Data General / One
The Data General / One (sometimes DG-1 for short ) was a laptop made by the Data General company in 1984 . It is recognized by the National Museum of American History as a landmark early laptop.
It was an IBM PC-compatible computer , equipped with
- two 3½ " floppy disk drives
- a non- backlit black-and-white LCD screen with 80 × 25 characters or CGA resolution of 640 × 200 pixels
- Battery with a runtime of up to 8 hours
- 128 kB to 512 kB RAM
- keyboard
- CPU : Intel 80C88
- RS232 interface
The Data General / One was delivered with an adapted version of MS-DOS 2.11, the scope of performance of the computer corresponded to the capabilities of MS-DOS desktop computers at that time. Despite the innovative design, the computer was not an economic success.
weaknesses
- The LCD screen was not backlit and therefore required precise positioning of both light sources and viewers in order to be able to see what was on the screen.
- By installing the two 3½ " floppy drives , the computer was ahead of its time: at that time 5¼" drives were still widespread, and the copy protection mechanisms of that time meant that the existing content could not be easily transferred to the Data General / One.
- The computer did not have a hard drive .
- Unfortunately, Data General installed a CMOS version of the Intel 8251 in this computer to control the RS232 interface , which was register-incompatible with the IBM PC standard NSC 8250 . This brought many problems with it, because of all things the external RS232 communication, which is important for a laptop, did not work with standard software. Many standard programs , such as Laplink , could therefore not be used.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Description. Museum, accessed January 21, 2016 .