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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

https://i.imgur.com/RUN11Hb.jpg

Back in the 90s a friend of mines dad donated a room full of new PCs for the pc lab (486 dx66) and some big monitors to our high school. My friend at the time thought that since he was the main one (voluntarily) tech supporting most of the PCs in the lab, and it being his dad who donated everything, that he could exchange a few things with his personal setup at home. Initially it was trading his 1MB RAM sticks for 4MB sticks. Near the end it was carrying home one of the those incredibly heavy Sony Trinitron 21" CRTs (the one with composite outputs) on his bike handlebars a few miles home down. I rode with him and kept thinking no way he'd make it... but he did, although there a few close calls stopping at traffic lights. In the spirit of his (sadly passed away) adventurous self, a few years ago I carried home 2x 24" LCDs that i had lent my friend the week prior... on my unicycle, figuring my hands were free, why not carry something? The worst part was going up hills... thankfully there were no spills ;)

The ID software guys used to carry their work desktops home at night to work on their own games.

You laugh but, several years ago in the second floor of Red Rock in Mountain View, I saw a guy do that very thing.

He brought in his laptop, and the box containing whatever giagantic Apple monitor he had, and proceeded to hook it up.

When barista came by bussing the tables, she told him to put it away. He was completely incredulous, but relented.

I wonder what the most ridiculous thing a coffee shop employee has had to tell someone to put away? Projector? Popcorn maker?

Hmm. I have a terrible idea.

I bet more than one coffee shop in the Bay Area has had to deal with projectors more than once.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/aNNDoiJuNkrgTwmv6

Dell (IIRC) used to have a portable workstation that when closed was basically a briefcase, with the hinge as the handle...

After a bit of digging, the XPS M2010 20" entertainment 'laptop' released in 2006.

That was Dolch's main product: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1226/Dolch-Computer-S...

https://jcs.org/2018/03/20/dolch64

https://twitter.com/jcs/status/1232779884751204354

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...

No, I'm not taking a vacation. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I'm getting a hotel room in a state where I don't know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions.

I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose - A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I'm sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year.

This will be an interesting experiment for me. I have always wondered how much of my time that isn't at peak productivity is a necessary rest break, and how much of it is just wasted.

SUN used to have the SPARKstation Voyager which was meant to be a portable desktop as well.

When I was in high school I worked for our district’s IT department. There were a couple of Power Mac G5s that were shared, but the students working in that department were using eMacs. One year I bought the first generation Intel iMac (my first Mac), which was significantly faster than the eMacs we were allotted. I got a carrying bag for it and biked into work with it each day. That said, I wouldn’t dream of doing that in a public cafe.

One of the promotional videos for the very first Macintosh from 1984 also showcased its "portability" :)

https://youtu.be/-5zeJyQ31rM?t=113 (at 1:52, with bonus Bill Gates)

I have seen an occasional iMac set up in the coffee shop...

If you like the gamer style more, you have the Roccat Tusko for 24" monitors. Works well with a mini-ITX computer when going to LANs.

Haha, first thing I thought of as well.

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