DOS Days – Laptop Displays

I remember my 800x600 Toshiba laptop back in 1997 then one of my colleagues got a posh 1024x768 HP Omnibook. I suddenly felt like a dinosaur computing user.

I wish large greyscale LCDs were more available. Since the decline of monochrome LCDs, it’s very hard to find these cheaply. I miss both the PDA aesthetic and the low power consumption, and the e-ink ghosting issue is much worse, so it isn’t a great substitute.

LCDs were indestructible as long as you didn’t leave them out in extremely hot or cold weather.

I loved my old Toshiba Tecra 780-DVD back in the day. I bought it used as laptop prices were falling, and got a lot of kit with it. A web cam (unheard of for its generation), DVD drive and hardware decoding (also very baller), and a docking station where I could chunk in PCI and ISA cards and full size desktop drives (I put in a DVD burner and a large desktop HDD - I forget the size, but probably tens of gigabytes).

I told my wife that in today's dollars, the whole kit would have cost about $11k. It's hard to sink that kind of money into a laptop with OEM accessories today even if you tried hard.

The old STN/FSTN monochrome panels had surprisingly good power efficiency and excellent static contrast.

We lost that niche when the industry fully committed to color TFT,and e ink never quite replaced the responsiveness.

Mousetrails, anyone?

I was talking with someone about a post we saw on social media, a $4999 laptop from 1992 or whatever, and it had something like an 8" screen.

"How did people even use those laptops!?"

Then you remember everyone didn't have a laptop for surfing Facebook and Amazon. You probably only had one of those if you were an executive or traveling salesperson.

Feeling old, I remember seeing all those models on sale at computer stores.

I remember my father having a work laptop with what seems to have been a gas plasma display (it looked pretty similar to the one in the article). Crazy to think how far we've come.

Windows 3.1 had a color scheme called "Plasma Power Saver", and that would be what it was for.

The coolest use of a gas plasma display I saw in person was at my teenage software engineering internship.

We had the coolest engineering workstation computers, Sun and almost everything else, with the huge CRTs... but strangely cooler, in a way, was the sysadmin's Ethernet diagnostics device.

IIRC, it was built atop a rebadged Toshiba laptop with orange gas plasma display, and included a glowing bar visual display for network traffic (packets? collisions?), with corresponding geiger counter sound effects.

A modern IPS LCD or OLED just wouldn't pair as nicely with the sound. (Analog gauges or Nixie tubes would work, though.)

I read this title and immediately got "Dance Hall Days" in my head.

In 1997, I paid $500 extra to upgrade my Toshiba 420CDT laptop to the "active display". The contrast was mind blowing. Totally worth it! ;-)

Something about the older beige laptops that is fascinating, I had gotten some Libretto C50s but sadly they are outdated, also keyboard is too small

> The orange gas plasma display from a Toshiba T3200SX (1989)

For some reason I love the computers of the 1980s era, plus minus some more years, even up to about 1995 or so.

Today's computers are of course much more powerful and cheaper per calculating unit, but also more boring. Those things in the 1980s were so wild. Also before that, 1970s. 1950s and 1960s look outright alien - also very cool.

Of course having all that in a small smartphone is epic too, but the hardware today just doesn't interest me anymore. It seems like a "problem solved" whereas in the past, people were trying harder, including micro-optimising all available resources. That required a different kind of creativity.

Perhaps this will come back one day in the future but I doubt it. Quantum computers would mean people don't care much about maximizing everything to the bare metal if things are already mega-fast for most tasks to solve.