ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) (09/07/89)
Portable Mac - why wait?
Having agonized a lot on the subject of the coming portable
Macintosh I had to conclude that I might not be able to afford it
for quite some time to come after its introduction (if any) in
few weeks time, if ever. Apple will without doubt price it on a par
with demand which already seems huge and growing. Time to re-think
the priorities and look for an alternative to my present needs
for mobile, alphanumeric data entry...
Before surveying the market I drew up a list of minimum
requirements for said "portable-Macintosh"-replacement: as small
and light as possible (certainly less than the rumoured more-or-
less ordinary-size transportable Mac), a good quality keyboard,
fullsize screen (anything less than 20 lines out of the question),
ambient-light-readable screen (I consider the Toshiba 1000's LCD
one close to unreadable), a built-in editor capable of cut-and-
paste among few memory-resident, smallish documents, a serial
port for uploading locally composed text to a Mac and, hopefully,
an integral 2400 bps modem. I didn't care about battery operation -
I'd gladly give it up in exchange for any of the other functions.
In short - I'd rather have a truly portable editing terminal
AND a stationary Mac than have to schlepp around a single piece of
much heavier hardware. An intelligent terminal would do quite nicely,
thank you.
Allthough I did not have great hopes of finding something that
might fit the bill I managed to uncover 5 different models of full
QWERTY, portable VT100-terminal equipment. Two of these were just
that - pure terminals with no local processing capability of any
kind. The other three that nominally came close to my needs were
the NEC UltraLight, the Z88 Cambridge Computer and the recently
previewed but not-yet available Zenith MinisPort (BYTE/ August) .
The NEC, while a nice machine in its own right, was just a
shade too expensive to be taken under further consideration. The
MinisPort will probably cost even more (when it becomes available)
on account of its unique mini-floppy drive. The Z88 unfortunately
did not have quite the kind of display nor the quality keyboard
that I could find acceptable. Moreover, it had the added dis-
advantage of being advertised by Jerry Pournelle ;-)
However, in the course of my research I managed to discover
still another brand new product that looks very promising indeed:
an ultra-light, fullsize keyboard/ fullsize (back-lit) screen
editing terminal with an internal modem, weighting less than 3
pounds!
Granted, a terminal, no matter how portable it might be, is
not a Mac. This one, however, might just be the way to go for
hassle-free recording of "random thoughts on the go" for later
transfer into the stationary Macs (or other) computers. As it
is of interest also to non-Mac users I posted a review of it in
comp.terminals. Look for the "MINEC 1000 portable terminal review."
--
!f/ Ian Feldman/ ianf@nada.kth.se/ ianf@sekth.bitnetralph@lzfme.att.com (Ralph Brandi) (09/08/89)
The new (October) issue of MacUser lists an interesting laptop alternative to Apple's forthcoming machine: take one Atari Stacy (ST laptop) with 1 Meg of RAM, floppy drive and 20 Meg Hard drive ($1995), add the Spectre GCR by Gadgets by Small, who have been making STs into Macs for a couple of years, ($299.95). Stir to a boil with Mac Plus ROMs (sorry, Apple), available for about $125, and for something under $2500 you have a laptop Mac with trackball that weighs 15 lbs. So it ain't exactly kosher; it is cheap, though. Ralph -- Ralph Brandi [most gateways in the known universe]!att!lzfme!ralph Work flows toward the competent until they are submerged.