Transportable Computers

Posted Wed Mar 23, 2005 in

Columbia VP 1600File under “Remembering my Roots,” via BoingBoing a story about the history of portable computing.

My first computer was a Columbia VP-1600, a 35-pound transportable with 2 floppy drives and a built-in 9-inch screen. I bought that machine in 1984 and promptly added a math coprocessor and an additional 384KB (yeah, kilobytes) of RAM to bring to total to 512KB of memory.

I used that machine incessantly until it came time to do the modeling for my Ph.D. research. The 5MHz processor had too little computing power for my work. So, with help from my in-laws, I bought a 16MHz 80386 based desktop and went to work. I finished porting the model from a mini-computer to the microcomputer and executed my research.

It took me another two years, but I got it all done.

  1. Egad. In the summer of 1984 in L.A. I spent a week doing six months (or was it nine?) worth of general ledger/journal entry work through financial statements on a Compaq portable borrowed from Ernst & Young. It had 2 diskette drives, no hard drive, and very little memory (by today’s standards). The project was one of those “program disk in drive A; data disk in drive B” operations.

    What the heck, it worked.

    — Linkmeister    26 March 2005, 22:58    #

  2. I can’t remember which machine came first—the Compaq or the Columbia. The Compaq was very similar to the Columbia (or vice versa) in that both were equipped with dual 5.25” drives, the same display (for all practical intents and purposes), and similar memory. I ran the standard program disk in Drive A: data disk in Drive B: approach and was really glad to not have to swap disks like you had to with the single-drive machines.

    I wrote a lot of Turbo Pascal code using that setup. The compiler/IDE disk in A: and my programs/data disk in B:. What a trip that was and it was very productive, especially after using the mainframe before that.

    That little machine did the bulk of my analysis as well. I used my “big machine” for modeling and my “little machine” for writing and analysis while the “big machine” was cranking out numbers. — ruminator    27 March 2005, 05:38    #