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Comment by webwielder2 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the "iPad of the 90s" be, you know, the Newton MessagePad by Apple?

And the iPad of the 80's would be the Apple //c as featured in the movie 2010. It was seen being used on a beach, complete with LCD screen, and this was 1984.

There's a couple of issues though, the //c did not run off battery power, so you'd need a long cord, and the LCD was terrible, I don't think you'd be able to read it in direct sunlight. But if you have a long phone cable to go with the power cord, maybe you could have sent a fax? Or at least a telex.

You had a few early laptops like the DG/One [1] that could run off of battery by 1984. But there was really no way to communicate without plugging into a phone line. (You could maybe have used a radio modem in principle but you mostly had to connect to landline phone service to communicate.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General-One

In the early 90's, I remember seeing a dude typing away furiously on an Apple //c at a coffeeshop on Haight Street in San Francisco. I did a double take when I realized he didn't have a screen or a plug. It turns out he was a stenographer, just practicing his typing.

I've seen pictures on the intarwebs of people using full Commodore PETs at coffee shops. I think in Toronto.

My favorite Commodore PET appearance in a music video is Pete Shelley's 1981 Homosapien:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HwmO_GZfzI

It's the professional version with the Big Boy keyboard, and it's running some silly BASIC program printing out text in a loop.

There was an all-in-one Commodore 64 that would have been coffee-shop-friendly. It was "luggable" (a stone away from being "portable"). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64

I had one of those. It was fun, but "luggable" makes it sound more romantic than it was to carry around. It weighed 10.5kg.

10.5kg becomes heavy very quickly, especially because of its awkward shape.

> It was "luggable" (a stone away from being "portable").

It was "luggable" (a cinderblock away from being "portable".)

FTFY

A stone is a common British unit of weight equalling fourteen pounds. You actually unfixed his sentence.

TIL! I guess I Americanized it, then?

A hillbilly never-used-a-computer-a-day-in-his-life relative of mine has one. He bought it new, but never even turned it on.

The last time I saw it was about five years ago, and it was in absolutely mint condition, even though he keeps it under a tarp with a bunch of junk in a barn.

For decades he kept promising to send it to me since he has no use for it. Recently that changed to "I'm gonna use it some day" so I no longer have any hope of getting my hands on it.

TRS-80 Model 100 was released in 1983 and was supposed to be quite popular: http://www.oldcomputers.net/trs100.html

It got 16 hours of runtime on four AA batteries.

Way before my time, but I got to play around with one in 2000 and really liked the form factor.

There were also glorified calculators like the 1980 TRS-80 PC-1 (https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=937&st=1). Never used that particular model, but that style of keyboard/display in a palmtop computer is not very ergonomic IMO.

There is a list of 1980s portables on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_portable_computers

That list may look long, but it is probably far from complete. For example, at the 2017 VCF PNW I got to play with a 1980s "glorified calculator" Lisp machine handheld. Can't remember the manufacturer, but it is definitely not on that list, and the only reference I was able to find with a quick web search was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lisp_machine#Sony_and_Lis...

So there were a lot more portable computers around in the 1980s than you suspect.

Was the Newton network capable?

Not out of the box and probably not for the first couple years at least and I don't think wireless (i.e. cellular... there was no wifi back then) ever. There was a serial modem dongle but that still required a land line.

The closest thing we had to wireless networking was infrared serial to either other devices or a computer. It generally didn't work well.

The Newton could connect to some online services via wired modem. It could also do e-mail and with some additional software PPP and TCP/IP. Apple sold a wired serial modem for the Newton and several PCMCIA models were also available. It was possible to use a cell phone to dial out, treating it like a serial analog modem. I don't know anyone that did that but it was technically possible.

There were a few good network apps for IRC, newsgroups, and even a few limited web browsers.

With Newton OS 2.x people got WaveLAN (pre-standard) and later a few 802.11b PCMCIA cards working. It was all a complete pain in the ass and only the most dedicated Newton fans even bothered.

Sounds like you stuck with it longer than I did. I can only speak to the original MessagePad 100 since that was the only model I bought. I still have the Apple modem dongle lying around here somewhere which is what I was referring to. While it worked, I never found it a terribly practical peripheral: slow even for its time and it devoured batteries.

The Apple modem had its own AA battery but it did devour them. I had one but only used it a handful of times and each time was a hassle and ultimately disappointing.

There is actually a scene in the movie ‘Under Siege 2’ with Steven Seagal, where he uses a Newton with a fax/modem to send a fax from a moving train.

Well... No wifi... I do recall using my 120 with a data cable, connected to my Motorola Flip and that as a modem to send/receive email.

It was a great demonstration in a coffee shop - although, you would be able to watch the battery drain in real-time.

Ah yes, there was also a PCMCIA/"pc card" in that mix too.

The later version of this was using IrDA on my Nokia phone to connect my Palm Pilot to the Internet. SO SLOW, but always fun to show off to people.

My MessagePad 2100 could do AppleTalk over it's serial port and wired Ethernet with a card. There was also a pre-wifi DigitalOcean device[0] that could do wireless AppleTalk.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/19970124002055/http://digitaloce...

There was IrDA (infrared based communication) that could be used for serial connections to other Newtons, computers printers and cell phones. It was slow though, so the better step up was an actual serial connection to either a modem or a cell phone (acting as a modem).

Later versions of the OS (2.1 for sure, and I think 2.0 could run a few specific Ethernet cards) had Ethernet (10Base-T, and technically 10Base2 I think) and Wifi (802.11b only) drivers written for them.

Other comments have mentioned some options that the released Newton had, but the Newton actually had network support during development; we just couldn't work out how to fit it in the package and make it affordable.

When I first joined the Newton team the hardware guys were testing a spread-spectrum network that supported roaming devices with automatic discovery and connection. At that point all the working Newton hardware was big clunky naked circuit boards, so they tested them by ribbon-cabling them to Macintosh SEs that they wheeled around on carts to go from one network to another.

Eat up, Martha

There were quite a few devices in the same category. None of them really succeeded but I think a lot was learned from them which then could be used from the 2000s in when things started to take off.

Palm Pilot debuted in 1996?

Cellular data--or at least widespread WiFi--was pretty much a prerequisite for this class of device. That's one reason that the Palm Pilot was always something of a niche device. The need to constantly sync it made it a lot less useful than it would otherwise have been.

(I'd argue that background syncing over WiFi or cellular networks is also a reason why Podcasting 2.0 is a lot bigger than Podcasting 1.0 was.)

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