• Hello MLAers! We've re-enabled auto-approval for accounts. If you are still waiting on account approval, please check this thread for more information.

One of the first netbooks ever... AST Ascentia M-series

lighting

lighting

6502
I was at SalVal today, and found a small leather bag which contained a fully functional AST 280M notebook.

Specs:

Cyrix (Ha! Remember them?) 200GXM CPU

32 MB RAM

8" 640x480 color screen

External CD-ROM (Missing the cable. I'll need to find one if I ever want to put linux on this thing) :(

2GB HDD

Windows 98

Integrated speakers and microphone

1 PCMCIA slot - if I can trim down windows 2000 enough, I can even give this thing wi-fi!

It's built in net connection? A 56k winmodem, haha!

And the miracle is, the battery still works!

 
The Gateway probably wins, hands-down, for combination of oldest and "netbook"; although it wasn't really possible to use it as a "netbook" when it was new.

The roughly same age, very-much-'net' device that would probably be closest to "first netbook" is the HP OmniGo 700LX. Essentially an HP 200LX, MS-DOS-running "palmtop" computer with a cell phone modem built-in. Always-on 1G data access. Complete with 'dock' for a Nokia cell phone.

My first system that I would consider a "modern netbook" in the current usage is my old Sony PictureBook. I bought one in late 1999, and had a Lucent WaveLAN card in it by early 2000. (I also worked for a company at the time that provided the first "public hotspot" in Portland, Oregon, covering Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square.) Roughly equivalent to the Toshiba Libretto, it added a wide aspect-ratio screen and webcam, just like most modern netbooks now have.

 
The other one I want is an early HP OmniBook 300. The early ones were fun, they had a 'pop-out mouse-on-a-stick' (the mouse was permanently attached via a moveable rod, it would slide into a small space on the side,) as well as having Windows 3.1 in ROM for instant-boot. Later models moved to having two PCMCIA type III slots, one for a 1.8" hard drive, one for expansion. (The expansion could also operate as two type II slots, as was standard at the time.)

What's amazing to me is that the MacBook Air is only 0.1 pounds heavier than the OmniBook...

 
Haha, looks like I've been beat. Oh well, this thing is still quite a quirky toy.

I've got a spare 80GB HDD and I figure, if I can ever find a cable for the external CD, I'll load it up with a trimmed version of slackware and a frontend of some sort to play my mp3s in the car. Possibly with my spare broadcom chipset 802.11g card for light browsing. I wonder if it would be possible to hack X to use subpixel rendering to get 3x the normal horizontal resolution? That'd make it more than usable enough for browsing slashdot and the MLA.

 
Ouch! A replacement CD cable from the computer recycler in Singapore that (apparently) bought all the unsold stock was $25! That one cable cost me 6 times what I paid for the computer and it's accessories.

 
I was at SalVal today, and found a small leather bag which contained a fully functional AST 280M notebook.
Specs:

Cyrix (Ha! Remember them?) 200GXM CPU

32 MB RAM

8" 640x480 color screen

External CD-ROM (Missing the cable. I'll need to find one if I ever want to put linux on this thing) :(

2GB HDD

Windows 98

Integrated speakers and microphone

1 PCMCIA slot - if I can trim down windows 2000 enough, I can even give this thing wi-fi!

It's built in net connection? A 56k winmodem, haha!

And the miracle is, the battery still works!
Click to expand...
Windows 95 is probably a better bet then Win2k with that amount of RAM. Sounds like a fun small portable.

 
The OmniBook 300s are beautiful. Never been able to land one.

I do have a OmniGo 700LX, but no phone for it, of course. I used a 95LX for a long time. A delightful little unit.

 
Windows 95 means no wireless and no even remotely modern browsers. I'm going to put in a 128 MB stick and try either a trimmed version of Win2k or slackware. Id' do gentoo so I could really tweak it, but on a 200 MHz Cyrix mobile processor it would probably take a month of straight compiling just to build the kernel.

 
Windows 98 SE can use wireless, if you buy an older card with drivers. I remember one time when mom brought home a State of Texas laptop from work. Damn thing had no Ethernet port but it did have a CD-ROM drive and a USB port. I hooked up an old WUSB11 dongle and got it online.

 
The OmniBook 300s are beautiful. Never been able to land one.
I do have a OmniGo 700LX, but no phone for it, of course. I used a 95LX for a long time. A delightful little unit.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I had a 200LX, and now really wish I had kept it. I bought it when I was in college in '94 or '95; and did all sorts of crazy things on it. I ran Windows 3.0; I played Microsoft Flight Sim; I even put a FORTRAN compiler on, because it was faster to just compile on the little 80186 than it was to wait for the network-share compiler to become available. (Lab of 30-40 computers, only 5 compiler licenses, so they had a system where it would queue up your compile request. About once a week, the queue would break, and it wouldn't compile *ANYONE*s project until an admin logged in and fixed it.)

 
Nice... so the reseller in Singapore didn't actually have the cable they claimed to have. So I'm not out $25, but I also still have no way of getting stuff on or off of this system.

Code Micro has a crap ton of parts that may or may not be right, but they also don't have pictures of anything... and I don't have a SKU to search for... any ideas?

 
The OmniBook 300s are beautiful. Never been able to land one.
Click to expand...
I've got one of those... apparently, there is still a bit of a community for them. I've been considering putting mine on ebay, though, to start my Pismo-G4 pool. :-)

 
The OmniBook 300s are beautiful. Never been able to land one.
I do have a OmniGo 700LX, but no phone for it, of course. I used a 95LX for a long time. A delightful little unit.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I had a 200LX, and now really wish I had kept it. I bought it when I was in college in '94 or '95; and did all sorts of crazy things on it. I ran Windows 3.0; I played Microsoft Flight Sim; I even put a FORTRAN compiler on, because it was faster to just compile on the little 80186 than it was to wait for the network-share compiler to become available. (Lab of 30-40 computers, only 5 compiler licenses, so they had a system where it would queue up your compile request. About once a week, the queue would break, and it wouldn't compile *ANYONE*s project until an admin logged in and fixed it.)
Click to expand...
I built apps on Turbo Pascal on a 486 I had (and still, as it happens, have) and transferred them over to it, games and such mostly. I also plugged it into a modem to dial in with the terminal emulator when I was out and about. The only downer with the 95LX was the small screen width, but it was a lot more convenient than the Atari Portfolio. I have a Portfolio, mostly as a curiosity, and on balance the LXen are the better machines even though Portfolios are really quite sexy.

When I lived in Malaysia for a few weeks, one of the doctors at the hospital there was practically conjoined to his 100LX. He did remarkable things with it.

I'm pretty sure I picked up the GEOS OmniGo too (OmniGo 100, IIRC?). I was not a fan of GEOS on the C64 or the Apple II, just too slow for practical use. But GEOS on the OmniGo was a surprising pleasure. And there is a ZEOS pocket PC (cheap piece of ...) and a Poqet PC around here somewhere also, but the LXen are my favourites.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top