Notebook Commodore C286-LT '90

Habra users are presented with a short story about the once very busy and unusual laptop Commodore C286-LT.

Under the cut a lot of photos and the life story of a laptop :)



This model was produced between Commodore International from the year 90 and until its bankruptcy at 94m. Mine was purchased in the 91st year in Geneva, Switzerland for 4,000 Swiss francs (3,000 USD at that rate).





The laptop is equipped with an Intel CS80C286-12 processor with 12.5MHz, 2Mb of RAM (the option of expanding to 5Mb was available), a built-in drive for 3.5 "floppy disks, a 10" LCD display, which I will focus on in more detail. It all works on the OS MsDOS. All childhood tormented the envy of 386x owners for working with Windows 3.1.

By the way, it is unusual, first of all, that Microsoft’s operating system is on this laptop, and not for example Amiga.

What I want to tell about the display: It has a VGA-resolution with 4 shades of gray, but has a yellow backlight, due to which the image is blue-yellow. Sometimes I felt like it was with this really happy person: everyone has a black-and-white image, but I can say color :) I have brightness and contrast settings on the side of the spinners (pictured). I take this opportunity to convey my regards to laptop manufacturers - such cool users, in my opinion, are an order of magnitude superior in usability to the idea of ​​using function keys to adjust brightness on modern laptops.



The size of the laptop is similar to my 15-inch asus laptop, it weighs about 4kg. Power supply - another 1.5 kg.

To assess the external dimensions, I decided to compare it with the Asus eee900, at first I thought that it was not the most representative object, but then I realized that I was not mistaken: the screen is almost the same :)





An interesting surface of the case of this notebook: it is rough and sometimes gives the impression of some kind of pile material. Vaguely reminiscent of very stiff suede. The case is made of a metal alloy, most likely of aluminum. To the touch not to understand.

The cover is fixed with two latches on the sides. The hinges of the lid are located not on the edge of the body, but with some indentation (seen in the photo). Behind them is the battery.



With the battery removed, the



Battery held for about a couple of hours. For that time it was a luxury.



The photo shows that its capacity is only 1700 mAh.

Under the batteries is a bios battery manufactured by Mitsubishi.



On the back there are ports: VGA, COM, LPT. I had to use only COM.



Kliviatura removed quite easily, underneath all shielded and can not see anything:)







To be honest, when I photographed this laptop, I was more struck by the fact that the appearance of the components remained virtually unchanged over the last years 20.

This one kind of gives me special pleasure:



With removed protective screens:



36Mb hard drive seems to be:



The most delicious: processor:)



"Miniature" power supply:



Unfortunately, I could not revive it, so the most interesting show did not work. The laptop lay in the basement of the garage for more than 3 years, apparently humidity or low temperature killed him. There will be time - even so I want to try to restore this miracle.

On this laptop I started to write my first programs on turbo basic, tried to pick C. I got it at the age of 6 years.

It was very annoying that there was no graphic editor, but I wanted to draw, so I used OrCAD for these purposes:) - a kind of difficult childhood.

All Keen 4, 5, 6 went through the games (I was a big fan), I remember some races, tetris and a field of miracles :) I killed the system several times completely, deleting system files or something like that. In general, imbued with love for laptops in full.

Photos July 5, 2009. The full album can be viewed here .