Talk:Xerox NoteTaker

Not the first portable computer
See the IBM 5100 Portable Computer, introduced in 1975, for one earlier example. --Brouhaha (talk) 11:06, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Technical details
This page is basically a copy/paste of the information from the Computer History Museum, which has some mistakes and no indication of where the information was originally from. The Notetaker had three 5MHz 8086 processors, for example, and not one 1MHz chip. The goal was to have a sale price of just $2000 and there were initial plans for a $500 Notetaker 2. All the original documentation for the Notetaker is now available at Bitsavers http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/notetaker/ and can be directly consulted. --189.19.1.51 (talk) 17:30, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

I should have checked the old memos before writing the above comment. In memo "19790604 Subsystem Analysis NoteTaker I" it is clear that the changes between the Notetaker I and II would be small and the goal was to get the cost of the case below $500, not the whole machine. The total cost of the prototypes was around $8700. The last memo (from 1980) mentions dropping the II in favor of developing a Notetaker III, but gives no details about what that would be like. The Notetaker had a 8086 for running Smalltalk and a second one for I/O. The third 8086 was part of the Ethernet board, which was still being developed when the project ended. --189.19.1.51 (talk) 18:51, 14 January 2011 (UTC)