This Strange Retro Laptop Isn't What It Seems
Vložit
- čas přidán 2. 06. 2022
- Consumer demand for laptops was growing dramatically in the late 90s, but some were becoming tired of lugging around a large, heavy computer. In 1998 Microsoft hatched a plan to help drive inexpensive, lightweight notebooks -- and Sharp delivered quite a unique model.
Sources:
"Jupiter enters PC orbit," InfoWorld, January 12, 1998.
HP 360LX photo: www.cnvintage.org/d/236-win-c...
Sharp HC-4600 photo: www.flickr.com/photos/blakesp...
NEC palmtop photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handhel...
Vadem Clio photo: collection.cooperhewitt.org/o...
"Sharp Mobilon TriPad and Vadem Clio," PC Magazine, December 1, 1998.
"Vadem Clio," Maximum PC, March 1999.
"Three Looks, One Notebook," Popular Science, January 1999.
"Lag in apps holds back sexy Clio," InfoWorld, November 9, 1998.
"IBM's Winning Jupiter H/PC," PC Magazine, June 8, 1999.
IBM WorkPad Z50 photos: www.sohu.com/a/336499835_1201...
"Smaller Isn't Better for Some Handheld Users," Computerworld, August 2, 1999.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please consider supporting my work on Patreon: / thisdoesnotcompute
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram! @thisdoesnotcomp
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music by Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com)
Intro music by BoxCat Games (freemusicarchive.org/music/Bo.... - Věda a technologie
Former Windows CE developer here - on an ARM chip. It was a dog, could address very limited RAM and storage, but in some ways CE was a remarkable OS. The developer tools allowed you to literally “roll your own” version of the OS by checking some boxes and choosing options from drop-downs so you could pick and choose exactly the features you wanted, to help you slim down the OS to the storage and RAM footprint you were stuck with. Ugly, slow, but still for embedded systems it was good at the time, and always better than Java, which never really materialized as a consumer ready platform despite decades of hype.
Literally Minecraft is the only reason Java still exists
A product ahead of its time by about 14 - 16 years
Yep, all the caveats and price but none of the significant advantages.
These were squarely for business and you could tell simply by the price. One of the many times I'm glad I was priced out.
@@JohnDoe-wq5eu All the caveats and price too ... the 1 Microsoft Way! 🌈
Superior Japanese tech, just like today
@@allentoyokawa9068 I dunno, man, the Taiwanese stuff is pretty good too, and the Americans are killing it with processors and GPUs. Any country with a big tech space can have good tech.
@@christophernugent8492 nah man Japan just built different.
sony and the walkman revolutionising music, revolutionary ibm thinkpad and sony vaio designed in japan,
nintendo and innovating the game console/controller,
etc etc
America saw the threat and had a lil "jap scare" in the 80s-90s and fucked up Japanese tech space and made these companies today a shell of what they were back then, now they're trying to do the same to China and Taiwan too. pussycat mfs who terrorize when their hegemony is threatened.
I'd forgotten just how clean those PC magazines looked. The perfect amount of whitespace. I never read them these days. But back in the 90s, I was always had a pile of them on my desk.
These Windows CE devices were actually very useful back in the day - the were instant on, the battery lasted for several hours and were great for taking notes, drafting documents, etc. I got a used NEC MobilePro 780 and later MobilePro 900 for taking notes in class and it was much more convenient than lugging a heavy laptop and much less expensive. I got a PCMCIA card with wifi and was able to get files on and off fairly easily.
I had a MobilePro 800 for the same reason in the early 2000s
@@retrospacenet ...if you can write shorthand, or cursive
though everybody is different, so I shouldn't really be saying anything right now. uhh...ignore this please!
@@retrospacenet i used tablets when i was studying in university, don’t have to bring a ton of notes and heavy book is already a big win for me.
@@retrospacenet Your point is well taken and in general handwriting notes is better for retention. But there is a significant population of learners who have various disabilities that prevent paper notes, so using a lightweight device is helpful and in the 90s and early 00s Windows CE devices were an inexpensive option for these folks (now iPads, ultrabooks).
In modern times I specifically bought a windows tablet for my in class needs. No need for it to be powerful when I have a gaming computer at home. Just don't get the ones with only 2GB ram that struggle to run office.
The Jupiter project was a fail back then, but it did come eventually. We have devices now like the Surface laptops, iPads, Galaxy Tab tablets, and Chromebooks. So, we did get it as a regular line of devices, but not as soon as Microsoft was really hoping for.
This design was used by the Dell XPS 12 too. Sadly most of the screens had their glue melting including mine, so there are only a few fully working ones left.
Wow that looks so small and compact, I'm surprised they managed to make something like that back then. I honestly wouldn't be opposed to owning something like that nowadays for art or note taking.
There is something available today. It's called the iPad.
@@motomike71 surface laptop studio
They are terrible. I had several CE devices back in the day. Windows CE managed to combined all that was bad from each and combine them into one awful product.
Despite being very expensive, they were built to the penny. They were all poorly built. There are probably far fewer of them left in the world working even as a percentage of their low numbers. Somewhere in my old box-o-tech I just cannot bear to throw away is a 1000 Dollar Sharp Color PDA (the one shown in this video) that just way back int he early 2000s. I have another one, a black and white one, where the keys have worn out because they are so cheap.
@@tarstarkusz
Not to mention the fact they're basically unrepairable. Any part of it breaks and you're pretty much SOL.
With modern tablet capabilities and room at the back of the keyboard for parts for storage or higher specs, I've love to have one of these today. I realize there are 'convertible' tablets that are laptop-like, and keyboards to add to just-tablets, but this is still a very good design and I miss when computer companies paid attention to the "some people just like smaller options" market, and made common things cool just because they could.
Found this channel yesterday. Fell in love and haven’t stopped watching it since.
Thanks for bringing this obscure tech to light bro!
Wow that thing is the Microsoft surface of its time. Im surprised how thin it is considering it is from 1998
I'm still always having to remind myself just how far we've come in these last two decades. When I graduated back in 99 the world was a very, very different place.
The idea that computers were coming out that didn't even have 56k modems at that time blows my mind still.
I got some brandless laptop with Windows CE on it for my birthday once, but I couldn't tell my parents that it wasn't a real computer or even remotely usable because it was a gift (I mean the 'manual' says not to block the fan on the bottom of the unit. There is no fan)... It had no transient storage (and no backup battery to keep the ramdisk!), and booted off the read only rom every boot. And being before tech was generally allowed in school, I couldn't even use it for its notepad. Getting a CE netbook in the late 2000's was like getting a laptop in 2015 or so only to find out it runs Windows RT: Basically no software for it... At that point, it was only prey for malicious sellers to make a quick buck on people that don't know about these deep shortcomings.
I think I know exactly what you're talking about, VWestlife did a video on it back in the day. At a time when the cheapest "real" netbooks you could get were ~$300, I thought it was pretty impressive that they could produce a laptop so cheap they could sell it for under $100 retail while still being somewhat useful at the time of release
That's terrible. I'm already seeing more like this with under powered laptops from relatively unknown companies selling because they look nice but with only 2GB of Ram and sometimes only 32GB of soldered onto eMMC memory they will find out the hard way sooner or later.
I feel your pain. My mom bought me a Surface RT. It's barely usable, many apps are missing, and the office are buggy.
@@42_comes_after_the_joke Lol, don't feel too bad, Office 2013 was a buggy mess on regular Windows too
I had an IBM Z50 back in the day. They went on clearance at CompUSA really cheap and I got one. I think maybe $200. It worked well enough to type up notes in college and do basic word processing for reports. The build quality and battery life was great but the performance wasn't worth the original MSRP. Also, I once gave a powerpoint presentation using it for a college class I had. The video output barely worked with the projector. The professor would have given me an F if it didn't work (luckily it did) as she said "if this was in the business world and your equipment failed, you'd lose the job".
I hate professors like that, because if you were in the business world, then you wouldn’t be penny pinching on a college student budget and would have decent equipment
@@mrb692 i also doubt you would lose your job if your laptop died/minor equipment failure.
@@mrb692 Same. So Bill Gates can have a fuckin' operating system crash when introducing the damn thing to the whole freakin' world but YOU deserve to lose your job because of a minor failure when doing a PowerPoint presentation, huh? And given how nit picky wrt hardware these projectors can be, one has to wonder what kind of bosses these professors would be.
@@Reverend_Salem yeah nobody really cares that much, they'd just hand you another laptop and move on
I had a techie for a parent, and I grew up with devices like this, and Palm Pilots, at the very very tail end/past the point of which they actually died. Gotta say, It definitely makes me have an appreciation for the level of sophistication we have in our portables now. I remembering being like, 7, and reading book after book on my hand me down Palm 7 and playing random bit games like Rogue on our Clio.
The Vadem Clio was on the top of my wishlist all through the early 2000s. Had to make do with a Jornada 720 in the end.
I loved my CE device. It was one of the folding 'palmtop' types, but man could I type up a storm on that tiny chicklet keyboard. Got me through two years of college when laptops were still expensive and bulky.
Me too.
I was fortunate enough to have owned several Sharp Mobilons including the TriPad, it was really special and way ahead of its time. The compact size, lightness, large keyboard, MS Office compatibility, solid state memory, stylus and a battery that seemed to never run out, made me the envy of all of my college classmates and the businesspeople who spent thousands for big bulky laptops of that time. The TriPad is what I used to shred through my college assignments at book stores, coffee shops, and libraries. People would always ask me about it and assumed that I had paid some ridiculous amount for it. I bought my TrPad used from Ebay in 2000 for only $200. This was one of the best productivity devices I've ever purchased. I'd like to see an updated version of this or the Surface Neo.
I loved my Vadem Clio. Had a Xircom wireless card in mine, felt like the future. We're so spoiled by tablets with wifi built in now, but I would buy something of this exact form factor immediately if it came back.
Right? I thought seriously about spending the time to model the case in CAD to 3D print. That way I could have the form factor with more modern guts, especially the screen. If only I had another 12 hours in each day ...
@@JoeSteele the iPad Pro magic keyboard case gets _close_ all these years later, but still isn’t quite there. No presentation/media consumption orientation for example. Wish someone would make a keyboard case with the Clio arms.
@@chronoso microsoft surface studio or that one vaio laptop 10 years ago
I've had three versions of this. The Sharp Tripad, then the Vadem Clio (both hardware versions). Still have the latest Vadem Clio with me, fun to use as a text editor on the go. Have rebuilt the batteries so I have more than enough power for a day with the four batteries I got. Thanks for the vid, always fun seeing these "Handheld PC Pro's" being reviewed.
Around 2005 they were selling windows CE "laptops" for like a hundred bucks. I bought one to read on the bus as I was taking the bus to work at the time and it was an hour long trip. Even as a reader they sucked,
Windows CE married all the disadvantages of a laptop and of a PDA, rather than marrying the good parts.
Probably the single best selling windows CE device ever made was the Sega Dreamcast.
I used one of these all through college. Loved it.
Me Too.
@@elturner7241 Good times. Miss those days sometimes.
Awesome content as always! Thanks for this fun look at at this little machine. Way ahead of its time.
I used to love these devices, but I definitely agree about the software shortfalls and the sketchy touchscreen. I have a Sharp Tri-pad and a Vadem Clio and I found them very capable for text work. I liked the keyboard especially compared to most of what was available in the form factor. I had a 4GB CF card inside and a Wifi card in the PCCard slot, so connectivity and storage were never issues for me. But the killer was Microsoft just not updating the OS much. I eventually managed to get NetBSD running on it and that was fun but not super practical since the device support was _very_ limited.
holy heck, the 1990s were an extremely forward yet optimistic preview of the late 2000s.
I found a Vadem Clio in a free box on the street in 2017. It's pretty fun intentionally writing sloppily with the pen to see the computer misinterpret the letters, resulting in some humorous gibberish.
Your videos are consistently super entertaining, thank you
Definitely a precursor to the Toughbook.
I'd love to see a video on that z50. The keyboard looks legit and it looks far more usable overall. I'd also love to see your take on the more contemporary (read: new) Planet Computers Astro Slide if you can get your hands on one (seems they're only out in Japan so far).
Great video! Totally forgot that this was a thing.
Thanks for the video! Never know about this - really interesting!
The limitation and the lack of support make me think a lot about the Surface RT 8.1 with the arm processor in it
I didn't realize these were ever made for use as stand alone laptops. I used one of these in the early 2000s for sales, but we just used it with company software running on top of Windows CE. They were good and rugged, but I can't imagine using CE for a daily laptop would be very useful.
There was a Sylvania laptop that ran Windows CE that VWestlife did a review of sorts a long time ago
Great video! I remember that windows CE stylus interface. Hadn’t thought about it in years. It seems archaic now, but what an exciting time for tech.
Windows CE was an attempt to fuse the best of both PDAs and laptops. Instead, Windows CE fused the worst of both worlds and came up with something somewhat worse than either one.
Not a fan hey? lol
Vadem were a big player in the portable pc market during the 80s. They designed portables and roms for companies like Sharp, Osbourne and others. I found them while looking into the Sharp PC-7100 which had some innovative “setup” rom on an xt portable made by Vadem.
Great video!
This video makes me feel like the IBM X61t/X240T deserve an oddball appreciation video, I always admired the center pivot hinge and enjoyed my 61T quite a lot at the time
That design went all the way back to the Thinkpad 360P and 360PE. They were very useful machines for the day. I still have a pen for one on my desk for some reason. The machine has been gone for twenty years.
Oooo, this episode makes me hopeful you'll cover a Fujitsu Lifebook sometime in the future.
Great work, as always.
I had a Clio that I bought from a garage sale. It had never been used. I rather liked it. I had a serial to usb connector, so I was able to connect to my pc. And I think I had a pc wireless card at one point,or at least an Ethernet card.
I kept nearly-hearing my name throughout... :D ... That was a nice little look into this machine. Very tempted to track one down...
It looks very forward thinking. It's basically the 90's version of a Microsoft Surface Pro.
That's surprisingly modern. If the specs got an upgrade it would fit right in the present
basically a convertible before the word even existed.
If it had proper stylus support I could totally see students working with these devices even back then, nowadays convertibles are standard in university. Maybe they should've marketed this more towards them instead of companies.
Oh my god, I want this so bad. It looks so rad!
This is like an iPad Pro good feature set incredible performance and convent but hindered by the software. Also that hinge design looks like the magic keyboard accessory for the iPad too
This thing is like a thin client, but without a server to actually feed it data. So weird.
Windows CE was indeed used by Wyse in a lot of terminal server client/thinclient hardware offerings. And you could get a remote desktop client on here, but using a desktop OS from these was never much fun.
Wow, certainly didn't think that 2-in-1 design was that old. Thought those first came out in 2012 with Windows 8!
Look up Microsoft Tablet PC, a 2001 idea from Microsoft. But in Microsoft there's different product managers and the guy in charge of Office hated the idea of tablet computers and refused to support it in Office. Microsoft could have also introduced the first eBook reader, but Bill Gates didn't like the GUI on it, he said it should use the Windows interface and so that never appeared.
@@6581punk Cool, basically a proto-Surface tablet. Also reminded me there were Windows XP convertibles, like the kind that spun around at the hinge. Still, I thought this particular style of convertible hinge had to be newer.
This kind of design came back a few years ago only to disappear again
What’s so neat is that the tablet/keyboard setup has taken over the space that this device was sort of trying to fill, although instead of a matter of size, it’s usually a matter of price these days.
I used one of these back in University is about 2006! I was addicted to mini CE devices like Jornadas at the end of high school. Pretty sure I had the Vadem Clio and it was from retired stock from some fleet of industrial units. Worked great for taking notes in lectures in a time where PC laptops were still over an inch thick.
it was interesting how (more thanks to clever marketing) the rollout of the iPhone & iPad in the late 00s was almost an extinction event for all the existing Mobile phones, PDA and "netbooks". So much of the basic technology concepts was already in place by the mid/late 90s when many companies were still treating regular desktop PCs as a novelty .
I had a HP iPAQ with CE and it was a amazing device at the time.
My favorite of that class of machine was the Gateway 2000 Handbook. Smaller, lighter, but monochrome screen and Window 3.1. Battery life wasn’t great, but it came with two and you could charge one while you used the other. Batteries were “warm” swappable, just put to sleep by closing the screen, switch batteries, then open the screen to wake it up. They packed a nearly full size keyboard into the case that most could touch type on. The A and L keys were only 1/2” closer together than on a desktop keyboard. It had a stick pointer like Thinkpads and Toshibas of the time, but the mouse buttons were strangely located on the front edge, convenient only to your right thumb. It predated the Clio by a few years. I remember having one in 1995.
When I saw the thumbnail, I immediately thought "This is a Windows CE device." Glad to see I still can tell that from looking at the device.
Didn't the Sega Dreamcast have Windows CE built-in as well? If so, would that count as a Jupiter device?
What would be funny is if the Sega Saturn had Windows CE and was a Jupiter device. It'd be both a Saturn and Jupiter!
The Dreamcast had Windows CE. Iirc the logo was on the console. I don't remember an association with the word "Jupiter" tho.
The Dreamcast is capable to boot Windows CE from GD-ROM but the OS isn't directly embedded in the console itself as far as i know
Many channels like this one. But none have the same laid-back atmosphere.
I saw these BITD and thought about every point you mentioned. These types of devices were way ahead of their time and were very limited by the technology of the time.
Netbooks before netbooks...
What an aesthetic.
IBM had the Workpad z50 to compete in this space. It was clear from day one that what users wanted was not a cheap alternative to laptops, they wanted cheaper laptops.
I have two of these and use them for writing because there is no distraction at all. I like the keyboard 😇
“Can we have Microsoft Surface Studio?”
“No, we have Microsoft Surface Studio at home.”
Microsoft Surface Studio at home:
Whoah, that's so cool!
I had an HP620LX from the same generation as this Sharp. Windows CE worked but it always felt like too much of a compromise especially when running on under-powered devices. Still, it was quite amazing at the time to be running these hybrid-like devices which offered good battery life and decent functionality. Devices like this Sharp are especially interesting because they gave us a glimpse of the swivel pen laptops that would arrive in the early mid 2000s. That was a generation of laptops that deserve a look back at!
It's hard to believe there was any overlap between the internet age and the time when 16MB was a workable/sellable limitation for both RAM and storage combined, even for a mobile device (especially one this capable as opposed to a PDA)
Microsoft in 2021: Introducing a brand new innovative design; meet the Surface Laptop Studio!
Sharp PV-6000 from the 1998: You forgot me. Rude! :(
this looks like that macbook concept that's been floating around on the internet lol
I worked for Compaq and we called the Windows CE products "wince" because you would wince when you were forced to use one.
Sony and Dell ended up doing a similar flipping display convertibles with the Vaio Flip series and the XPS 12 9950 respectively. Both laptops came with a full Windows 8 and are really great to work with. The Vaio Flip is a joy to use with Windows 10 except for the very annoying fan.
I have an XPS 12 9Q23. I guess I should say “had”, because mine had that horrible issue where the LCD ends up leaking after a few years…
Me seeing the thumbnail: Surface Studio?!?!
its basically an ipad pro with a magic keyboard
Did not know that MIPS CPU's were used in this era of mobile Windows CE devices, pretty cool!
The R4000 was a pretty old design though, that's a 1993 CPU which saw heavy use most notably by SGI in their workstations.
That IR Transceiver used a IR LASER and there might be a warning saying not to look at the IR Transceiver port when switched on or you might lose your eyesight permanently.
I loved my HP palmtop computers back in the day.
Interesting... I never heard of these devices. Feels a bit like the netbook of the 90s, with surprisingly similar advantages and disadvantages over regular laptops.
Yet again another wonderful video thank you so much for the extreme hard work it takes to make these videos and the wonderful content
After watching this, i remember modern computer called Lenovo Yoga A940, it has touchscreen and it's suprisingly weird too
So, Jupiter devices essentially were the iPad Pro. Serving the exact same market segment as the iPad Pro does now. This machine even looks and feels a LOT like the iPad Pro with the Smart Folio Keyboard and Apple Pencil. Heck. It’s even CALLED a “TriPad”.
-touch screen/kickstand
-tablet mode
-almost no io
-gimped version of windows
its a fucking surface
Damn your pfp just sent me on a total time trip. I can't remember the last time I've seen milk Chan.
Back when old laptop are weird look than the new one
Reminds me of the Dell Inspiron Duo or Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio. I owned the duo myself.
These devices were pretty much predecessors of Windows Mobile smartphones, early ones even came with Windows CE 3.0. Some limitations were haunting the platform for the most of it's consumer life (because Windows CE is still used as sort of IoT and embedded platform).
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ahead of its time!
Ah yes the great grandfather of the Microsoft surface studio.
I’m truly flabbergasted. It’s only so far away from modern workflows with apple iPads.
But Imagine a Linux based tablet with a similar physical configuration today? I’d fall in love!
Dell XPS 12 from 2015 was exactly like that
Wow this reminds me allot of an Ipad with keyboard case accessory
Clio! They are still around today and that's amazing considering the competition of the market. I just wish they kept with designs like this, instead of going with the "Invisible" style they have today.
CE was also expensive to develop for. The tools cost a lot and you needed to learn all the differences.
It might be strange, but better strange than the 12,367,862,182nd black rectangle.
Those really annoying Coke Freestyle machines still run Jupiter. It is faster to drill a well than pick your flavor. The coke machines had USB ports at least, and 10/100.
Oh man, I think they also have Sharp displays, why did that company even try to venture in to color graphics at all?
Okay that explains a lot but it also blows my mind. Old tech never dies it simply gets put into self serve drink machines.
Nice looking device. Better than some modern ones.
Pocket PCs were the high point of mobile windows computing IMO. In high school I had, essentially Windows CE with additional app support. I loved the game bubble breaker!
I have a pair of these and the problem was the battery cover
A battery interlock switch was held down by a thin tab on the cover. That's tab would break off
The industrial design of this was done by frog design in California, the same firm that developed the design language for Apple in the mid-80's, and worked with Steve Jobs on the Next Cube (and is still around and going strong today)
This was such a strange time with mobile computing.
I always wondered where Windows CE was actually used as I only knew about it being used on the Sega Dreamcast.
We had a Clio. It definitely had a lot of promise but never delivered.
That's actually IdeaPad Yoga but almost two decades earlier
The HP HX, Dell x50v still a retro classic CE Device. I still keep a HTC HD.
They were useful at the time, you can install and develop any thing you want on it.
Who the hell would buy a $1000 mini laptop/pda thing, as I watch this on a once $1200 cell phone
This is the Surface Laptop Studio of the 90s.
Ah, resistive touchscreens... What a nightmare. 😆
We had nothing like this when I graduated highschool in '96 but I loved using Windows CE in the early 2000s.
That's pretty cool.
My first laptop was a Compaq Concerto which was a similar setup but ran full fat Windows 95, would make a great video comparing one of those to a Surface.