mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (09/13/86)
After spending an amazing amount of time sitting around in airports, on airplanes, and in cars, hotels, and doctor's offices bored silly while a ton of work was waiting for me elsewhere, I decided I needed a laptop PC so I could work during these periods. I borrowed a friend's Data General DG/1 for awhile, but it got to be a real hassle, and sometimes when I needed it, he needed it at the same time. So I've been comparison shopping for a few months looking for a laptop. This is a summary of what I found. This summer has apparently been the time for laptops to come out. There are three very similar laptop PC's on the market for about the same price, from IBM, Data General, and Toshiba. There are others which I haven't considered, for example, the Radio Shack models don't have a full-sized screen or MS DOS compatibility, and there are some that only have one disk drive. IBM came out with their PC Convertable. It costs $1995 with 2 720K 3.5" disks and 256K of RAM. You pay extra for an external serial and parallel port ($195), an upgrade to 512K ($390), a battery charger ($25), DOS 3.2 ($85), and a 1200 baud modem ($480). Data General has a new version of the DG/1 out, called the DG/One Model 1. It's substantially improved from their older DG/1, and the price is also much lower. The two floppy 256K unit costs $1995, plus $390 for an upgrade to 512K RAM, $250 for a 1200 baud modem. Serial and parallel port, DOS, and charger come standard. In addition, you can get a model with 1 floppy and a 10MB hard disk for $2795. (In effect, the hard disk costs $1000 over the base price of $1795 for a one floppy unit.) The hard disk will run off batteries! DG has a version with an ELD screen, and expansion options including an external 5.25" floppy drive, a card with RGB and composite output, etc. Toshiba has a set of systems out. The T3100 has an ELD screen, which is nice and clear but has to be plugged into the wall. The T1100 has an LCD screen, 256K RAM, runs off batteries, and comes standard with 2 720K 3.5" floppies, parallel port, serial port, color RGB port, B/W composite port, charger, and DOS. The 1000 PLUS is like the T1100 but comes standard with 640K RAM. (I may not quite have this right, since I've never seen a T1100 which isn't a plus, it's possible it's missing a few of these options.) The T1100 PLUS lists at $2395 but the introductory price at MicroCenter was $1995, leading me to believe it will be rare for anyone to spend more than $1995 for it. The T1100 plus also comes with a non-copy-protected copy of SideKick. All three systems are very compatible with each other and with vanilla DOS systems. They all have the same floppy format, and will boot each others versions of DOS (at least, the combinations I've tried work: the DG DOS boots on the IBM and the Toshiba.) The older DG/1 had serial ports that weren't software compatible with a regular PC, but all three versions come with compatible serial ports. I've booted the Venix boot floppy (copied to a 3.5" 360K floppy) on all three, and it works. (You can't do much with the tiny shell it gives you and a full 360K filesystem, but I suspect it can be made to run on the DG/1 with the hard disk, if you want to fill your 10MB hard disk up with Venix.) All three systems emulate an IBM color graphics display, using 200x640 monochrome LCD bitmaps. (The IBM will also emulate a monochrome display, should you have some program that insists on the monochrome, but the text isn't any clearer.) All three systems have full 25x80 displays (actually, the DG/1 has some extra graphics rows to go to 256x640 pixels, but this doesn't break anything.) The displays are similar, but the DG/1 is the clear winner in this area. The IBM and Toshiba have a black on white LCD display that is about the size of a typical keyboard (ignoring extra keypads) - that is, it's too short for the width, and things look slightly smashed. There is a contrast adjustment, and the screen tilts 180 degrees to take maximum advantage of existing light. It's pretty easy to read outdoors in sunlight or under flourescent light (which you'll always find when they demo it to you) but incandescent light is harder - you must get the light source somewhere behind you to be able to see the screen, and then you'll have to do some fiddling with the angle. Since typical hotel rooms and lounges and typical homes have incandescent light, this is an annoyance, but it can be gotten around. The DG/1 display is black with a green background. I found it extremely easy to read from any angle, but I didn't have the chance to try it at night in an incandescent room. (The green background is not really annoying, and the contrast control tends to turn off the green at some settings.) Note that the Toshiba ads for the T1100 show what appears to be the same green background screen, but this is not what you get on the actual T1100. The IBM, Toshiba, and older (second version) DG/1 all have comparable screens. The IBM and DG/1 weigh about 13 pounds and are about 14" x 12" x 3". The Toshiba weighs about 10 pounds and is about 12" x 12" x 3". For a portable, this makes a lot of difference: the Toshiba actually fits in my briefcase, while the DG and IBM must be toted in the other hand. They all have built-in handles, and come with a carrying case into which you can put things like the manuals, floppies, recharger, etc. (The rechargers are really just transformers which serve both to run the unit off wall current and to power the true rechargers, which are internal.) If you've ever carried one of these carrying cases on a plane, you'll realize you're already loaded down with a briefcase and possibly a garment bag or other luggage, and the extra bag for the computer is a considerable inconvenience. (The data sheet on the DG/1 in front of me syas it only weighs 10.5 lbs. But it sure seemed heavier than that to me - about the same as the IBM.) The keyboards are another story. Everybody goes to some kind of special pain to fit an MS DOS keyboard in a laptop and still have room for a couple extra keys for something. The numeric/arrow keypad is gone from all of them. There is generally a cluster of arrow keys near the right hand shift key, and you must press num lock to get a numeric pad, which is overlayed on the 789uiojklm keys. When using a program like crosstalk, which turns on num lock by default, this can be annoying, but otherwise it's no big deal. The IBM keyboard can best be described as "braindamaged", and worst as "rectal". It has caps lock to the left of A, control keys on either side of the space bar. It's ugly and wastes a lot of space. The DG/1 keyboard has a sane layout, but the keys are smaller than most keyboards, so things are a bit cramped. I've found you have to hit the DG/1 keys from straight up to reliably make them register; sometimes the shift and CR keys stick on me. But this isn't hard to get used to. The Toshiba keyboard is full sized and sane in all ways except one: there is only half enough room for ESC to the left of 1, so they moved it up a row to the left of the function keys (above 1.) This is annoying but since there's no key where ESC should be, I think I'll be able to get used to it. The old DG/1 would automatically power off (losing everything) when you shut the lid. The current generation is smarter than that. The DG/1 stays on, but the display blanks after being idle for several minutes, so you can carry it around running for several hours. The Toshiba is the same, and in addition an alarm sounds for a few seconds if you shut the lid while it's powered on, as a reminder. The IBM has the neatest solution here: when it times out, it writes its state onto the floppy disk, and completely powers itself off. Then, when you next power it on, it reads the disk and resumes where you left off! I'm not sure exactly how this works, but I suspect it writes a DOS file, so it may not work without a DOS floppy in the A drive. Anyway, I chose the Toshiba T1100 PLUS, partly because it's so small and light, partly because it had immediate availability. (MicroCenter has the T1100 and the IBM in stock, but to get the DG you must order through Data General, and it takes several weeks.) I was also impressed with the list of standard features. (My only extra expenses were for an adapter cable from the Toshiba/IBM-AT 9 pin RS232 to 25 pin, and for a Microsoft mouse, which happily will plug directly into the 9 pin serial slot.) I also had to buy some floppies, and a 3.5" drive to put into a resident PC to copy data over. One problem I've run into is that Opus 3.5" floppies are NOT recommended. They work fine in a DG/1, but in the Toshiba, they tend to stick on something when you put them in, and you must wiggle them just right to get them inserted and locked, and then only one time in three will they read. (My Toshiba apparently has a fussier A drive than others, I had almost no trouble with the B drive, and much less trouble on their demo T1100.) MicroCenter tells me that the IBM Convertable actually eats the Opus floppies, and you have to use pliers to get them out! I haven't figured out what it is about Opus that causes this problem; the only obvious difference is a clear sticker on the metal slide, but it looks too thin to make a difference. 3M and Sony floppies work fine, as do the DOS and Sidekick floppies that came with the T1100. Getting data back and forth is nontrivial. MicroCenter didn't have any of the options in yet (the modem and external drive, for example, or the expansion chassis.) I could have played games with Kermit or Xmodem, but I'm not real comfortable with them. While I've ordered UULINK and intend to get the internal modem, I don't have them yet either. So what I did is buy an IBM (official big blue) 3.5" half height floppy drive, which only cost about $150 or so. I found an AT&T 6300 with two floppy drives sitting around here lightly used, and replaced the B drive with the new drive. The instructions that came with the IBM drive were very complete (they describe every screw to take out and put back in) but since they only cover an IBM XT, all the screws were different, and I wound up ignoring the instructions. This turned out to be a mistake, because the 3.5" drive failed to work at all. I eventually read the instructions and discovered that you have to remove a terminating resistor which for some reason they left on the floppy. Once I did that, it still failed under the AT&T provided DOS 3.1, but it booted the Toshiba DOS 2.11 happily when I plugged it in as the A drive. (The salesman told me that older versions of DOS would handle a 3.5" drive fine, except that I couldn't format disks without DOS 3.2. He was wrong.) So a little copying of floppies and switching the A and B plugs, and I had a 5.25" floppy with Toshiba DOS on it happily running SIMTERM and able to read, write, and format both size disks. The only catch is that it doesn't know about the AT&T's clock/calendar, so it sets the date to Jan 1 1986 when it boots if you don't have it prompt you. This was no big deal for what this system does, but it's easy enough to have two different floppies used to boot, depending on what you want to do. One thing that surprised me about the Toshiba DOS is that it's missing a lot. In particular, there is no GWBASIC on the disk and no GWBASIC manual. I've never gotten a version of DOS before without a BASIC. Since most of the games in the world (at least in my collection) are written in BASIC, and since my kids love to play the games, this was a serious problem. Fortunately, the GWBASIC from the DG/1 runs fine on the Toshiba. It's allowed me to test out lots of graphics, colors, and the like (using the LCD and using an RGB monitor) and it's 99.9% compatible. (Certain graphics demos, like the BALL that comes with the IBM PC, seem to offset one of the colors horizontally by a few pixels, for reasons I don't understand. But I haven't run into a case where this really matters.) Service is another interesting area. MicroCenter says that within a month, they will be an authorized Toshiba dealer, stocking parts and able to do repairs on-site. This is also true of IBM. But MicroCenter refuses to touch the DG/1, apparently not for technical reasons but because they have had business differences with Data General in the past. Data General does have their own service, but you have to mail the PC in to be fixed. This is not really a bad thing, however, becuase for a reasonable price, you can buy a service contract where, if your PC breaks, they will ship you another one overnight, and you send the broken one back to them in the same container. Overnight repair is pretty fast - certainly faster than putting your PC into the shop across town and waiting a few days. In summary, all of these laptops are good choices. If size, weight, or standard features are most important to you, get the Toshiba. If you're more concerned about clarity of the display, or insist that all the keys be in the right places, or need a hard disk, get the DG/1. If saving state and auto-shutoff is most important to you, get the IBM. Mark