Ultralite Laptop Is Unveiled By Nec
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday October 9, 1988
A NEW two kilogram laptop was introduced on Monday by NEC Home Electronics.
Called the Ultralite, it is 30cm wide, 20cm deep and less than 4cm thick. The most striking thing about it is that it will fit into a briefcase or bag without forcing the user to discard magazines, cheap novels or toothbrushes.
The second most striking aspect is that it does not weigh much more than a weekend newspaper.
The Ultralite achieves its size and weight through some significant design changes, which have to be viewed as compromises.
For anyone who deals with large amounts of data and who needs to exchange or transfer the data on the road, the Ultralite may not be the best selection
Also, its battery is listed as good for two or three hours, which is only minimally acceptable. Unlike portables that offer full desktop power and features, the Ultralite is not intended to be a user's primary computer.
That is why NEC still offers the popular Multispeed laptop, in addition to the new Prospeed 80286 and 80386-based machines.
But for people who deal primarily with word processing or other character-based applications, who do not need more than one or two software applications in the computer at a time, and who want a travelling companion that will not wear them down, it is appealing.
It does not have a standard disc drive, although a 3.5-inch external device is available as an option. Almost everyone will need this option. It does not have a printer port either, although one is included with the floppy drive and another is offered on an optional plug-in card.
How does one load a spreadsheet, word processing or data base program into the computer without disc drive? And how does one transfer data to another system at the end of a trip?
Part of NEC's solution involves another innovation: the Ultralite's"silicon hard disc". This is essentially a series of NEC's proprietary one-megabit storage memory chips that add up to one or two megabytes of data storage, the equivalent of one high-density floppy disc. The two-megabyte configuration costs $US3,699.
Speed is the positive side of putting storage memory in the chip, instead of on a conventional disc drive. The negative side is cost, since all memory chips are expensive today.
Still, one or two megabytes is not very much by today's standards. The company reported that this feature would be expanded to eight megabytes, but that depended on the price and availability of four-megabit chips, which were new and rare and even more expensive.
Another way the Ultralite deals with the data storage and memory challenges is the use of ROM cards. A ROM card is the size of a double-thick plastic credit card, and it contains "read only" circuitry that holds the software code.
Instead of buying Lotus 1-2-3 on floppy discs, for example, one would buy it on a ROM card for about the same price and insert it into a built-in ROM card slot on the Ultralite.
Besides Lotus 1-2-3, the first available ROM cards will be Wordperfect 5.0 and Xywrite 3, which are word-processing programs, and Microsoft Works, an impressive program that combines spreadsheet, data base, word processing and simple communications.
Tom Miller, assistant vice president of NEC's computer products division, said the company was negotiating with other software companies to add popular titles to the ROM card catalogue.
That means that most popular applications are not on ROM cards yet, so the user must figure out a way to transfer them from floppy disc to the silicon hard disc. This entails attaching the Ultralite to another computer, via a cable and built-in Laplink software from Traveling Software, or to the optional external floppy drive.
Still another data transfer mechanism is the machine's built-in modem.
The microprocessor of the Ultralite is the NEC V-30 processor running at 9.83 megahertz, which puts it somewhere on the performance scale between the old 8086-based IBM XT and the 80286-based AT.
The machine comes with 640 kilobytes of random access memory. An additional 256 kilobytes of RAM is available for about $US350 more.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald