You Can Still Use an MS-DOS Laptop in 2023

Which OS is installed on your laptop? I’ll guess, Windows, OSX or maybe Chrome OS. But how about MS-DOS?

Dmitrii Eliuseev
Debugger

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Let’s take a challenge and imagine that you have this machine from 1988.

Which by the way, had a $1,999 price — the value equivalent to $4,989 today. Can we do something useful on this laptop nowadays? Let’s figure it out.

Specs

At the end of the 80s, the typical personal computer was looking like this:

IBM PC XT © https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT

It was a nice machine but it was absolutely far from “portable”. If you wanted something really portable in the 80s — you had to be on the cutting edge of the tech of that time, it was something that most people were not able to afford. Actually, switching from a “desktop” to a “laptop” gives you a new dimension of freedom, and this is what people were ready to pay for. I can’t even think of a suitable analogy for what kind of modern gadget can cost about $5K nowadays. Today, even switching from a $500 to a $5000 laptop will probably not give you a similar increase in productivity at…

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Dmitrii Eliuseev
Debugger

Python/IoT developer and data engineer, data science and electronics enthusiast