Cheap Laptop Terminals

[Steve Dyer]

>Now, my ideal would be rather more modest: *just* a terminal -- perhaps
>with enough room to plug a (decent -- TB+, for example) MODEM in.
>Of course, part of the reason for this is my deep-seated prejudice
>against Intel chips and IBM PC-type things; more practically, I commute
>from one place to another via bicycle.  Therefore, I would prefer to
>have less to break (it would be difficult to persuade me that of two
>otherwise equivalent devices, one of which has some sort of disc drive
>and other does not, that the one *with* the disc drive would be more
>rugged), have less mass to lug around, and less to pay for.

TI makes a series of portable LCD-based terminals which are a follow-on to
their old Silent-700 terminals.  I have also seen a portable VT100 LCD
terminal advertised in the pages of Digital Review and/or DEC Professional.

Let me say, however, that if you get a Toshiba T1000 with a "hard RAM"
card, you won't ever have to use the floppy disk drive more than once.
Drive C: (the boot disk) is in ROM, and drive D: is the non-volatile RAM.
You can ignore drive A, the floppy disk.  You can have Kermit or whatever
you like sitting on drive D:, ready to run.

Because of the economies of scale, you will be hard pressed to find a
portable terminal substantially cheaper than the T1000 (or a similar
machine.)  The T1000 has also been designed for light weight; I'm sure
the competing portable terminals will weigh a lot more.  I don't like
the 8088 particularly well either, but I'm not willing to pay a high
premium for my prejudice if there's an 8088-based machine which does
everything I need.

Do you really want to carry around a Telebit TB+ on your bicycle?? :-)

---
Steve Dyer
dyer at arktouros.MIT.EDU
dyer at spdcc.COM aka {harvard,husc6,ima,ihnp4,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!dyer