Gaming on a 25 YEAR OLD Laptop!!

[MadDuke]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

Proper fucking keyboard.

Something that pisses me off to no end on today's systems. Everything is falling all over themselves trying to emulate an Apple laptop with their shyte chiclet keyboards. No tactile feel, no travel, utterly useless for any sort of long term work....when you've had a proper keyboard.

My 1st laptop was a (British, IIRC) Bondwell 286 with a built-in security system. You could set it and if anyone moved the laptop, a siren would go off and the keyboard would lock, pretty slick stuff back then.

 

Also grey-scale monitor and 20MB hard drive with 1MB RAM. 

 Yeah. I have an HP Elitebook 840 G5.  Keyboard is quite OK, but the saddest part is.  Other than bezels, ports and slimness. Nothing much has really changed.  Even this old thing that Linus tested.  If they didn't include a CD, Floppy, dual PCMCIA and an integrated power supply and had a flat battery the thing wouldn't have been that fat   hehehehe

[RejZoR]

I still remember when we were playing Dangerous Dave on some monochromatic laptop back in early 90's at friends place. Until he punched it in the screen when playing some game (could be Danegrous Dave even hehe). Good times lol

[X_X]

7 hours ago, Nowak said:

While the laptop is undoubtedly of the '90s, 25 years ago (as of 2019) would have been 1994, and laptops from 1994 did not have that much RAM, a 100MHz Pentium or a trackpad, and only a handful had a CD drive. In fact, the screen:body ratio would be much worse. The year this laptop is from is more 1997 - 1998, which would make this machine 21 or 22 years old.

 

Source: I own a laptop from 1997.

 

Edit: It appears to be a Compaq Armada 1500, which was released in 1997, according to manuals I can find online.

I remember it that way too but I guess 25 years sounds more spectacular than 20 years. When I bought my first laptop from 25 years ago it also came with grey scale LCD screen although you could run color on an external monitor, 4MB of RAM (4x 1MB modules), 120MB Conner HDD (huge for that time), a 33MHz 486DLC with external 387 and DOS. Cost over $2000. Later upgraded to Win 3.1 and even later partitioned the drive to 60MB/60MB to install another OS. Not used so much for gaming though except for a little Doom now and then.

[Gr00vy]

Does enyone know how did Linus get the mouse clicks working at 1602? I've had the same problem with Populous The Beginning on my W10 T430 and never figured it out.

[derr12]

go farther... i wanna see some number-munchers.

[brandishwar]

The line printer ("parallel") and serial ports on the back... wow...

 

And USB came about in 1997 and support was available with Windows 95 OSR 2.1. The retail version did not have that, not even a service pack to add it. Windows 98 had it in the Retail version of Windows. Linux didn't get USB support till much later... I want to say the 2.4 kernel had it built in. I remember patching a 2.2 kernel to get USB support as there was someone who extracted the USB support from the 2.3 "in development" kernel for patching to 2.2 - worked pretty well, too.

And you apparently forgot that hot-plugging a PS/2 mouse is actually a bad thing to do. Not unless you like replacing fuses on mainboards. And yes, I'm speaking from experience on that.

[danwat1234]

I remember this style. It was 2001 or so in High School. I had a Dell Latitude LM, similar to this laptop. Battery was removable of course. CDROM was as well, could hot-swap in a floppy, or a 2nd battery i believe. 

The Infrared port was awesome! Back then HP laser printers at my school had an infrared port on them and so i could wirelessly print in the computer lab without having to pay for pages!

I don't think I had a CDROM drive so what I did was I used the parallel port and used a piece of software call 'Fast PC linker' to transfer data from my desktop to my laptop with the parallel port. It was like 20KB/s transfer speed. I would transfer over a whole CDROM image and emulate on the Latitude LM with something or another to run Microsoft Bookshelf or Encylopedia Encarta...

The PCMCIA slots, I think I was able to get a Wireless-B card for it, but not 100% certain. 

The Latitude LM had a cool secondary display that showed battery charging, CDROM light, Hard drive light. 

In the end I ended up crushing it with a garage door... I should have kept the laptop. 

 

It was a cool machine.  Yes the keyboard was awesome. So is the one on my Asus G50VT (~2008) gaming laptop). They don't make em like this anymore. 

 

[fred7010]

I actually acquired an IBM Thinkpad 755CE about a year ago. Now that's a proper 25 year old laptop, as far as I can tell on the Thinkpad wiki it was released in 1994.
Forget about USB, this thing doesn't even have a CD-ROM drive. Trying to install anything is a nightmare, I only have 1 floppy disk and an external floppy drive, but programs in those days often came with a whole stack of floppy disks. I think MS Office 95 needed something like 80 floppy disks, so installing it was a painful process of: install the first part, remove disk, put it in the external reader with my modern PC, wipe disk, copy next file part across, unmount disk, reinsert in the laptop, install that part. Repeat for a whole day.

Then you find that one of the parts in the file you downloaded is actually corrupted so the whole install fails....
All in all though, even though you can't do anything with it, it seems to work pretty much perfectly apart from the battery!

[Homelessscootalo]

That was really impressive how well it still ran.

[PutuNix]

I bought one of these in 1997 in SF, It was £3,500 in the UK but only $3,500 in the States. And that was when there were ~$1.6 to the £. I used it to build part of a system for Rolls Royce Nuclear Engineering on a project to manage the safety documents for the Trident submarine fleet! Paid for itself several times over. 

[Anthem Anderson]

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