Atari Portfolio
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The Atari Portfolio, launched by Atari in 1989, was the first PC-compatible palmtop computer. The Portfolio was licenced from Distributed Information Processing (DIP) based in Surrey, England.
It is built around an Intel 80C88 CPU running at 4.9152MHz and runs a variant of MS-DOS called DIP DOS 2.11. It has 128 KiB of RAM and 256 KiB of ROM which contains the OS and built-in applications. The on-board RAM had to be divided between system memory and local storage (the C: drive). The LCD is monochrome without backlight and has 240x64 pixels or 40 characters x 8 lines.
There is an expansion port on the right side of the computer for parallel, serial or MIDI expansion modules. It uses a card expansion port for removable memory, which is unfortunately not compatible with PCMCIA as it predates the standard. expansion cards came in sizes of 32, 64, and 128KIB initally, though it has been confirmed later cards came in as high as 4mb. these cards also were backed by a small button cell battery which lasts approx. 2 years, and is replaceable. Built-in applications include a text processor, spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3 compatible), phone book and time manager. expansion cards contained programs such as a chess game, a file manager, and a finance manager, among others. Most text-based MS-DOS applications could be run on the Portfolio as long as they did not directly access the hardware and could fit into the small memory.
other expansion modules included a floppy drive, and a memory expansion unit. the memory expansion unit was interesting. it gave the portfolio an aditional 256KiB of ram, which could be partitioned into several drives. it also featured a pass through expansion connector, allowing you to use more than one expansion unit. in theory, you could have multiple memory expanders attached, increacing your stoarage to 1MiB+
there was also a card reader you could buy for your desktop PC to read and write to the expansion cards on your computer. the kit contained an ISA card, a special cable, the card reader, and software distributed on both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks.
Interestingly enough, there is plenty of hype on this unit today. many people use them for thier strict simplicity, and lack of un-nessicary features. several hacks have been made for the portfolio, including a backlight set, allowing you to use an elecroluminescent backlight on the unit. it comes in either yellow or blue, but you have to install it yourself.
another interesting hack, is a portfolio card to compact flash converter. it allows you to use regular CF cards in the portfolio's card slot. the adapter is a simple breadboard, and connects to the internal connector. the CF card can be inserted into the adapter when it is in the unit. in order to use the adapter, you must "short" one of the pins on the portfolio's motherboard, and it is unkown if you can still use the original cards.
Trivia
The Portfolio appears in the film [[Terminator 2: Judgment Day]], where it is used by the young John Connor to bypass security on an ATM ("Fedteller") with a dongle (Atari's Parallel Interface) and a security door keycard system. Though this trick was fictitious, a similar application was developed for the Portfolio in the early '90s to crack Simplex doorlocks at MIT.
External links
- [Unofficial Atari Portfolio site]
- http://www.backlight4you.com/en/products/el/kit_atari.htm/ Atari Portfolio backlight kit
- http://www.palmzip.de/palmzip/pofo2cfe.htm/ Atari Portfolio compact flash card page
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