Originally published at: Atari ST Book laptop among the rarest treasures of the 16-bit era - Boing Boing
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The ST Book was certainly an interesting piece of kit along with the Macintosh Powerbook 100-series released around the same time. I remember as an Amiga user wondering why Commodore couldn’t get their act together and release something similar, although it would have been far out of my price range regardless as a teen working a part time job.
Instead I eventually ended up with an Atari Portfolio palmtop bought used a few years later. Despite only being an IBM PC/XT class device with rather anemic amounts of RAM, storage (battery backed SRAM cards), and a very cramped screen, it really did a great job as a pocketable word processor and dial in terminal and had a surprisingly useable keyboard for its size. It was an essential part of my cyberpunk lifestyle getting carried around with me in a weatherproof army surplus messenger pouch until it finally got replaced with a Sony Clié palm pilot in the early 2000s.
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and IIRC, it could also be used to hack ATMS given some additional hardware strapped to it. (Terminator 2)
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In retrospect, now we know the whole Commodore story, it’s amazing they got anything done.
Just checked - that Commodore machine was rocking a 1MHz processor - and was completely incompatible with any other Commodore machine. I’d have gone with the SX64:
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Yeah, I’ve got one of those. You could do a CrossFit workout with it.
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I used to have a “laptop” with a gas plasma display. The screen got hot enough that you wouldn’t want to touch it, and I put “laptop” in quotes because all that heat was getting into the laptop in the form of 120VAC. It was too power-hungry for batteries. Maybe the unlit LCD crew was right.
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Too true. Reading the history of what went on there from various insiders doesn’t paint a very pretty picture. Good engineers alone can’t save a company from bad management. It must have been an extremely frustrating place to work for anyone remotely competent during the later years.
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That was a pretty low effort scene but it was an action movie, not a hacker movie so I think we can forgive Hollywood for that one. If nothing else it showed that the Portfolio had the right vibes at least. 
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Something, something, Boeing…
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