Due to massive amounts of caffeine & sleep deprivation, Allison J Parent said:
>Most of the early laptops were either 8085 or z80 as both required less
>support chips than the 8080 (8080+8224+8228) as the 8080 chip set required
>three voltages and lots of board space. the 8085 or z80 were single 5v
>at lower power needs. the 6502 was also popular for the application.
Correctomundo! -- Motorola was actually rather late coming out with CMOS
versions of their CPU's / support chips, so they weren't a drop in the
bucket of the laptop/portable market compared to Commie/MOS / Intel / Zilog.
>Tandy improved the 100 with the 102 which has a lager screen.
FYI: Kyocera actually made the Tandy 100/102/200, the NEC 8201A and the
Olivetti M10... I think there were others, but I cannot remember them right
offhand.
Also, the Tandy 200 actually came out before the Tandy 102 -- twice the
screen size, less _maximum_ contiguous memory but more total banked memory
(standard -- not counting 3rd-party solutions) and had MS MultiPlan on ROM
standard as well -- and the keyboard was even better, the cursor keys were
in a + style and were real, not chicklet keys. (Gee, can you tell I have
one and I love it?)
The Tandy 600 was OEM'd by Zenith, not Kyocera and was (as rumor has it)
the first laptop with a built-in floppy drive (3.5", 80 track, SS/DD 360K).
Zenith marketed a similar machine, (same screen - 80x16 / keyboard) but it
did not have the floppy drive and the programs in ROM were different, IIRC.
Hope this helps,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger | Why does Hershey's put nutritional
Programmer, NorthernWay | information on their candy bar wrappers
zmerch_at_northernway.net | when there's no nutritional value within?
Received on Mon Nov 10 1997 - 10:17:12 GMT