The second laptop I purchased, the one I really put to work, was an NEC UltraLite. Its claim to fame was that it was the lightest laptop in the world. In 1988, and at 4.4 pounds, it was!
Today’s ultralight notebooks are far lighter — and more powerful — than the NEC UltraLite. But after discovering that my Dell 320LT was utterly un-portable, I wanted something I could use.
My UltraLite had 2MB of storage on what was called a silicon disk. Today you’d call it an SSD and, once again, laptops use that technology for lightweight storage. The device had 640KB of RAM. It ran PC-DOS in ROM, meaning I couldn’t upgrade the operating system.
The UltraLite lacked an internal floppy drive. Instead, I used an octopus-like cable to connect it to my desktop computer. Once connected, file transfer software coordinated files between the laptop and desktop. The file transfer software worked really well, which is another reason I enjoyed using the UltraLite.
The battery lasted for a consistent two hours, which was awesome back then. That meant that I took the UltraLite on the road quite a bit. In fact, I made it my ritual: Every Saturday, I drove about 10 miles from my apartment to the Pannikin Coffee House up near Del Mar, near the Pacific coast.
At the Pannikin, I’d order coffee or tea, plus a Greek salad. Or if I felt my weight could tolerate it, I’d order a slice of cheesecake.
The coffee house shared space with a bookstore and it had a really funky, fun atmosphere. Such an environment is common these days, but it was unique back in the late 1980s. And I was the only person there who sat down with a cup of coffee and opened a laptop computer.
This isn’t my original UltraLite, but another I purchased a few years back for a photo in my Laptops For Dummies book. The Pannikin coffee mug, however, is the same mug I purchased some 25 years ago.
My reason for going to the coffee house with the laptop was to get work done. I set out each Saturday to write my computer magazine column at the Pannikin. It was a way to get my homebody out and into public. The two-hour battery life in the UltraLite was perfect; it kept me focused.
Remember, there was no Wi-Fi Internet back then. I had no games installed on the UltraLite (it was text-only), so I actually did get work done. I wrote many words in that coffee house.
The only problem I encountered was that my unique setup frequently drew the attention of curious onlookers. I’d wind up talking laptops with various people. But still, it was great to get out of my apartment, enjoy a cup of joe and a salad, get be laptopping on the road.
I don’t know what fate befell my UltraLite. I do recall that it stopped working for some reason. I remember checking into the cost of a new battery or Silicon drive, and it seemed excessive. It would be several more years before I purchased another laptop.
There is something seriously wrong with that laptop that it would have such poor battery life since it is text only screen. I recall there was a portable, I believe a version of the TRS-80:
http://oldcomputers.net/kc.html
that had battery life of something like 10 to 20 hours. The old Palm Pilots had a CPU of something like 10mhz and they have batter life of about 4 weeks. I have a feeling that computer makers were just selling stuff that looked modern back then but was really not taking efficient advantage of technology and so portable computing did not take off back then like it could have.
Comment by BradC — April 17, 2013 @ 1:42 pm
I believe the original battery life was something like 6 hours. It didn’t compare with the Tandy-100, which ran from AA batteries, but it was a good life. I remember it lasting 2 good hours after it was broken in. Remember, the batteries were NiCADs back then, not Lithium-ion. And it was some sort of battery issue that made me retire the thing. Now that I’ve had time to ruminate, I think I eventually disassembled it, which is why I don’t have it any longer.
Comment by admin — April 17, 2013 @ 3:33 pm