decided it would be awesome to set up a RAM drive on the laptop, to make something or other run faster. So into config.sys I went, adding the magic incantations 'ramdrive.sys /size=256' or whatever. I saved the file, and rebooted the laptop, only to be met with... Nothing. At all. Nothing.

I had screwed up the ramdrive.sys line, and there was no way the thing was going to boot now. No magic 'F8' key to drop me into safe mode, no Linux ob a second partition, no Windows XP Recovery Console... Just a hard drive with a borked config.sys and no bootable floppy drive on a laptopt that wasn't even mine...

In the end my dad had to borrow an identicle Northgate from a co-worker, take both machines apart, switch the floppy drives, and then boot from a floppy so I could un-do my config.sys magic.

I think something of those early machines rubbed off on me, because my Z33 is very similar in color and size, although it is a bit thinner and less square

 

My story isn't very exciting. While I took an interest in computers early, my first laptop experience was when I was 13 (5 years ago), and I was just playing games on a friends laptop. Since, I have owned 3, and my third was an Asus, the V6j, the best laptop I have ever used, hands down.

 

My first laptop was a Toshiba T1910 with 4mb ram monochrome screen and a 486sx 33mhz, I bought it for $40 bucks at the flee market, had a good battery too, would last over an hour, I would play alot of older games on it, Street Rod, Street Rod 2, Duke Nukem, Test Drive 1,2, and many others, It also had windows 3.1, I really like it.

 

My first laptop was a Sony Vaio I got from my grandparents for free slightly over 5 years ago. It had a 500 Mhz CPU, 8 MB integrated graphics that didn't playback video that well, and 64 MB of RAM (that I upgraded to the max of 256 MB while I had it). My grandmother bought it and ended up never using it, so she gave it to me, figuring that I'd get some use out of it. Well, needless to say, I did, but then there was that fateful day when I picked it up by the lid and the screen cracked. Not even thinking about the concept of external display, I figured the computer was broken, so I decided to take it apart to see how it worked. This adventure ended in me not only not being able to take apart the whole thing as I'd hoped, but also after I put everything back together the way it was before, it decided to not boot. I had a friend of mine who worked in hardware take a look at it, and he said it was just dead. And so just as I had become entirely dependent on having a laptop, I didn't have one anymore. So I decided to buy one when I had the money, which took me from 2003 when I killed the Vaio until 2005, during which time, I looked at a great many different computers and went from considering a different Vaio to the Dell 8600 to the Sager 3790 to the Acer 8100, and finally I ended up buying (on pre-order, no less) an Asus Z71v, at which point I signed up for a couple computer forums and got hopelessly addicted.

 

I bought and used my first laptop when I was 13 (6.5 years ago) for $1800 from dell (300 hours of babysitting and lawnmowing). It was a Inspiron 2500 that still runs perfectly (including 2 fully charged batteries). I brought it everywhere and played games like diablo 2, sim city 2000, etc. I used that until this summer when I purchased the laptop in my sig as an upgrade.

 

The first time I played on a laptop was when I was about 7. I played games on my uncle's laptop, the 1st sim city, and this game about a rabbit that runs really fast (I forgot the name, vaguely remember it though). It was big and clunky but at the time it was considered "cool".

I think this was around the era of windows 95... not sure though

 

The ThinkPad T21 was my first 'real' one, meaning that I used for at least a month, the others were just my uncle's(He works for HP) whom visits and stays with us, i just mess around with it.

Fond memories of playing Diablo I on that machine

 

My earliest laptop memory probably shouldn't be described as a laptop at all, since it would have broken your legs. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the Kaypro II, which our school's IT department bought for no readily apparent reason back in 1982.

Puts todays machines into perspective, doesn't it?

 

Jazz Jackrabbit. The demo of the game came with the Gravis Gamepad that I still have (but can't plug into my A8Jm) but I didn't have a CD drive on my 386 nor a game port. Many sad years of bringing my gamepad to friends' houses...

 

My dad had a Compaq Portable.

http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html

And we complain about weight today...

 

My first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad 365XD which I received brand new for HS Graduation (10 years ago now). It came with Windows 95 which I promptly formatted and put OS/2 Warp on in its place. The screen was terrible since it was dual scan, and this model had no palm rest, the mouse buttons were right on the edge of laptop. No trackpad either, this was back in the day when ThinkPads had only the eraser nub, and no Windows keys.

 

I bought my first laptop in 1994. It was an NEC Versa. I can't remember the model number. It was a 486, and I upgraded the 4mb RAM to a full 12mb.

I used that thing for 6 years, it took me through Universiry and Graduate School.

 

Well I actually had one of those lunchbox computers with a 386. I used it portably too.

My first real laptop of the current age was a toshiba libretto. It had a pentium 90.

I broke it lol. It was great though it ran windows 95.

 

You guys crack me up..

My first portable computer, (you'll notice I don't say it was a laptop, and you can see why when you look at it), was my very first computer. It was called a Seequa Chameleon, weighed 28lbs, and I bought it in 1983 for the MSRP of 1995, (because I couldn't afford the 3000 of a Compaq Portable, which was a much nicer luggable.) But it was my first one, I bought it myself, and I've been hooked every since. I remember buying Microsoft Word 1.0 for it, and in 1984 buying a 300 baud Anchor Volksmodem for it, and getting hooked on BBSes, even though it took forever to download huge files, like 200k. I finally sold it around 1985 for around 800.

I can't even remember how many different computers I've owned since.. (I only seem to be interested in which one I'm going to get next.. weird huh?)

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=107&st=1

 

Had a beige 486 Compaq laptop, with DOS then later upped to Windows 3.1. It had a trackball next to the screen and a brightness slider under it. Used it to surf the net on my 500 kb/s Cable Modem when everyone thought 56k was super fast . It worked great till it somehow got dropped about 10 feet. Even now it still runs...sort of, though the screen is a total loss.

Cat

 

I just picked something pretty cool up on eBay. I've always wanted one, ever since I was a kid:



The Butterfly Keyboard Thinkpad! Complete with 486DX2-50 and a 10.4" 640x480 screen!

Suggestions for what to *do* with it are welcome...