The $11k PS2 Laptop | Nostalgia Nerd

[Music] this foray into blue is sponsored by squarespace ibm big blue they were the ones who instigated who created the very platform that most of us use for our desktop endeavors its open architecture helped it become a great success but it was also in the context of ibm's business a great failure the personal system 2 then released in 1987 was ibm's attempt to recapture some of the market that it had lost to rivals creating compatible machines with compact being the most formidable these new machines gave us futuristic looking designs coupled with proprietary hardware designed to bring consumers more firmly under the ibm wing this proved popular with business buyers familiar with ibm's sales reps but penetrated less so into the home markets with consumers opting for cheaper and often higher spec'd competitor machines so if i tell you that compact have made the world's most advanced desktop computer from 386 chips and 32 bits of a bus you'll think be unreliable so i'm not going to do this ad i've got a reputation to think of for compact desk pro 386 chips buses and compatibility ibm then needed a way to expand again to create the same sort of personal computer growth they had witnessed in the early 80s and one of the ways they saw this happening was through the portable computer market the problem was ibm were already making portable computers and compared to the competition they were pretty abysmal bulky unimaginative and late to market weren't really key selling points especially for executives out and about looking for something small and reliable to work away from the office and this is something competitors were somewhat struggling with as well although their offerings were quite a bit cheaper now the fish weighs 22 pounds which makes it extremely portable it will fit snugly on passenger seat of your car or when traveling by train on the luggage by coincidence the computer weighs exactly the same so nothing to choose between them so far but there was one man who had a vision and it wasn't john cleese it was an ibm employee named jim cannavino the book thinkpad a different shade of blue by deborah dell and jerry purdy documents how jim would eventually do the groundwork for the ibm thinkpad line one of ibm's long awaited success stories but there were a few developments needed before that to pave the way the world was desperate for a desktop replacement laptop i felt that portables had a chance to provide the pc company with a sustainable foundation i knew that it would eventually be an individual's only personal computer i thought there was a whole niche that would run with just portables that has certainly turned out to be true hey everybody the new computers are here new computers who may i ask authorized new computers yeah who cannavino had convinced ibm to eschew their traditional three-year development cycle and instead run with one lasting only a year to do this a skunk works team was assembled to work separately from the main company and ibm's yamato lab in japan were brought in for design the outcome of this was the ps2 p70 an ibm that was in the marketplace at the right time and because of that became the number two selling luggable in the market second only to compact compact's new portable two computer it's such a marvelous machine that it would be quite unfair to compare it with another computer so we've decided to compare it with this fish ibm went from a 1.4 billion dollar loss in 1988 to 1.2 billion dollar profit in 1989 with the ps70 contributing significantly toward that the p-70 was followed by the p-75 but there was an issue compact had again delivered not just something that fitted consumers needs but was redefining consumers needs compact believe their computer simply works better before you do the spade work ask your dealer why in october 1989 the compact light based around an 8086 processor and the light 286 were introduced what most would consider to be the first notebook computers weighing in at just six pounds compared to the 22 pounds of ibm's p75 luggable overnight it made ibm's portable range seem like cumbersome desktop machines business customers quickly began asking their ibm reps when their notebook would be coming out and once again it was down to canavino to step up to the task with bob lorton leading the team the result of which was the l40sx laptop released in the usa on march the 26th 1991 [Music] of course marketing was key to selling the l40sx and that's no different for your business or brand squarespace gives you the tools you need to create a website quickly easily and most importantly professionally there are scores of templates to choose from and even then you can customize it as much as you want create a blog create a shop create a dynamic photo gallery everything you need to make an appealing proposition for your audience drop on by to squarespace.com nostalgianerd to get started for absolutely free then when you're ready to publish a site or custom domain just use the code nostalgia nerd for 10 [Music] off [Music] now as you can tell by this example it's still a fairly sizable beast and it's not just because ibm couldn't condense their technology into a smaller package it was down to a fear that had resided in the company since the pc junior you see the pc junior came with a different kind of keyboard a tiny keyboard a chiclet keyboard and consumers well they despised it it was intended to be sleek and modern and allow for various keyboard overlay templates to be inserted which could help the user with text text-driven environments but it bit them in the arse and ibm did not want that to happen again so the l40sx is fitted with as good a keyboard as they could muster and it's for that reason that both the keyboard and laptop are larger than compacts offering of course the real solution was somewhere between the two and compact had already worked that out by integrating a smaller but still highly usable keyboard into the light but ibm did perhaps get this component exactly right for die hard keyboard fanatics and we'll take a closer look at how in a minute the increased case space also meant that the l40 had enough room for some mighty processing power the top laptop in the original light lineup was a 12 megahertz 286 but under this baby's hood is a mighty intel 386 sx running at 20 megahertz substantially faster and with up to 18 megabytes of onboard ram and the optional 387 sx co-processor the case allowed for a nicad battery with more than average running time and a plethora of ports including ps2 25 pin parallel nine pin serial a vga out and an external expansion connector all of which are covered up with these nicely contained flaps and all of this is held within just 7.7 pounds which makes it not too much heavier than compact's offering and it was actually enough for a lot of media outlets to classify it as a notebook computer with measurements of just over two inches high just under 11 inches long and 13 inches wide however according to deborah bell and jerry purdy this actually puts it outside of even ibm's stated maximum notebook measurements of 2 by 9 by 12 inches now although it feels long it's still a nicely constructed machine and it's pleasing to look at everything is tucked away everything is neat and clean it was also the first laptop to use a row of lcd indicators rather than leds not only was this easier on the battery it also provides visual feedback with icons for the modem speaker battery level humidity which is pretty neat and will alert you if you're outside of normal operating levels temperature hard drive disk drive num lock caps lock screen and suspend modes and it honestly looks pretty cool with the lcds blacked out if there's nothing to report the power switch is nearby and accessible with an a slash m switch the other side for selection between manual or automatic mode curious in automatic mode the hardware initiates low clock speed during idle periods in manual it runs at the standard or a predefined speed as long as it needs to the 10 inch vga screen itself is a black on white monochrome super twisted pneumatic lcd capable of supporting up to 32 grey scales it's 10 millimeters thick and has a cold fluorescent side light which produces some nice colors at odd angles thankfully the built-in brightness and contrast help with your viewing pleasure even at some obscure angles and this is a totally respectable setup for the time what's most noticeable though or i should say least noticeable is just how quiet this thing is the 250 megabyte hard drive which is upgraded from the standard 60 is barely audible and sounds more like i don't know a distant triangle being played by a lone band member doesn't sound like a mechanical drive at all really and that's in stark contrast to the floppy drive which feels jarring and abrupt amid this serene landscape so after a memory check confirming the two megabytes of onboard ram the pc boots directly into the ibm dos shell a standard feature of pcdos which of course is the standard os here being an ibm machine pc dos 6.3 to be precise although originally this pc would have shipped with pc dos 3.3 4 or even 5 on later models by 6.3 pc dos had diverged from ms-dos and was doing its own thing with different apps for ram optimization editing and the like and talking of editing which is brought up by just typing e it gives me a chance to demonstrate just how beautiful the standard 8485 key keyboard is not just its construction but also its feel this is by a country mile the nicest laptop keyboard i have ever had the pleasure of typing on it's so nice that it seemingly reduced my normal typing error level by about half it's like skipping over a still surface of highly resistant water of course being a laptop there are no switches here instead we get a rubber dome under each key which buckles with exquisite certainty allowing you to feel utterly connected with the letters you are typing ibm were keen to get this right and boy did they nail it i have no doubt that this helped sell the laptop and sell it did according to thinkpad a different shade of blue ibm had projected to sell about 30 000 of these machines by the end of the first year but in the end sold over a hundred thousand and selling significantly more thereafter so despite compact offering it was very much a success especially when you consider that the retail price for each was nearly six thousand dollars just over 11 000 in today's money but then this is very much a business machine aimed at getting businesses mobile it was designed for executives working from hotels or around a conference table so big budgets were pretty standard it certainly wasn't designed for gaming as you can see from paperboy 2 here the blur on this screen is worse than anything you might have experienced on a game boy or game gear in the 90s but at least for pc speaker it's pleasant especially combined with some clever use of it like paperboy 2 employs it almost feels like there's a sound card on board that's a very good pc speaker if you really did want a game on it then something like overlord or supremacy is much more at home naturally it has no trouble running with the 386 processor and if you wanted to connect it up to an external monitor then well the world is your oyster but it's not meant for that it's meant for this and to aid with that a few add-ons were available one of them is a numeric keypad which can be connected easily via the side port where an optional modem port can also be placed and it allows you to enter numbers quickly like that bookie on the running man taking rapid bets you could also get this rather quirky track point mouse that could be used both as a trackball or a standard mouse depending on your desk or lack of like a lot of ps2 machines the bios is a fiddly affair and settings are tweaked from booting a reference disk rather than built-in controls from here you can run numerous machine tests you can set the speed of a processor and say if you wanted to run some old software that was upset by the fast pace of the cpu and that is linked to the a m switch i mentioned earlier you can even change the speed of the keyboard repeat which is a good level of control impressively this is one of the first machines to also incorporate automatic power management features allowing you to adjust screen drive timeouts and the like not only that if you close the lid in use the current applications are suspended you know as you get on a modern day computing device leaving only the system memory and real-time clock operational pretty neat honestly if i had this laptop in 1991 i'd be as happy as a pig in grot but then for six grand you'd hope so the question is were ibm happy was this the success they'd hoped they'd accrued more sales than they expected so yes but by this point they weren't hoping for the world and honestly they didn't quite get it the l40sx wasn't the saviour of ibm but it did pave the path for other machines and it played its part more than you might think some pre-production prototypes of the l40sx were actually created in black rather than this standard ps2 pearl cream color they also had a built-in track point pointing stick and a 10.4 inch full color tft display and you know what other laptops had those features that's right the n51sx n51 slc and cs57s6 what what what is this those aren't think pads where where are where's the thinkpads these these came first really really okay so it turns out that the first laptops that ibm rolled off in their sensational new black livery were less than sensational and they didn't have those red striking pointing knobs but despite their black color these were actually called metoo products by the press once again trailing behind the competition but at least you could finally classify them as a notebook without question their release was questionable almost like a tentative test step into waters because just a couple of months later in october 1992 ibm would finally release the thinkpad and this really did change the fortunes of the company incorporating many of the features of the l40 including its patented power saving controls see now this is what it's like to fly first class and this seems lucky some say suspiciously lucky because in may 1993 just three months after the l40sx was discontinued ibm issued a recall for some 150 000 of them after 15 separate short circuits were reported all of which were oddly from europe it seems that owing to damaged insulation a hole could be burned in the machine's casing ibm offered to repair systems worldwide for free but recommended that users remove the battery and power only through the asc adapter why this took two years to emerge as an issue seems strange perhaps ibm were keeping hush until my new products came out and no one cared or maybe the degradation just took its time a bit worrying giving i'm using one that's 30 years old let's hope it was a repaired model perhaps because sadly there aren't many of these beasts left in the wild most of them scrapped by the businesses that bought them the l40sx may have been a stepping stone but it was a stepping stone with a damn nice keyboard and if you get a chance to try one out i holy recommend it until next time i've been nostalgia nerd toodaloo [Music] you

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 125,179

Keywords: ps2, ps/2, ibm, laptop

Id: PvocdnZWiWI

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021