Atari Portfolio

» see atari.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the atari portfolio sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it shipped in june 1989, when i was four years old in turkey, nine years before i would touch my first modem. by the time i started caring about computers, the portfolio was already a curio, a thing you saw in retrocomputing magazines or in the pause-frame screenshots from terminator 2 where john connor used one to pop an atm.

but the portfolio was a first. specifically the first ibm pc-compatible palmtop, designed by a tiny british outfit called dip research as the dip pocket pc, then licensed and rebranded by atari for $399.95. it ran ms-dos 2.11 compatible code on an intel 80c88 at 4.9 mhz with 128 kb of ram. it ran lotus 1-2-3. it ran on three aa cells. nothing else at that size and price existed in 1989.

atari discontinued the portfolio around 1993 as the hp 95lx took over the dos-palmtop niche with proper hp build quality. atari was also in the middle of unwinding its entire computer business, with the st line winding down and the jaguar bleeding cash. there was no portfolio successor and no formal goodbye. it just stopped being on the price list.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was in the box ~

the portfolio had a 240x64 lcd showing 40 columns of text. it used proprietary bee cards for storage. its bundled apps included a lotus 1-2-3 compatible spreadsheet and an address book that could dial phone numbers by playing dtmf tones into the earpiece of a held-up handset. plus the usual text editor and calculator. that dtmf detail is the kind of feature you only ship when nobody on earth has phone apis yet.

the keyboard was 63 keys laid out in a real qwerty pattern. small but usable for short bursts. accountants and engineers were the original audience. accountants logged expenses on it at conferences; engineers carried it because nothing else that small ran their tools.

~ the terminator 2 moment ~

the portfolio's biggest cultural moment was a few seconds of screen time in 1991. john connor walks up to an atm, plugs a homebrew cable into a portfolio, types a line of code, and the atm spits out cash. later he uses it again to break into the cyberdyne mainframe. the device was real, the cable was real, the hack was movie magic, but it sold portfolios to a small generation of kids who wanted to be that exact kind of teenager.

that visibility did not save the line. by 1993 hp's 95lx and 100lx had eaten the engineer market, palm pilots were still three years away, and atari was running out of money. the t2 cameo aged into a meme rather than a sales hook.

~ what came after ~

the portfolio's actual lineage is dip research, which got bought by sharp in the early 1990s and seeded some of the work that later went into the wizard pdas. its conceptual lineage is the whole "dos in your pocket" idea that the hp lx series carried forward until 1999. its movie lineage is whichever 1990s kid grew up to read your debug logs.

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