DIP Research
Atari Portfolio
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| Also known as | Atari PC Folio, dip POCKET pc |
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| Type | Palmtop PC |
| Release date | June 1989 |
| Introductory price | US$399.95 (equivalent to $772.74 in 2016) |
| Discontinued | 1993 |
| Operating system | DIP DOS 2.11 |
| CPU | 80C88 @ 4.9152 MHz |
| Memory | 128 KB of RAM and 256 KB of ROM |
| Display | monochrome LCD (no backlight) 40 characters × 8 lines |
| Graphics | 240 × 64 pixels |
| Sound | Tiny speaker (DTMF) |
| Input | Keyboard 63 keys, QWERTY layout |
| Power | 3× AA size removable alkaline batteries (Optional AC adapter) |
| Dimensions | 20 cm × 10.5 cm x 2.5 cm (7.5" × 4" × 1.25") |
| Weight | 505 g (17.5 oz) |
The Atari Portfolio (aka Atari PC Folio) is a IBM PC-compatible palmtop PC, and was released by Atari Corporation in June 1989, making it the world's first palmtop computer.
DIP Research Ltd. based in Guildford, Surrey, UK released a product in the UK called the DIP Pocket PC in 1989. Soon after its release, DIP licensed this product to Atari for sale as the Portfolio in the UK and US. In Italy, Spain and Germany, it was originally marketted as PC Folio instead. DIP officially stood for "Distributed Information Processing", although secretly it actually stood for "David, Ian and Peter", the three founding members of the company who were former employees of Psion. The original founder of the company (first called "Crushproof Software") was Ian Cullimore, and the other two David Frodsham and Peter Baldwin. Ian Cullimore was involved in designing the early Organiser products at Psion before the DIP Pocket PC project. The technologic successor of the Portfolio was the also DIP-developed Sharp PC-3000/3100. DIP Research was later acquired by Phoenix Technologies in 1994.
The Portfolio uses an Intel 80C88 CPU running at 4.9152 MHz and ran "DIP Operating System 2.11" (DIP DOS), an operating system mostly compatible to MS-DOS 2.11, but with some DOS 2.xx functionality lacking and some internal data structures more compatible with DOS 3.xx. It had 128 KB of RAM and 256 KB of ROM which contained the OS and built-in applications. The on-board RAM is divided between system memory and local storage (the C: drive). The LCD is monochrome without backlight and had 240×64 pixels or 40 characters × 8 lines.
Power is supplied by three AA size removable alkaline batteries. The computer's memory is preserved during battery changes. There is also an optional AC adapter (110V: HPC-401, 220V: HPC-402).
There is an expansion port on the right side of the computer for parallel (HPC-101), serial (HPC-102), modem or MIDI expansion modules. It uses a Bee Card expansion port for removable memory (aka Credit Card Memory or CCM), which is not compatible with PC card as it predated that standard. Expansion cards were available in sizes of 32 KB (HPC-201), 64 KB (HPC-202), and 128 KB (HPC-203) initially, and later were available in capacities up to 4 MB. The expansion cards were backed up by a replaceable battery, which last approximately two years. Built-in applications include a text editor, spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3 compatible), phone book and time manager. Expansion cards contained programs such as a chess game (HPC-750), a file manager (HPC-704), and a finance manager (HPC-702). Most text-based DOS applications can run on the Portfolio as long as they did not directly access the hardware and could fit into the small memory.
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