Atari Portfolio - The $400 Palmtop PC from 1989

The moment he said "you aren't going to play doom on it" I heard almost a dozen crazy programmers cry out in a loud voice "challenge accepted"

"You're not gonna run Doom on here...." Them's fightin words!

One small showcase for man, one giant leap for LGR’s T2 John Connor cosplay

You're not gonna play doom on here Somewhere someone in the DooM community: Hold my beer

Actually, that Portfolio was used in my local hospital. The doctors were using it for writing down patient reports and then printing it with an old dot matrix printer. Fun fact. They used those little Atari machines till 2008 and then they upgraded to Windows Vista machines XD

The appearance and style of this thing has aged very well, I think. It doesn't look so dated as many of its peers

I couldn’t figure out why this was so familiar, until you said “hacking ATM’s” and it hit me like a ton of bricks where I knew this from.

"You're not gonna run Doom on here...." What fresh heresy is this?

You know the hardware is truly limited when there's no DOOM port for the platform.

I totally get that technology moves forward but there is just such a charm around devices like this. I'd love to do some proper dedicated writing on one and just feel like I'm stepping back in time haha

0:39 I like how the OS is DIP and John Connor says "You calling moi a dipshit".

Shout out to LGR for his superb filming, editing, and writing. Each episode truly immortalizes the technology LGR presents. Such dedication to preservation deserves commendation.

As a die-hard Atari Computer fan I was intrigued with this little machine. It was clearly not an Atari design but it did seem like it might be useful, especially as a supplemental machine for a PC user. I never cared for the IBM PC or its ilk, but they were all on DOS 3.3 at the time and DOS 2.11 felt like a deal breaker.  Everyone was comparing its size to a VHS tape. We were Beta.  But it did appreciate that it ran on AA batteries, my coin of the realm at the time. I was into low-level programming so I was wailing for an assembler. I was also waiting for the price to drop to $199 which felt more appropriate to me. Of course "PC compatibility" was promised much more than it was delivered an awful lot in those days. You're generally better off writing your own software to pass data to a real PC. I still think John Connor demonstrated the most practical use of this machine.

It seems inevitable that “netbooks” will soon be old enough to be worth considering as an LGR topic. I have an early Samsung in a fetching blue color that I would be willing to donate.

LGR videos are definitely one of the few that, no matter how long, could never be long enough. This video could be three and a half days long and I'd still be like aww damn it's not four days? Clints voice is next level soothing fr fr lol.

Unbelievably, my Dad had two of these! He had some great software for them, too. I've got a photo hanging up of me using one, taken in 1991. I seem to remember he had some games you could play across a cable, connecting the two machines. Do I remember battaleships? and Pong? Awesome days.

Disappointed I had to scroll 3 screens down to see a T2 reference. "Easy money!"

Compromising usability for portability Literally nothing has changed lol

This takes me back to college, one of the tutors there had one (two years before T2). I thought it looked cool, but I had a Gameboy instead as I wanted to play games on the move. He also had a Yamaha SY77 synth workstation, I was jealous as they were top notch and expensive. I have two SY77s now (I bought a broken one to fix and failed, bought another then got both working) but no Portfolio, I don't think they're that useful. I did have a Nokia 9110 communicator in 2001 and that was an AMD 486 running DOS with Geos as the frontend.

Who didn't want one of these things when they were in the JCPenney and Sears Christmas catalogues back in the day?