This is a special laptop for me. I got it when I was a teenager from a friend and it was my primary machine in high school. I wasn’t cool, I was just poor. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing various stuff on that computer and doing a lot of things.
From the hardware perspective, I remember it had a 386 processor which had two speeds: 10 and 20MHz. There was a keystroke combination in the BIOS setup that switched between the two, but even at the high setting, the laptop still had a limited set of capabilities. The RAM I had in mine was 4 MB and the hard disk was a 60MB Western Digital. It was severely underpowered and it was retro even by standards of 23 years ago, because I was using in 2000 a computer made in 1991, as shown by the FCC report, or more likely 1992 (considering the manufacturing date of the hard disk is December 13, 1991).
Because I got a new computer somewhere in 2002, this laptop was left to collect dust. Unfortunately, the power supply went bust at some point, rendering the computer useless at that point. I remember I had a manual of it, but I threw it away, as I considered it trash, without knowing the fact that one day I will be into retro computers. After moving it from place to place for more than 10 years after the PSU died, I decided it was time to throw the old computer away, mostly because I opened it many many times and the structure became brittle and it was filled with cracks. I decided to keep the HDD though, in case I would some day be able to recover the data from it. It took me about 4-5 years but at some point I remembered I had it and bought an IDE adapter and I was able to recover almost all its data. By the way, the image of the hard disk board is high resolution, so if you need more info about the chips and board of a Western Digital Tidbit 60 Hard Drive (WDAH60), check it below in all 12MP glory.
While the data contained wasn’t immense, as the HDD was only 60MB, it used a compression algorithm known as DoubleSpace (the precursor of Drivespace), which allowed the HDD to store up to about 110MB. While the contents I recovered are not to be shared, they did contain some chain letters of text fun jokes, ASCII art and nude photos (at 640x480 in 256 colors — which the display could only show as shades of gray anyway). I also managed to recover a script for mIRC that I built back then for mIRC running under Windows on 16-bit (for Windows 3.11), as well as some prank .bat files which looked like they formatted your computer and shit, but it’s all cringe as fuck (remember I did that when I was 15).
The unit itself was bulky and had a battery that looked like four D-size batteries into a yellow plastic film. It looked like a fucking dynamite. I used to call it dynamite. Of course, it was depleted and the only way to use the laptop was for it to be constantly plugged in to the mains. The screen was bad, you can see it in the movie I will add below what a bad refresh rate it had. The video is not mine, I just found it online.
It had no speakers (or soundcard) and it relied on system beeps to alert me of anything, and while it did have a floppy disk unit, it was half-busted, and was stuck in read-only-mode, meaning that whatever data got into the laptop could never get out of it. However, I’d still write school essays and papers and would carry my laptop to the printing place where they still had a printer which used a parallel LPT connector so I could print them. For me, that was high-tech!
Speaking of connectors, it had an external VGA output, a SCSI connector, a serial 9-pin connector and another parallel port. I don’t remember if it had an integrated modem or if you could add one, but it definitely has a phone jack (or I think mine just had a plastic cover). It has a PS/2 port for an external keyboard, but the built-in keyboard was actually very very good, probably one of the best I’ve used.
I hope I’ll one day find another unit, make it functional and play with it, but the laptop is so obscure, I might never find it. Update: I actually found one on ebay and I was able to get it. It’s going to come from across the pond, so it will take it more than a month to get here, but let’s hope it’s gonna arrive in one piece and that I can make it work again. That would be so cool, stay tuned!
