Hey everyone, it's Colin. How's it going?
Not long ago in a pile of e-waste, a small black electronic organizer caught my eye
Little did I realize at the time that the device had helped spark a new era in personal computing.
The handheld was incredibly dirty with various cracks and chips in its plastic housing.
It looked like it had spent the better part of a couple decades in someone's garage.
I started cleaning it up, but when I opened the screen, I realized it wasn't any ordinary organizer.
This is an Atari Portfolio, released in June of 1989 at a price of $400 US.
It uses an Intel 80C88 processor at about 5 MHz
and has a 260 by 64 pixel monochrome reflective LCD.
It operates off of three AAA batteries and has
128 kilobytes of RAM which also doubles as its storage.
Since flash media was very expensive at the time,
a portion of memory was used as a RAM disk and kept persistent by a backup battery
There's a slot on the left side for program cards or memory expansion
which used the same battery backed RAM setup.
They weren't cheap though,
a 128 kilobyte expansion card cost a cool $200, half the price of the Portfolio itself.
An expansion connector on the right side could be used for add-on modules like modems,
parallel or serial ports or other specialty devices.
An article in the British Journal of Anesthesia from 1992
Illustrated how a portfolio could be connected to a
hospital blood oxygen meter for data logging and analysis.
The device came with a few built-in programs like a calculator, word processor,
spreadsheet editor, calendar and address book.
But what grabbed my attention is the operating system it runs.
One would expect given it was from the late 80s that it would use a
simple embedded OS like other pocket organizers
But the Portfolio instead runs DOS,
it's not full-fledged Microsoft DOS,
but rather a derivative called DIP DOS.
It's similar enough to MS-DOS that conceivably one could run standard programs,
but in practice, this proved difficult due to the system's unique hardware architecture.
But it could interface with PCs and serve as a remote terminal console with use of the modem add-on.
The Portfolio even got a pop culture cameo in the movie Terminator 2, as the device used to hack into an ATM.
Throughout the 80s, Atari had become a well-known though, maybe not
leading name in the personal computer industry.
Given its variety of other products, a pocket computer was a logical addition to its lineup.
But Atari didn't actually design the Portfolio on its own,
rather it was just a rebadged product from a UK company
called DIP Research known as the DIP Pocket PC.
That's also where the unit's OS, DIP DOS, gets its name.
The company's founders originally came from another
technology business, Psion, which had a lengthy history with pocket computing
DIP Research didn't release many products, but it did go on to design a follow-up to the Portfolio.
It was sold in 1991 as the Sharp PC-3000/3100
Atari had apparently lost interest in the market by that point.
Ultimately, DIP itself went on to be sold to Phoenix Technologies in 1994.
By the time it was discontinued in 1993, Atari's Portfolio hadn't necessarily been wildly successful,
but it was generally regarded as one of the very first pocketable PCs
and its release helped to usher in a whole new era of computing
that saw rapid evolution throughout the 1990s.
In the end, I was able to get my trash-picked Portfolio
reasonably cleaned up, but it still has its fair share of flaws and missing pieces
and I think that about sums up the Portfolio in general,
It was never really the most feature-rich product.
But it does serve as a very tangible reminder that all technological revolutions,
need to start somewhere.
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