[HN Gopher] DOS Days - Laptop Displays
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DOS Days - Laptop Displays
Author : nullbyte808
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-11-20 09:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dosdays.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dosdays.co.uk)
| dolbex wrote:
| I read this title and immediately got "Dance Hall Days" in my
| head.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I remember my 800x600 Toshiba laptop back in 1997 then one of my
| colleagues got a posh 1024x768 HP Omnibook. I suddenly felt like
| a dinosaur computing user.
| JoeBOFH wrote:
| And what's kinda sad is we only recently moved past 1280x720 as
| the "standard" for entry and cheap laptops.
| iamnothere wrote:
| I wish large greyscale LCDs were more available. Since the
| decline of monochrome LCDs, it's very hard to find these cheaply.
| I miss both the PDA aesthetic and the low power consumption, and
| the e-ink ghosting issue is much worse, so it isn't a great
| substitute.
|
| LCDs were indestructible as long as you didn't leave them out in
| extremely hot or cold weather.
| AlanYx wrote:
| My favorite display era was the short-lived period of 4-bit
| greyscale X-terms. Just enough shades of grey to be usable, few
| distractions.
|
| There are a lot of greyscale radiology monitors available in
| the used market these days, but they tend to have a relatively
| high white point and aren't easy on the eyes.
| leejoramo wrote:
| My all time favorite laptop was the 1994 Apple PowerBook DUO
| 280 with active greyscale screen. These screens actually looked
| the best in direct sunlight with no backlighting
|
| The battery life was listed as 2-4 hours. Normally it was under
| 3 hours. However, with no backlighting and booting a stripped
| down Mac OS and apps off a RAM disk, I could get close to 6
| hours in BBedit or WriteNow. I would spin up the HD to save
| data and turn it off again.
|
| https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I remember my father having a work laptop with what seems to have
| been a gas plasma display (it looked pretty similar to the one in
| the article). Crazy to think how far we've come.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Windows 3.1 had a color scheme called "Plasma Power Saver", and
| that would be what it was for.
| danishSuri1994 wrote:
| The old STN/FSTN monochrome panels had surprisingly good power
| efficiency and excellent static contrast.
|
| We lost that niche when the industry fully committed to color
| TFT,and e ink never quite replaced the responsiveness.
| bluedino wrote:
| Mousetrails, anyone?
|
| I was talking with someone about a post we saw on social media, a
| $4999 laptop from 1992 or whatever, and it had something like an
| 8" screen.
|
| "How did people even use those laptops!?"
|
| Then you remember everyone didn't have a laptop for surfing
| Facebook and Amazon. You probably only had one of those if you
| were an executive or traveling salesperson.
| ge96 wrote:
| Something about the older beige laptops that is fascinating, I
| had gotten some Libretto C50s but sadly they are outdated, also
| keyboard is too small
| shevy-java wrote:
| > The orange gas plasma display from a Toshiba T3200SX (1989)
|
| For some reason I love the computers of the 1980s era, plus minus
| some more years, even up to about 1995 or so.
|
| Today's computers are of course much more powerful and cheaper
| per calculating unit, but also more boring. Those things in the
| 1980s were so wild. Also before that, 1970s. 1950s and 1960s look
| outright alien - also very cool.
|
| Of course having all that in a small smartphone is epic too, but
| the hardware today just doesn't interest me anymore. It seems
| like a "problem solved" whereas in the past, people were trying
| harder, including micro-optimising all available resources. That
| required a different kind of creativity.
|
| Perhaps this will come back one day in the future but I doubt it.
| Quantum computers would mean people don't care much about
| maximizing everything to the bare metal if things are already
| mega-fast for most tasks to solve.
| proee wrote:
| In 1997, I paid $500 extra to upgrade my Toshiba 420CDT laptop to
| the "active display". The contrast was mind blowing. Totally
| worth it! ;-)
| RajT88 wrote:
| I loved my old Toshiba Tecra 780-DVD back in the day. I bought it
| used as laptop prices were falling, and got a lot of kit with it.
| A web cam (unheard of for its generation), DVD drive and hardware
| decoding (also very baller), and a docking station where I could
| chunk in PCI and ISA cards and full size desktop drives (I put in
| a DVD burner and a large desktop HDD - I forget the size, but
| probably tens of gigabytes).
|
| I told my wife that in today's dollars, the whole kit would have
| cost about $11k. It's hard to sink that kind of money into a
| laptop with OEM accessories today even if you tried hard.
| brk wrote:
| >It's hard to sink that kind of money into a laptop with OEM
| accessories today even if you tried hard.
|
| Apple has entered the chat.
|
| A fully specced current-gen MBP gets to about $7,500. Not $11k,
| but still a pretty expensive device to tote around.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I'm sure they will get there.
| neilv wrote:
| The coolest use of a gas plasma display I saw in person was at my
| teenage software engineering internship.
|
| We had the coolest engineering workstation computers, Sun and
| almost everything else, with the huge CRTs... but strangely
| cooler, in a way, was the sysadmin's Ethernet diagnostics device.
|
| IIRC, it was built atop a rebadged Toshiba laptop with orange gas
| plasma display, and included a glowing bar visual display for
| network traffic (packets? collisions?), with corresponding geiger
| counter sound effects.
|
| A modern IPS LCD or OLED just wouldn't pair as nicely with the
| sound. (Analog gauges or Nixie tubes would work, though.)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Feeling old, I remember seeing all those models on sale at
| computer stores.
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