[Simh] Why no VAX laptop? (was Re: SIMH emulator running on Windows Mobile 2003?)

[Hittner, David T.]

Why was there never a VAX laptop? Just because it was possible did not
mean it would/should be done.
As explained to me by a Digital Product Manager many years ago...
 
1) It would have ventured into hardware areas that Digital did not do at
the time:
   ATA/IDE disk drives
   ISA bus (keyboard, mouse, serial, parallel)
   PCI or ISA bus (network, video)
[PC technology was first assimilated into the Alpha systems, and then
retrofitted to the VAX line.]
   
2) A laptop would have been cool, but how many would they have sold at
2X-5X (this *was* Digital) times the cost of an Intel laptop?
 
3) If VMS/Ultrix was for secure networked multiuser computing, why would
people want a portable (insecure console, single-user, infrequent
network)?
 
Reasons #2 and #3 also apply to an Alpha laptop, with the additional
challenge of the heat dissipation from the Alpha chip.
 
There were two designed-to-be-portable systems that I remember:
  1) The non-Digital Tadpole
  2) There was a company [can't remember the name] that advertised that
it would take an existing MicroVAX2 BA23-based system and recase it into
a compact "luggable" [small suitcase size with a handle] unit with a
screen and keyboard. They extracted your BA23 chassis and remounted it
into the luggable chassis along with a custom plasma-based VT100. My
company at the time actually explored this option for taking our
VAX-based manufacturing diagnostics to the customer site, rather than
requiring the customer to ship the questionable unit back for testing.
They decided it would cheaper to port the diagnostics to a laptop PC.
:-)
 
Dave


	
	But: Even on my laptop, VMS is cool - remembering the 11/750 I
once owned :-) 
	And I always regretted that DEC never built a VAX laptop (why ?
should have been possible in the early 90s ?!) 
	At least a VS2000 with plasma screen in a box would have been
handy some times ... 
	
	Andreas
	
	

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