Atari Portfolio - The $400 Palmtop PC from 1989

This is a really cool device

Hey, it's that prop from the movie Terminator 2.

Ever heard of the "Grunt" by Texas Micro? I remember seeing it in a magazine a millions years ago, some kind of ruggedized PC dos handheld, 486 chip if I remember correctly but black and white display.

So can I hack ATMs?

It feels like I've got this wrong, but they'er expecting you to keep files on a memory card with a battery, and there's no way to change the battery without losing the files?

What is this thing for?

"Chess..... exactly the only kind of game that doesn't suck on a machine this small"

Yeah, I wrote Punkman II... vertical scrolling (full graphics too) Pacman game for the platform which wrote directly to the LCD controller and at one point, I even wrote something to tweak the refresh rate of the display to attempt grayscale colors. The routines were so fast that I had to slow them down.... but some of us made really decent homebrew games for this thing. I even wrote a Minesweeper game and a Breakout clone game which came with PSTUFF which were routines I wrote in Turbo Pascal to make your own games.

If I didn't have a hard drive crash and lose the backup of the code in 2002, I'd probably put it all in public domain. I was proud of that inline assembly code I wrote where I had to reverse bytes to the LCD controller to quickly draw graphics..... even allowing "sprite" like displays without flickering. :) Only thing I couldn't control was the vertical scrolling of the graphics causing low refresh but that's what I was working on later on to increase refresh rates to improve on that.

And despite the name in the game, yes it really was me who wrote them.... some things changed in 25 years... including me. ;)

A:/FARTS.EXE

what a cute thing ☺

i always thought jhon conner moded its guts an programing

Can you play Doom on it?

I want to see you do more pocket size and palmtop style computers. I'd be interested to see you cover the HP200LX.

Hudson made bee cards for turbo graphx/ PC engine consoles. They don't look the same(?) But is there any relation between the formats?

The price of this machine ajusted to 2023 inflation would now be around 985 dollars, crazy times

When I was a young teen, after seeing the movie Terminator 2, it was the thing to have, between me and a friend. I couldn't have one as "hot" as that because of the price, but my friend yes, his parents bought him one. It was being a young teen and to be jealous when a friend had a better gadget 😂

I think palmtop peaked with hps 100 and 200 lx line. Full cga support, dos 5 support with the ability too run windows in real mode, cf support and the ability too work with dos and old windows programs. While dos 5 is stripped down a bit, you can re add the missing commands

I owned a HP 95LX a couple years after the Portfolio came out. It was my first computer. Pretty neat. No idea what happened to it though.

Watching this on a Cosmo Communicator, which looks very much like a pocket laptop, is weirdly satisfying.

No Wolfenstein?

That 200LX looks pretty sweet!

I wonder how many Atari Portfolios exist and work anymore, let alone how many have two expansion units available to insert?

hold on to your hats 4.92 Mhz thats some blazing fast speeds

can it run doom?

That phone number 😄 tune 👌

Can you run Zork (a text-based adventure game) on it? Will the Portfolio be able to run the game, without its memory likely to be eaten by a grue?

I was hoping for a tiny Atari 800 or ST...

Check out a Psion!

As a journalist, it is very interesting to me seeing these old press clippings. The tone is very promotional compared to the tech beat today, which requires a certain distance from the subject matter -- an antagonistic relationship, even. I wonder if the new way is really necessary and why we can't lighten up just a little.

lol what a funny little machine. I'd never heard of it. Seeing the Portfolio made me momentarily think the Apple Newton 110 was good.

Can you make a video of how to get files on to the portfolio using a modern PC?

Funny thing is, that $400 price point at the time isn't too far off from what people ask for it now on the used market. I would love to indulge in a lot of old tech like this that I never got the chance to back when they were new, but these days, since we've passed the threshold of old tech being boring and relatively cheap, prices aren't any kinder. It makes nostalgia a lot harder to swallow when you nearly pay the same cost 30/40 yrs on but now it's scuffed up and barely functional.

Please also do videos on the Psion Revo and the Vaio Lifestyle palm computers.

The Atari Portfolio was used by the character John Connor to crack PINs in two scenes in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

LGR rockz!!! 🖤🤍🖤🌟🌟🌟

15KB for an O/S... incredible... love the 80s!!!

love Atari 🖤🤍🖤🌟🌟🌟

The sad thing is palmtops, and then "netbooks" never really became much of anything, and the laptop still rules. Perhaps the one thing we did get from netbooks was a smaller, thinner laptop perhaps, but then again, part of that may be just the continued miniaturization of components like CPU dies and transistors and integrated circuits and chips that handle multiple functions instead of just one or a handful, and of course the eventual development of things like SoCs.

does it run linux

Can make you a better lover is quite the marketing phrase

This Card looks like a HuCARD From PC Engine

Replacing the electronics with a Raspberry Zero W or similar could turn this into an interesting sleeper.

I would love to find that piece for sure, good one to collect.

I never owned a Palmtop but I did own an Atari 800XL...my very first ever computer. The keyboard itself was the computer and you had to have a floppy drive to run anything. I used this thing to death...literally, I just kept using until the floppy died. My dad must have sent it in for repair 2 or 3 times before he gave up on it (and technology was advancing). I remember programs like "Koala Paint" where it would allow me to make printables for my bedroom door (dot-matrix style). And my dad must have gotten well over 100 games for me to play! Games like Kongo Bongo, Super Pac-Man, Gauntlet (not the Gauntlet you're thinking of), Air Support, Pit-Fall (1 and 2), Kids on Keys, Donkey Kong, Juno First, Miner 2049er, Apshai, the list goes on.

I'll never forget that system and I play an emulated version to this day.

The most common and cheap solution for transferring date to or from pc was a Laplink connection between the parallel port device and the pc or was it the serial device... Dam im getting old.....

thanks for the info.

Poor atari was the radio shack of electronics ☹️
I used to love my brother word processor!

128 kb, that's unimaginably small now.

Any chance of reviewing the HP 200LX?

I wonder if Atari got any kickback from the T2 scene. Probably not, I don't remember the logo being visible. Am I wrong?

Help! :( Somebody get me out of here. I'm trapped in this computer. Help! Somebody!

It is a brilliant bit of engineering... but I remember those Palmtops and I saw them being bought but never saw anyone use one- and there lies the problem- brilliant design but it is the golf pencil of computing. You can in theory use them in many circumstances, portable, cheap, but no one actually uses them.