Three decades of laptop computers
I was tidying up the garage on the weekend and came across a stack of old laptops that I've been "accidentally" collecting since, well, way back apparently!
First up, my very first laptop, the Amstrad NC100, released in 1992, but I was using it in 1994 still - it had a proper-sized keyboard, a word processor, BASIC programming, and was very portable (4 AA batteries lasted days) - I used it for writing and taking notes, and I also wrote a twinkling xmas lights program in BASIC (1st and only I think - maybe that's where I got the inspiration for my 2017 Kafka Xmas tree lights simulation blog), connected to 8 LEDs via the parallel port. Notice the whopping 512K byte memory card!
I thought it may still boot up, but no such luck, so I opened up to see what made it tick - apparently a square Z80 (the small chip on the left, the big chip in the middle is the IO controller).
Here's the Z80 enlarged.
By 1994 the Z80 was pretty old school - it came out in 1976, but was only discontinued in 2024! It was popular for control systems (Xmas tree lights?), gaming consoles, etc. What else happened in 1994? Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, ending apartheid.
Skipping forward a decade we come to 2004. I was working in London at UCL at the time and was impressed by this glossy red computer (middle in top photo) that was on show in the local electronics shop on the high street - I couldn't resist.
This monster was an Acer Ferrari 3200 Athlon 64, it ran very hot and was super fast for those days (but only a single core). And no, I didn't pull it apart as it still boots! What else happened in 2004? Anyone remember TheFacebook? No, me neither. What I do remember is flying back from London (via Thailand, where I spent a week on a beach!) to Australia and the huge disaster of the Boxing Day Tsunami a few days later - killing over 227,000 people :-(
Moving on another 10 years approximately to 2014, I was still using this very cool laptop (on the right) the Alienware M11X:
Ok, so this came out around 2010, but I was still using it in 2014 - again, a super fast laptop, that blew massive amounts of heat out the back ports (not fun if you had it sitting on your lap). This was an official work computer (NICTA, Australia gov R&D lab, had a BYO computer policy - buy what you want and they paid for it - I did actually use it for running performance modelling simulations which were pretty demanding), and even given the heat it pumped out, it was one of the "coolest" and most powerful laptops I've ever used. From memory, I had the upgraded version with Core i7-2617M: A 1.5 GHz processor with a turbo speed of 2.6 GHz.
How do the speeds of these vintage beasts compare in MIPs?
z80 = 0.58 MIPs
AMD Athlon 64 2800+ = 9,000 MIPS (estimated)
Core i7-2617M = 117,160?MIPS
What else happened in 2014? The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - still unsolved.
I recall I did also have a more recent 13-inch Gigabyte work computer which was great - I can't track it down (it wasn't in the stack), but I think this was the insides! It doesn't really look much different to the internals of the Amstrad from over 30+ years ago, does it? Just a PCB and a bunch of chips really ;-)