IBM Made The Longest Laptop Ever



Finally, those of us who are sick and tired of short laptops can rejoice. The solution was here all along.

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Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:03:37 Early portable PCs
00:10:07 External overview
00:20:31 Battery + first boot
00:23:21 Initial impressions
00:27:15 LCD / Graphics
00:37:40 Addon hardware
00:43:35 Addon teardown
00:47:27 Desktop mode / Video card
00:50:16 CGA aspect ratio
00:55:40 5140 Monitors
01:02:10 Printer
01:08:32 Application Selector
01:15:50 System settings
01:17:10 Resume feature
01:23:45 Conclusion / Outro

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40 thoughts on “IBM Made The Longest Laptop Ever”

  1. If you want some more 640×200 action in something more useful in a modern sense, check out the NEC MobilePro (preferably the 780 or 900). I used one in high school, which made me the first person with a laptop. People thought I was crazy until they were buying my perfect biology notes and watching tiny videos in study hall.

    Edit after finishing the video: Nah Dude, your presentation was top-notch as per usual. Was able to see the screen pretty well; except for…well, when no one would be able to. Excellent!

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  2. Great video. But I will say, with such a long video, I almost bailed pretty quickly. I'm glad I didn't though. I learned a lot! But the biggest thing I learned was about the feature (no spoilers) that IBM basically invented for all portable devices going forward (really not just laptops if you think about it). But you didn't mention this until the end of the video! Maybe tease it a bit more in the beginning? Or maybe you did tease it, and the video was so long, I already forgot. Either way, it was a great video! Very informative with just the right amount of added (attempts at) humor. 🙂

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  3. Ooh I can feel how good that keyboard feels to type on over the video. I love the look of these old luggables and chunky laptops. It's fun how almost all computers have the same visual language depending on the era they come from.

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  4. Its very interesting to see games run on early 90's pcs because of the weird speed issues they have. Its interesting to see what the slowest pc thats capable of smooth scrolling is. I also like it when people run doom on a 386 or quake on a 486.

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  5. In the video you say that there are lots of things you collect that don't deserve a full video, but i wonder if you could make a compilation thats kind of surface level, and just full of "wow thats neat" things, i would definitely watch it!

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  6. well s***… if your channel is about anything, it's about the history of said product highlighted and how it all ended up to be…. we came from using those things to a simple mobile device that can fit in your hand…. I'm sure I haven't seen one of those types of laptops since I was a kid… I remember seeing something like that but it used D cell batteries to power it… can't remember name/model, unfortunately.

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  7. the only interesting things about PC videos is expansion cards, if you get wierd ones, or rare ones, showing how to get them working, what they do, what they don't do…

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  8. The display adapter wasn't the only thing they apparently borrowed from the IBM PCjr. The modem also sounds very similar to the one for the PCjr, and I was able to get Procomm to use it, although downloading binary data was … interesting.

    I have a Data General One, and it has the second best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop, the best being the IBM laptop you showed off (a friend of mine's father worked for IBM Boca and let us use it).

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  9. I was under the belief that the Fn was not Function, but F (n) as the "special functions" were mapped to invisible F11, F12, F etc keys in the operating system, so as is the way of engineers, it was F n =Function number 12 13 14 etc..

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