YEAR: 1989
INITIRAL PRICE: $4499, $9,443 in 2020
The Compaq LTE 286 laptop happens to be one of my favorite retro laptops that I have in my collection. The design is so iconic, when you think of a late 80`s laptop this is the image that you get.
The LTE was introduced in 1989 and was one of the first models to be the size of a notebook, thus the term “notebook computer”, the LTE model name was considered to mean “Lite” as a reference to the LTE’s small size and weight of only 3.0kg. The specifications of theLTE/286 was very impressive at its time of release, which proved it to be more successful that it’s competitors. The competing laptops from NEC and Toshiba only had 720KB Floppies and no internal hard drive, the one downside was that it used a blue backlit plasma CGA (Colour Graphics Adapter) display with a resolution on 640 x 200 or (80 x 25 lines) compared to 640 x 480 gray scale LCD but seriously, come on the back light on these were blue, Four shades of grey? I don’t think so, these little baby’s pumped out 4 shades of blue!
| Processor: | Intel 80C286 microprocessor 12.0 MHz operating speed |
| Memory: | 640kB RAM standard, expandable to 4 MB using proprietary memory cards |
| HDD: | 40MB |
| STORAGE | 1 x 1.44 mB 3.5″ floppy disk drive |
| GRAPHICS | Monochrome CGA 640 x 200 display (80/40 x 25 lines, 4 shades of gray) with separate CGA video output. User adjustable brightness and contrast |
| SOUND | PC speaker |
| POWER | Original AC Power Adapter, no NiCd Battery pack |
| OS \ Others | OS DOS 3.0 \ System Manuals, missing Diagnostic and User Program diskettes |
| Weight | Approx. 6.7 pounds |
