The company I worked for used Compaq Portable II for a drilling machine controller. Like a modern CNC controller, but using a 286 running DOS to run our software (initially written as a *.BAS file loaded into GWBASIC (I think?), converted by me to QB4.5 so we could distribute a .EXE, not a plain text .BAS file, among other reasons.
I developed much of the software on-site in response to needs and wishes of the folks that bought or operated it; typically heavy steel fabrication, building huge boilers, heat exchangers, and the huge piping and other bits & bobs used in oil & gas plants. I did a lot of coding at the machine in those factories.
And did a lot of coding in hotels; I’d pop the Compaq out of the controller, secure the keyboard to the front, and carry it to the hotel for nights of coding. We removed the majority of the plastic case, so all the guts were exposed. We did leave the nice carry handle on the back side.
Eventually I got my own Compaq Portable III as my “development system”. Some sort of fluorescent glowing orange screen, but it also had a fricken’ hard drive or 20 or 40MB. Not one of these “solid state” doohickeys; I’m talking real platters and such.
That thing was a tank. One time at O’Hare I had to lug it from the far end of one concourse to another’s far end; I think my arms stretched 6" that day.
I used an Osborne 1 for a bit. Only thing I recall is the screen (tiny 9"? mono green screen) would shrink and expand as the floppy disk motor started & stopped. I suspect the power supply didn’t have sufficient reserves to keep the monitor circuitry voltage up during the drive motor starting power draw.
Or maybe bad capacitors before bad capacitors were a thing. DAE recall a time when the vast majority of folk had no idea what a capacitor looked like?
I doubt that this thing runs cool; but it wouldn’t be entirely surprising if its lap-warming potential is disproportionately low.
The real thigh-scalders, per watt of system power draw, are the ones where the vendor controls all the dimensions to relatively tight tolerances and has the option of reducing noise from the tiny and overworked fan by conducting heat into the chassis.
As best I can tell from the pictures; this thing is certainly tight by the standards of desktop cases; but has the same very minimal contact between components and chassis(and both the motherboard and GPU are hot-side-up); just the usual screws and standoffs and reliance on airflow rather than conductive cooling from the chassis.
I worked at Sony’s Broadcast Video research group in the UK as a student in 1990, then for a couple of years after graduating. Had SPARCstations for a lot of the work we were doing, but also Sony’s own NEWS workstations:
The ‘laptop’ that I would lug home was one of these:
Pretty sure the shrinkage was symmetrical; a square drawn around the screen would shrink inwards towards the center. If from the drive motor(s) I would think there’d be skewage to the side where the motor(s) are, not symmetrical shrinkage.
But who knows… lots of complex magnetic fields in those CRTs.
