IBM Notes gets more hate than it deserves. I used to support it, it was fine.
Looking back through the thread, I think were still missing some Apple products:
My dept office bought one of those.
Also, non-Apple - the Compaq “Portable”. The keyboard latched onto the front
Yes, that was the whole screen…
It cost $3950 - in 1983 dollars, the equivalent of just over $6000 today.
I found one of those in the World Trade Center. It was abandoned in an office because the keyboard didn’t work. Which I fixed by reseating the cord. Took it home on the subway, it weighed a ton. Barely portable. I played around with it a couple of times and it remained in a closet until I moved, when I threw it away.
2/10 would not drag home again.
My dad used to drag one of those around. I’d somehow found some crude rogue-like RPG that I would occasionally play on it.
The Apple LISA! Basically a Proto-Mac (with a WHOLE MEGABYTE of RAM) which was bananas expensive, and after the Mac 128K came out was renamed the Macintosh XL.
A friend’s dad had one of those back in the day. We’d go over to his house and play games on it…loaded from floppies, of course. Beast is the only one I remember. I tried playing it again a few years later on a newer PC and it was unplayable because everything was running at super speed…there was no adjustment for clock speed.
My dad had one of these for awhile… but I don’t remember him ever carrying it around with him. I don’t even actually know why he had it. At that time, he had a side gig where he was writing manuals for various technology, so this might have been one of them, I don’t know. (I was like 12 at the time, what do I know.)
I don’t remember at all whether it had any kind of games on it or not.
Look at the size of that monitor! Makes the 9 inch diagonal classic Mac monitor look extravagantly large.
IIRC, Infocom supported the Osborne, but I can’t imagine playing a text adventure on that screen!
This was the portable tech that I sort of lusted over:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Atari-stacy-001.jpg/800px-Atari-stacy-001.jpg
I think my parents still have an Osborne 2 kicking around. With a built in acoustic coupler modem and dot matrix printer!
When the Mac came out there was no native development environment for it - you could only develop Mac applications by using the Lisa and cross-compiling to a Mac executable. I was in a Mac interest group that spun off 4 of us who wanted to make a Mac application. One of the guys was an independent contractor and had a Lisa. But for the other three of us, we borrowed $5k from my parents (!) to buy a Lisa, and we shipped the machine around to do our program.
I know my parents thought they’d never see that money again. However, we did finish the application, we did get an advance, and we did pay my parents back the $5k.
It was called StatWorks and I actually found a page that links to some info about it here.
I have no earthly idea what happened to the Lisa after our project (one of the guys formed a software company, so I expect he ended up with it).
I had one of those as my PC at my first job post-graduation.
Did many Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets on that sucker.
And did my first play-through of Starflight (I hauled it home on the weekends)
On a green monochrome monitor? Ouch. But Starflight was such a great game it probably held up great anyway.
Yeah, it was a step down from graduate school, where I had an IBM PC XT
…and played Zork, Ultima 3 etc at night since I was living in my grad school lab. I didn’t have Starflight at that time…I can’t remember if it was even out at that time or if I bought it a few years after it was released.
Every time I see an Amiga, it makes me a bit sad. It was such and awesome machine. It was a magical time to be living in. I had an Amiga 500, and eventually an Amiga 3000.
I love that you can run Windows 95 on your Linux box. In the '90s I had dual-boot systems, now there’s no need to choose!
Does it come with a copy of netscape navigator?
If they really wanted to be authentic, it would come on an AOL free trial CD.
And it would crash early and often.
And still require you to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS even though it was allegedly a full GUI OS.