Data General Walkabout: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:34, 28 January 2024

Revision as of 15:19, 14 February 2024

Line 39:

The original Walkabout sold slowly, according to Weiss, who wrote that, as a thin email client in the late 1980s, "[i]t was a great idea that was ahead of the hardware curve". In retrospect, Weiss deemed Data General's original asking price too expensive.<ref name=damer1 /> Despite its lack of success in the marketplace, the Walkabout proved to be the conceptual prototype for mobile [[thin client]]s of the 2000s, such as [[Palm, Inc.|Palm]]'s cancelled [[Palm Foleo|Foleo]] and [[Hewlett-Packard]]'s [[List of Hewlett-Packard products#Mobile thin client|HP Compaq 6720t]].<ref name=cnet />

In July 1990, Data General won a $3.6&nbsp;million order from [[Rockwell International]]'s [[Allen-Bradley]] (AB) division to rebrand the Walkabout/SX as the Allen-Bradley T47. This incarnation of the laptop was remarketed by Allen-Bradley as a terminal for its line of [[programmable logic controller]]s (PLCs) for use in factory automation. Data General manufactured for AB a custom board slotting into one of the proprietary expansion slots a communications board, allowing it to interface with Allen-Bradley's 1784-KL PLC. As well, the T47 came preinstalled with AB's 6200 Series software.<ref>{{cite journal | date=July 24, 1990 | url=https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A8683698/GPS?sid=wikipedia | title=Minigrams | journal=[[Computergram International]] | publisher=GlobalData | via=Gale}}</ref>

==Reception==