Uncreative Labs

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Just curious, early 90’s I can think of several B&W VGA laptops but not sure when they fell out of favor.

Any ideas?

And tablets and other micro portables don’t count.

I owned a big 286 laptop with a purple charger display which sucked (even wha would have been a world better)

Ah well

Thanx
Ryan

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Had a Compaq Portable LTE 4/25 with mono-vga. Still have it somewhere. But some "more-recent" TI Travelmates (486-DX2-50/66) may have had it as well. I'd suspect it'd be a rare thing to find a Pentium with it (but not saying it's impossible)...

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 377 Location: Stuttgart, Germany

I had a Toshiba T1850 at one point in time. Some 386 clocking at 25Mhz if I remember correctly. I believe there was also a T1850C already (C for "color") so monochrome was probably already declining in popularity back then.

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I've been doing a lot of research on old laptops lately, mostly the NEC Versa which I"m starting to collect.

I don't know for sure but the NEC Ultralite Versa series (PC-4xx) was offering Monochrome on their laptops as late as the E-series in 1994. Even the manual shows the monochrome screen version of the E (40E/50E). Those screens could also fit and work on the Versa M/75 and P/75 as well. The mono screen was a 9.4" with a Kyocera panel on it, and the color came in 640x480 using a NEC NL6448AC30 panel. Later they introduced an 800x600 model.

All versions of the screen were available with touch/pen support at one point or another. I'm thinking they continued monochrome a little longer as a cost-saving measure for people who wanted touch/pen support but did not really care about having color enough to pay the $5000+ for a unit with one.

Prior to this the latest mono laptop I've ever seen was the 1992 NanTan built Prostar 9200M (FMAK9200 is the model# I believe, either that for FMAP9200). It was a 486 based laptop that used socketed Desktop 486 chips - not SMDs - and could run anything from a 486 SX-20 to a 486 DX4-100. Which lines up perfectly with the TwinHead Slimnote 433SX/M I had, which was a monochrome 33MHz 486.

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2021 2:44 am

T-R-A wrote:

Had a Compaq Portable LTE 4/25 with mono-vga. Still have it somewhere. But some "more-recent" TI Travelmates (486-DX2-50/66) may have had it as well. I'd suspect it'd be a rare thing to find a Pentium with it (but not saying it's impossible)...

That's pretty close to what my TravelMate 4000e's processor. Every one of those I've seen uses a color screen.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Thought I remember seeing some when I worked for Siemens (which was a former TI facility), but that was now over 13 years ago and the memories starts fading when you're over 60 years old...