Retro Tech Tuesday: 1989 Macintosh Portable

I have no doubt that in twenty-odd years, we (and our kids) will look back and giggle at what we considered cutting edge technology. Still, that's no reason to keep us from looking back now, and laughing at the state of the art 20 years ago.

In 1989, Apple was ready to unveil the Macintosh Portable, with a blazingly fast 16MHZ processor. That's megahertz, folks... Still, looking back there were some cutting edge features like stereo speakers, save sleep state, and according to Apple''s numbers, 10-12 hours of battery life.

Given the increases in processor efficiency, you could probably operate a modern laptop for a month if we were all willing to lug around something the size of the Macintosh Portable. In this clip, we get prescient prediction that portables could lead to an explosion of the use of animated presentations in the business sector. Kudos to Microsoft for also sensing the growing market, and purchasing a then Mac-only piece of software called Presenter, which would later become what we know today as PowerPoint: