Computer Chronicles Revisited 112 — LapLink, Battery Watch, Won Under, and MagniView

In May 1988, the United States Senate’s Rules Committee faced a dilemma. Wendy Woods reported that the Committee recently received bids for a contract to provide laptop computers for “workaholic” Senate employees seeking to replace their portable typewriters. It turned out there was only one bidder that met all of the Committee’s requirements–Toshiba. Unfortunately, Woods said, it was “politically impossible for the Senate to buy Toshiba laptops,” and an unidentified source said the members would “have to fudge the criteria a bit, to make sure someone else qualifies.”

The reason Toshiba’s laptops were a political non-starter for the Senate dated back to a scandal that sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. Starting in the late 1960s, a United States Navy warrant officer named John A. Walker, Jr., started working as a spy for the Soviet Union. Among other things, Walker passed along secret information regarding the U.S. Navy’s ability to track Soviet submarines. In response, Moscow started looking for a way to manufacture quieter propeller blades for their submarines.

In 1980, this led a Soviet trade organization to contact a counterpart in Japan. The Japanese company arranged to acquire restricted computer equipment for the Soviets to use in creating their new propeller designs. The company that provided that equipment was Toshiba Machine Corporation, which was a subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Toshiba Corporation. Toshiba Machine officials shipped the computers through a Norwegian intermediary in order to get around a series of export restrictions imposed by the Japanese and United States governments to keep sensitive technology away from the Soviet Union.

In late 1986, the American and Japanese governments learned of what happened from an informant at the Japanese export company. The Reagan administration publicly disclosed the sales in April 1987. Toshiba immediately faced significant political backlash at both home and in the United States. The Japanese government forced the resignation of Toshiba Machine’s top two executives, who also faced criminal prosecution. Meanwhile, the always thoughtful and deliberative United States Congress saw the affair as an opportunity to take a sledgehammer to the country’s trade policy.

And I don’t mean a metaphorical sledgehammer. In July 1987, nine members of Congress staged a photo-op outside the United States Capitol where they used actual sledgehammers to smash a trash can filled with Toshiba-branded radio-cassette recorders. The Senate quickly followed up by passing a bill to ban all imports of Toshiba-made goods into the United States.

The House of Representatives rejected a total ban, however, and eventually forced the Senate to accept lesser sanctions that merely limited Toshiba to no more than $200 million in annual sales to the United States government.

As you might expect, lobbying played a key role in helping Toshiba escape an outright ban. The Los Angeles Times reported in May 1988 that Toshiba America, the company’s American subsidiary, spent around $3 million lobbying members of Congress. The company’s argument focused on the potential harm to U.S. businesses and consumers if Toshiba’s exports were banned. This included the harm to the U.S government itself and many of its defense contractors, who depended on Toshiba electronics in manufacturing their own products.

This included laptops. Now the laptop market in mid-1988 was not especially large. At an industry conference held that June, organizers estimated there would be 630,000 laptops sold that year. For comparison, in 2020 there were an estimated 218 million laptops sold.

Not only was the 1988 laptop market therefore still quite small, but it was largely focused on serving government customers, in particular the military. In January 1988, Newsbytes reported that the U.S. Department of Defense ordered more than 225,000 laptops from Zenith Data Systems, the leading American manufacturer of portable PCs. (Ironically, one of the main uses for military laptops was on submarines.) Zenith, Toshiba, and Tokyo-based NEC Corporation were widely considered the three market leaders, with Toshiba accounting for about 25 percent of all U.S. laptop sales that year.

Why Were All These Peripherals Necessary?

Given Toshiba’s prominence in this nascent market, it should come as no surprise that many companies were eager to offer laptop add-ons, accessories, and peripherals for the Japanese manufacturer’s laptops, which was the subject of this next Computer Chronicles episode from May 1988.

Stewart Cheifet opened the program by showing Gary Kildall two Toshiba T1000 laptops. The only difference between the two machines is that one came with an after-market backlight and the other did not. Cheifet said the backlight provided better screen visibility in low-light conditions. He added that the existence of such accessories raised the question of why the manufacturer couldn’t built a laptop that came with everything in the first place.

Kildall said that laptop designers had to consider various trade-offs, such as the cost of parts and construction, as well as size, weight, and power consumption. If you added more memory or a modem as standard features, you needed to consider how that would draw more battery power. It was therefore largely left to the consumer to decide whether to add those parts later in customizing their laptop.

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment, which profiled Dr. Ricardo Martinez, the clinical director of emergency services at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California. Over B-roll footage of Martinez returning to his home, Woods noted that he was the author of numerous articles for medical journals and books. In that role, Martinez found that a portable computer–in his case, a Sharp PC-4500–and a couple of key accessories made his life a lot easier.

Martinez told Woods that he could use the modem on his laptop to access the National Library of Medicine database and conduct research. He could then save his search results to the laptop’s data diskettes, take the laptop to the Stanford library, and retrieve the full text of the articles he needed.

Woods explained that Martinez used a simple cable and software package called LapLink to download segments of larger files from his PC to his laptop. The portable then became his principal writing tool and reference liability, which he could use at home, at the hospital, or even at a distant medical conference. Martinez added that the portability was nice because he could take the laptop on an airplane or when meeting with another physician.

Woods said that Martinez even saw a time when the portable computer might play a role in diagnosis and treatment, especially in remote areas. But for now, Martinez was satisfied that by helping him speed up his research, it improved the quality of his work.

Don’t Tell Apple Users It’s “Trivial” to Upgrade Laptop RAM

Mark Eppley and Keith Comer joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Eppley was the president of Traveling Software, the company that developed and sold the aforementioned LapLink. Comer was an assistant product manager with Toshiba America.

Kildall said that given the recent improvements to laptop displays and storage–many now came with hard drives–should desktop PCs now be considered “dinosaurs” like the old room-sized mainframes. Eppley said no, there was simply an evolution going on in the marketplace. Laptops were becoming the “personal personal computer,” i.e., a small form factor desktop alternative. It was complementary rather than a replacement.

Kildall then asked Eppley to discuss his company’s latest product, Battery Watch, a software program that monitored a laptop’s battery usage. Eppley explained that in developing the software, Eppley and his team dismantled 18 different laptop computers and tested them with current-monitoring equipment to measure the power usage. This enabled them to come up with accurate real-time calculations of battery usage. The program itself ran in the background in just 15 kilobytes of code.

Eppley demonstrated Battery Watch on a Toshiba T1200 laptop. He compared it to a fuel gauge in a car, in that the program showed the amount of time left until the laptop battery was “empty.” Cheifet clarified that Battery Watch was specific to a particular machine and use. Eppley said yes, and the program also constantly changed in response to the user’s actions. For example, if you turned the laptop’s hard disk off–yes, you could actually do that–the Battery Watch display updated to add time until the battery emptied completely.

Kidall sought additional clarification with respect to the batteries. For instance, if you bought two batteries and swapped between them, would they each have the same discharge characteristics? Eppley said no, every battery had its own characteristics, but you could adjust Battery Watch to account for that, such as by inputting the different amp-hour ratings.

On that note, Cheifet turned to Comer, who demonstrated Toshiba’s removable and interchangeable battery packs. He turned off a Toshiba T1200 on the desk, pulled the battery out of the bottom of the computer, and inserted a new battery that he pulled out of an offline external charger, which could hold and charge up to three batteries at once.

Cheifet pointed out there was also an expansion slot on the back of the T1200. What types of expansion boards could you plug into that slot? Comer said it was similar to an IBM PC expansion slot, although Toshiba used a different form factor. Comer showed off a memory card that was compatible the slot and added an additional 768 KB of RAM. There was also a third-party speech synthesis card. You could also add a variety of modems, either internally or using the expansion slot.

Kildall asked if there was a way to install standard IBM expansion boards. Comer said there was an expansion chassis available that plugged into the Toshiba’s expansion slot. You could then plug up to five IBM-compatible boards into that expansion chassis. Comer noted the standard T1200 configuration, which included a number of ports, was perfectly fine for travel. But if you wanted to take the machine to the office and use it more like a desktop PC, the expansion chassis was an option.

Cheifet asked for more information on using the RAM card with the T1000. Comer showed how you installed the card internally on that machine by opening up the unit from the top and dropping the card right into a slot just above the right side of the keyboard. He emphasized how “trivial” it was for the user to install this RAM upgrade. The upgrade increased the total available memory on the T1000 from the standard 512 KB to 1.2 MB. Comer added this additional RAM could also be used as a virtual hard disk that could retain data even after the laptop was powered off. This provided additional storage on top of the T1000’s single floppy disk drive and the ROM, which contained MS-DOS and functioned as the “C:" drive.

Using Your Laptop as a Fax Machine

Chuck Weston, the editor of Portable Computer Review magazine, joined Cheifet and Kildall for the next segment, along with the returning Mark Eppley.

Kildall asked Weston about Won Under, a device that made it possible to attach an IBM-compatible expansion board underneath a laptop that did not normally accept such boards. Weston demonstrated by showing the Won Under board itself, which plugged into the external slot on the Toshiba T1200. The user could then attach a single IBM-compatible board to the Won Under using a cable, with the board itself contained in separate plastic housing attached to the underside of the laptop using screws and Velcro strips.

Kildall said you could also use the Won Under to attach an external 20 MB hard disk. Weston added that laptop’s internal battery would also power that hard disk. Cheifet clarified this would make more sense on a Toshiba T1000, which did not come with a hard disk, as opposed to the T1200, which included an internal 20 MB hard drive.

Cheifet then shifted the discussion to portable printers. He asked Weston to discuss one such printer, the Axonix ThinWrite. Weston said it was a portable dot-matrix printer that came in two varieties, one with a built-in battery and the other requiring an external power connection. He noted it was compact enough to fit in a briefcase and sold for about $500.

Eppley then showed off another printer, the Diconix 150, which Traveling Software sold through its catalog. He emphasized the printer’s lightness, which only weighed 3.75 pounds (about 1.7 kg) with its battery. The Diconix used standard Hewlett-Packard inkjet cartridges, which were readily available. Cheifet asked for clarification on the power source. Eppley said the Diconix used rechargeable, C-cell batteries that provided about 50 printed pages per charge. (Kildall joked you could use it to print on an airplane.)

Eppley next showed off a portable fax machine that weighed less than one pound (0.45 kg) and connected to a laptop via a serial cable. It followed the worldwide fax standard, so a user could sit with their laptop in a hotel room and transmit an image of their letterhead that they previously scanned into the computer. Eppley said he had done just that. He scanned his letterhead and signature into his laptop from his desktop PC. He could then write a letter on the laptop using WordStar, add the digitized letterhead and signature, and transmit the finished letter from his hotel room using the fax add-on.

Kildall asked if this setup could be used to receive faxes as well. Eppley said yes, it would receive a digitized image that could be displayed on the laptop screen. You would still need an external printer to produce a hard copy.

IBM Invents the Blackberry Without Realizing It

Wendy Woods returned for her final remote segment, which focused on IBM’s DCS Portable Terminal, a hand-held computer that included a portable modem with its own tiny cellular phone. This was not a commercial product, but rather a device used internally by IBM’s customer support staff. Woods said that whether a customer had a problem with a typewriter or a mainframe, the distress call came to an IBM regional service center like the one in San Francisco, which provided our B-roll for this report.

Woods said IBM had a sophisticated dispatch network maintained on powerful mainframes. The service center’s computers kept track of a customer’s history, the available parts inventory, and more importantly, it could locate the closest, most qualified engineer to answer the call.

That engineer carried what Woods described as perhaps the world’s most sophisticated pager, i.e., the DCS Portable Terminal. The terminal displayed the details of the assignment and allowed the engineer to carry on a two-way dialogue seeking additional information. These transmissions were sent back-and-forth across high-frequency radio waves. This meant the engineer could “virtually” access all of the information on the mainframe using their Portable Terminal.

An unidentified IBM representative told Woods that the Portable Terminal was the most universally well-accepted tool that the company ever gave its customer engineers. If you stopped one of them in the street and asked them, “What was the one tool you could not do without?”, they would reply their DCS Portable Terminal.

Woods reiterated that you should not expect to see these terminals sold to members of the public anytime soon. IBM had no plans to sell the technology. The bottom line was that the system was just too valuable to share.

Using Your Laptop as a Slide Projector

The final studio segment saw the return of Mark Eppley and Chuck Weston. George Morrow also joined the group. Morrow, of course, was previously the principal owner and chairman of Morrow Designs, which developed the Morrow Pivot laptop.

Cheifet opened by issuing a correction to the previous studio segment. The Won Under did not work with the Toshiba T1000 laptop. It required a T1100 Plus or T1200.

Kildall then asked Eppley to discuss some of the add-on modems that his company, Traveling Software, sold through its catalog. Eppley showed the WorldPort, which he described as the world’s smallest Hayes-compatible modem and ran off a 9-volt battery. It plugged directly into the back of a laptop and came in both 1200- and 2400-baud models.

Eppley said the WorldPort modems supported an acoustic coupler adapter, which could be placed over the mouthpiece of the telephone. Alternatively, Traveling Software sold a device called the Blackjack, a portable modular telephone jack that clamped onto the telephone’s mouthpiece, allowing a modem to make a direct connection to the telephone system. Eppley also showed off a third product, which was a replacement mouthpiece that could be used either to talk through or plug in a modem.

Cheifet and Kildall then asked Eppley about another device, the Migent MM1200 pocket modem, which looked like a bright-red race car. Eppley said Traveling Software didn’t carry this product in its catalog. Unlike the WorldPort devices, the Migent did not have LCD indicator lights to show when the modem was connected and at what speed. Nor did the Migent support an acoustic coupler or communications protocols used outside of the United States.

Cheifet then asked Morrow about LapLink, a product made by Eppley’s company. Morrow explained that one of the problem with using laptops was that most software still came on 5.25-inch diskettes while almost all laptops had 3.5-inch disk drives. This created a problem when it came to transferring files. It wasn’t as simple as buying an external 5.25-inch drive, as the connectors were non-standard among different laptop models.

As a result, Morrow said, he’d become almost completely dependent on LapLink, which came with a data-transfer cable that plugged into a standard serial port and made it possible to transfer data between machines using the included software. Kildall asked about the data transfer rate. Morrow said it was about 115 kilobaud. Big files therefore took quite awhile, but most files transferred quickly.

For our final laptop accessory, Weston demonstrated the Dukane MagniView, which was set up on the other side of the studio. The MagniView made it possible to display the output of a laptop screen on an overhead projector. The MagniView itself was a large tablet with a built-in LCD screen. Weston noted the screen was the same as those used on laptops, except it was transparent. He placed the MagniView on top of an overhead projector.

Weston then transferred a graph from his attached laptop to the MagniView, which effectively functioned as an external monitor. The overhead projector projected the graph from the MagniView onto a standard projection screen. Morrow noted that he’d used a device similar to the MagniView when giving talks. This enabled him to keep all of his presentation “slides” on his laptop. It was a far more efficient way to give presentations when traveling.

Kildall asked about the resolution on the MagniView. Morrow said it was as good as the laptop’s CGA card. He added the great thing was that you could also change a slide right before giving a presentation. Cheifet noted you also avoided the logistics of having to create hardcopy slides.

Cheifet closed the program by asking how much the MagniView cost. Morrow said these type of devices ran between $1,000 and $1,500. Weston noted that Dukane was working on a new version designed to womacrk with EGA cards. Morrow added that other companies, such as Kodak, also made similar products.

Traveling Software was clearly the featured company of this episode. Mark Eppley founded the company in 1982. By that point he’d already developed a fairly unusual background for a software company founder, having worked as a certified public accountant, a fraud investigator for the IRS, and an aide to Washington Sen. Henry Jackson.

It was while working as an accountant for Peat Marwick Mitchell that Eppley decided to start a company focusing on laptop software and accessories. Eppley used an Osborne-1 in his accounting job. While not a laptop, the Osborne-1 was a transportable machine that Eppley outfitted with what he later described to a reporter as a “car battery,” which provided about 20 minutes of power. Inspired by the potential for more truly portable machines–and backed by a venture capitalist–Eppley launched Traveling Software in the Seattle suburb of Bothell, Washington.

Eppley’s new company initially focused on designing software packages specifically for laptops, such as a word processor called The Traveling Writer. Later, the company expanded its catalog to offer a wide range of third-party laptop peripherals, including several items demonstrated in this episode. Eppley also negotiated deals to bundle his company’s software, such as Battery Watch, with new laptops.

But it was the release of LapLink in 1986 that really put Traveling Software on the map. Making it easy to transfer files between a laptop and a desktop PC was a game changer for both Traveling Software and the portable computer market as a whole. The company subsequently released a Macintosh version of LapLink that even made it easy to move files between a Mac and an IBM PC.

By the early 1990s, Traveling Software was the go-to company for file transfer and data migration software. Eppley himself developed a reputation as one of the tech industry’s biggest party guys. Writing for ZDNET in 1999, Michael Fitzgerald described Eppley as “computing’s clown prince,” pointing to his epic “burnout parties” at the annual COMDEX show, as well as his summer “SPAM Jam,” an annual rock concert held at Eppley’s farm in Washington. (SPAM in this context stood for “Summer Party at Mark’s.”)

Eppley’s showmanship extended to promoting his company’s key product. When “beta testing” a wireless version of LapLink for Windows 95, Eppley scaled the 14,400-foot summit of Washington’s Mount Rainier with his laptop to conduct file transfers. He conducted similar “tests” using LapLink to transfer files while riding a motorcycle and from the bottom of a swimming pool in Las Vegas.

But in January 1997, Eppley decided he’d had enough fun and stepped down from day-to-day operations at Traveling Software. While remaining chairman, Eppley turned over the chief executive officer’s role to Kevin Bohren, a former vice president at Compaq Computer Corporation. Bohren assumed the reins just as the Internet and demand for remote-access tools exploded.

Unfortunately, Traveling Software struggled to make significant inroads with remote access software, where the dominant player was Symantec. Just 21 months into his retirement, Eppley decided to reclaim the CEO position at Traveling Software in late 1998. By now, the dot-com boom was in full swing, and Eppley hoped to capitalize on that by refocusing product development on the web and finally taking the company pubic after nearly 20 years. To that end, Eppley changed the company’s name from Traveling Software to LapLink.com and made plans to conduct an initial public offering in 2001.

Of course, by that point the dot-com boom had gone bust. The IPO never happened. In March 2003, LapLink Inc.–Eppley dropped the “.com” from the name–filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, which had about 140 employees during its early 1990s peak, was now down to just 19 people.

Fortunately, this was a case where bankruptcy helped a company survive. Thomas Koll, a former Microsoft vice president, purchased LapLink’s assets out of bankruptcy and reconstituted the business under a new company, LapLink Software, Inc., which remains in business as of this writing in December 2024. The modern LapLink continues to focus on file transfer and data migration software, primarily through its PCmover line of products.

As for Eppley, he remained with LapLink for a brief period during the transition to Koll’s ownership. He left the company for good in 2004. Since then, he’s worked as a consultant.

Notes from the Random Access File