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California Looking for a vintage notebook suitable for use as a DOSbook.

Covers: California
hbquikcomjamesl

hbquikcomjamesl

Member
Joined
Jul 24, 2022
Messages
33
This past May, on my Spring vacation, the last of my pair of beat-up old Compaq Conturas died on me. I'm looking for something about the same size (9"x12"x2") or smaller, same weight (8 lbs) or lighter, with a working floppy drive, a working hard drive, and a working PCMCIA slot. Something capable of reliably running PC-DOS 2000 and DOSShell. (Any WinDoze installed on it will be wiped clean: I don't allow WinDoze in my house.) A working serial port suitable for establishing an Interlink connection to my DOS/Linux tower would be a definite plus.

The only mission-critical applications that have to run on it are WordPerfect 5.1+ and Xerox Ventura Publisher (DOS/GEM Edition, the real Ventura, not the bloated PageFaker knockoff for WinDoze that Corel turned it into). Anything else I can get running on it would just be icing on the cake. (I have a small Chromebook for more modern apps.)

Depending on its condition and on how well it fits my needs, I'll gladly pay $50, $100, $150, maybe even $200 for the thing. Plus shipping, if necessary (I'm in Orange County, not far from John Wayne Airport, and I spend my saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum, in Carson, CA, so if you're local to the area, a face-to-face meeting would certainly be an option.)
 
Man it's hard to beat the Compaq Contura, unless it's with the Compaq Contura Aero! I love my 4/33c, it's my go-to DOS laptop. The floppy drive for it are external through the PCMCIA slot. I upgraded my hard drive with CF adapter & 8 GB CF card. You can nab them on eBay occasionally for $100-150. If you go this route just make sure you get one with the floppy drive and power supply.
 
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lets not coin new phrases like Dosbook.. please... Unless you need a DOS manual that is.

You need a DOS laptop got it.

You can get a pentium 2/3 Dell for very little. with onboard usb 1.1

Inspiron 3700 or 3800

I own a Dell Latitude cpxJ p3 550mhz its great. these can be had for around $50.00

As Nullvalue stated a compaq lte 4/33c is a great laptop and you can get a full size docking bay with isa card slots and drive bays. it was my first laptop. i had a scsi card with 1x cdrom in it. but the price on those early comoaq models is pretty high lately.
 
I'd even be up for another 400-series Contura, or for somebody who knows what he/she is doing attempting to make one good one out of the two failed ones I have, if I honestly thought I'd end up with something reliable. As it is, the screen was already getting a tad wonky, and I was even having trouble with the screws holding the thing together. Besides which, given that it now shares my notebook case (at least when I'm traveling) with a small Chromebook (about 3 pounds with power supply and mouse), and I'm not getting any younger, I was hoping for maybe something with less bulk and weight.

So tell me about this PCMCIA-attached floppy drive on the Aero series. Is the computer bootable from it? And what's the weight and bulk, compared to the 400-series Conturas?

It's nice to find a board where there are others who share my contempt for bloatware, and my desire to avoid upgrade treadmills.

--
James H. H. Lampert
"Luddites of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your upgrade treadmills!"
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
So tell me about this PCMCIA-attached floppy drive on the Aero series. Is the computer bootable from it? And what's the weight and bulk, compared to the 400-series Conturas?
Click to expand...

Sorry, missed your reply.. Here's a reddit post I made about my Compaq Aero.
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/j8pp4v

In the picture, you can see the external floppy drive plugged into the (single) PCMCIA slot. Yes, it its bootable! which is cool. The BIOS for it is really great actually - it's hot swappable too. Just plug it in and off you go. The computer also has built-in sleep mode which works in DOS and is excellent for a machine of this vintage (not sure if your 400 series does this?) Weight (without the battery since mine has long been dicarded) is about 3lbs.. It's really small yet still comfortable to type on. Probably about the smallest & lightest of the era, probably lighter than a comperable powerbook.
 
I'm seeing Compaq Armadas at a couple of different outfits: Tamayatech (based in San Antonio, TX, with a Los Angeles, CA satellite office) and Laptop Outlet (in Tujunga, CA).

Anybody know anything about either of these outfits?
Or about Armadas?
 
No, it doesn't have to be a Compaq. As long as it's reliable, will fit (closed) in a space no larger than 9 1/2" x 12" x 2," is no heavier than 8 pounds, and has a working (bootable) floppy drive and PCMCIA slot. (A serial port that can do Laplink/Interlink would be nice).

One prospect had me stopping at a fellow's house on my way home from my docent shift at a museum. Only to find out that he didn't know the difference between a floppy drive and an optical drive, and it only had the latter.
 
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While this DOSbook is primarily for use when traveling, it will also be there to provide much-needed redundancy for the DOS side of my dual-boot tower system (which has a motherboard old enough to support two physical floppy drives, a 1.44 and a 360). On the other hand, I recreated my budget spreadsheet (originally in Tandy DeskMate, then ported to Quattro) in LibreOffice, so I'm no longer dependent on the DOSbook to keep my vacation expenses under control.

(And no, I don't keep saying DOSbook over and over again just to irritate "VERAULT." :p And yes, I'm completely serious about avoiding WinDoze.)
 
I'll measure the size a couple of what I have and weight them if they pass muster. I have the remains of my closed laptop business and there's bit of this and some of that and I'll need to see what fits the limits. The 8 lb limit is that with or without a battery? Most that I have that are cheap might not have a working battery still holding a charge. NiMH batteries are not light. I have see what I have left. Asking for something of a fixed size isn't new to me. Many years ago I sold a bunch of Green 753 Pentium laptops once because they were the correct size to replace some beat up laptops being replaced in portable radar console units. The G753 comes with both an optical drive and a 3.5" floppy built-in, but no USB, no WiFi, and the PCMCIA slots (2) are 16 bit (non-cardbus) only. They do have RS-232, IR & parallel ports and are perhaps of the correct size. Weight? Offhand, I only know the shipping weight for them as packed in double heavy cardboard boxes along with the AC adapter, leatherette carry bag and a stack of manuals. Never tried PC-DOS with any of them - DOS 6.2, Windows 95, 98 and ME, yes. On the other end of the scale I think I have some Clevo D47V P4 desktop CPU beasts that weight a ton, have huge LCD's, floppy drives, maybe a couple of hard drives and optical drives, a TV tuner and a partridge in a pear tree. Plus are about twice your physical size limit. Battery life on them even when new was about car to office desk. Don't stop for coffee. <G>
 
Get a thinkpad 755/760/380. Soundcard works great in dos (although its only Mwave but hey its a dos soundcard!), good vesa drivers, and dos based pcmcia drivers...
 
The 8 pounds was with a battery pack (if anybody's curious, Conturas took a stick-pack, that looked a little like the pack for a Makita 9-volt drill motor).
DeltaDon said:
Never tried PC-DOS with any of them - DOS 6.2, Windows 95, 98 and ME, yes.
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Well, then there should be no problem with PC-DOS 2000, since that's simply the IBM fork of DOS, at the 7.1 revision level, with HIMEM, and an EMM that could emulate physical EMS memory well enough for Xerox Ventura Publisher to use it, and a few Y2K patches built in.
 
I checked a few of my stored laptops:

Alphatop Green 753 or Green 753+ (same size for both) ---> 9" x 12" x 2.5" weight 6 lbs without battery
Chicony MP975 ---> 9.5" x 12" x 2.25" weight 6.5 lbs without battery

I didn't have batteries handy. Guessing that a battery would add a pound or 1.5 lbs. max. and might need rebuilding with new cells.

Measurements done with a tape measure and eyeball. Not exact to +/- 0.000001" Weight on a postal scale that's not calibrated, but P.O. weight matches within reason. All of these laptops were sold under various brand names. I'm using the Taiwan ODM names.
 
vespirah said:
Tamayatech is very awful and a distrustful Business Tamayatech Reviews
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Then it's probably just as well that they never responded to my email. Then again, what I'm after is so unusual that I'd call it a 50/50 shot that anybody getting such an inquiry would dismiss it as some sort of prank.

Brooklyn said:
I’ve got a compaq LTE Elite 4/75CXL in the Bay Area.
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Interesting. Certainly well within the size envelope, but (1) is something that old (apparently slightly older than my Conturas) going to be reliable?, and (2) how much does it weigh?

DeltaDon said:
Alphatop Green 753 or Green 753+ (same size for both) ---> 9" x 12" x 2.5" weight 6 lbs without battery
Chicony MP975 ---> 9.5" x 12" x 2.25" weight 6.5 lbs without battery
All of these laptops were sold under various brand names. I'm using the Taiwan ODM names.
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I've never heard of Alphatop, and I've only heard of Chicony as a parts manufacturer. You say "various brand names"; any that I'd recognize?
And I think 2.5" is a bit thicker than my Conturas (I'll double check the 2.25"), but not fatally so. And I've had one or two Contura battery packs rebuilt for a reasonable price, so I can't imagine that getting packs rebuilt for other systems would be much different. And if a system could be run off of a modern USB powerbank, with the appropriate adapter, I'd be open to that as well

twolazy said:
Get a thinkpad 755/760/380.
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Dimensions? Weight? Reliability? Bootable 3 1/2" floppy drive? Where would I find one?
 
2.5" thick will definitely fit. A bit tight, but it will fit. So will 9 3/4 deep. Maybe even 10" deep.
 
Just like today the brands we see in the stores are not the manufacturers of the laptops. They contract with Taiwanese ODM's and have them produced. This includes Apple, HP and others. Dell for years used Quanta laptops. Alienware laptops prior to Dell buying them were custom painted Clevo laptops with an Alien head in place of where the other brands had a logo.

Alphatop was (I believe) part of Maxtech and they built the "Green" series of PC laptops and I also believe some of the very first Apple laptops. (the white ones) I wasn't allowed to look in on the Apple side of things. Top Secret and all that? Companies that sold Alphatop laptops include NEC, Micron, Trogon, ARM, Brick and many others. Later on ECS took over (bought?) the "Green" line and Winbook, Walmart (Balance), Honeybee, Fry's, Northgate and others sold them. Chicony made laptops up to the P3 MP999 (sold only in Europe?) and then stopped. Since ending laptop production they havre continued with keyboards. I heard rumors that they are (were) somehow tied in with Clevo laptops (sister company?) which continues to produce laptops as Sager, Prostar, Alienware and Eurocom as their resellers. Today I think Chicony is a major supplier of keyboards for laptops, but can't prove that.

The Chicony MP973 has one drive bay (floppy or optical) and if optical is installed then the floppy can hang on the parallel port with a cable. It uses a Pentium mmx CPU and has two PCMCIA cardbus slots and with Ontrack can handle up to 32GB HDD's, I think. Otherwise 8GB? I mostly install CF cards with an adapter since smaller PATA HDD's are hard to find and slow. Knowing the physical size limits are a tad flexible, more or less, opens up the window a bit and I'll see if I have a PII or P3 laptop that also fits the size limit.

All of these older machines need a 19VDC adapter and the batteries are in the 11-12 volt region, I think. I'll need to check on that.
 
Well, soon I should be up to 10 posts, out of my probationary period here, and will be able to either negotiate by PM, or PM my email address.
 
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