Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!ibmchs!auschs!d75!pedz
From: pedz@pedz.austin.ibm.com (Perry Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Unix laptops
Message-ID: <PEDZ.90Jan13130300@pedz.austin.ibm.com>
Date: 13 Jan 90 18:03:00 GMT
Sender: news@d75.UUCP
Distribution: comp
Organization: IBM AWD, Austin, TX
Lines: 31

I've got the wait and see approach to buying a computer because of the
fact that with each year the prices drop and the power goes up plus
the fact that I have no real persoanl use for one.  I am curious about
the current state of the machines though.

If we totally disrequard price, is there a laptop which runs Unix in a
true multi-process environment?  I'd like to have BSD Unix (or mach).
I'd like to be battery powered although I could live with being
severly hampered in battery mode if I could have all the power I
needed once I got to a place where I could plug it in.  As far as
power, of course I'd like to have as much as possible.  I think 5 mips
would be plenty though.  I'd also like to have an expandable disk
system where I could have a limited amount of disk in battery mode and
a huge amount of disk when I finally got back home.  I don't expect
all the disk to be housed in the laptop.  Unix by itself is big plus I
like to use emacs and TeX and some other huge packages so I need quite
a bit of disk space.  But I don't need this when I'm sitting on a
plane (for example).

Oh, while I'm blowing smoke rings -- I'd like eventually to be able to
run some sort of X windows or similar package.  This is actually not a
big deal since emacs gives me all the environment I need.  The
advantage of emacs as an X client though are sorta neat and I'd love
to be able to have those capabilities as well.

Has the technology even approached such a beast?  If so, who makes it
and how much is it going to set me back?  (I'm willing to go pretty
high if I really like what I see.)

Thanks,
pedz