01/01/2024 Edition
Page 1 - CPUs
We will start this guide with a general overview of what vintage laptops of each processor generation tend to look like. This will hopefully give you a basic overview of what generation you should be looking for, along with what sort of issues you may run into with each. I will go into more detail on all of this in later pages.
Mid 1980s through the early 90s
These make up the earliest of laptops. They generally fall more under the luggable catagory than the laptop one. Many of these will be floppy-only with no built in hard drive, although plenty also do have internal HDDs. Be warned that some that do have hard drives will use weird interfaces that make replacement drives very difficult to find. There were some strange early standards that never managed to take off that made it into some of these. Plenty do use standard IDE though.
Most of these will use low-quality early LCD displays, many of which will be strange non-standard aspect ratios, and many of which lack backlights. Even the best LCDs from this era look terrible for games though. However, you will rarely run into one that instead uses a Gas Plasma display, which are orange in hue and look great. More info on displays is listed on page 2.
The majority of these systems will only support CGA graphics, and none of them had built-in sound as far as I know. However, some of the bulkier ones did have an internal ISA slot that could be used to add a sound card.
Many of these also lack internal batteries.
I also don't think I've seen a single one from this era that had any sort of built-in pointing device. Many will have very nice desktop-quality keyboards though.
Many of these early laptops can be quite reliable still, although plenty of them are the complete opposite. It's generally the less feature-rich (non-backlit LCD, floppy-only) systems that seem to be the most reliable, which makes sense. This is far from a rule though.
386 systems spanned from the end of the era of giant luggables through to the new era of ultraportable laptops brought in by new innovations of the 1990s. Early systems can share much in common with ones from the last era, but you can generally expect that a 386 laptop will have a hard drive, a battery (usually NiCad), and probably also VGA graphics.
By the middle of the generation, most would be compact laptops with no internal pointing device, no sound card, and a low-quality passive matrix LCD (again, more on LCDs in the next section). Some of the later 386 systems did have internal pointing devices, but this is somewhat rare.
You can pretty much expect that any 386 laptop will have a passive matrix grayscale-only LCD. There ARE exceptions, but they're rare. Practically the only time where you're going to run into a 386 laptop with any other type of screen is if it's a huge luggable, and even then, I only know of a few. Toshiba made a few with Gas Plasma displays, and there were a couple that even had early TFT Color panels, some even compact ones, but they're very rare. (more on this on the next page). You can pretty much be sure that there will be a couple exceptions to most general rules I write in this guide, but what I say applies to the vast majority.
1992-1995
The vast majority of 486 laptops were the new 90s-era compact type (although not so much by today's standards of course). Beyond that, they varied greatly in capability and features. Processor speeds started around 25MHz, and reached up to 100MHz by late 1994. Some used mobile-specific ships like the Intel 486SL and the Cyrix 486SLC (which was little more than a souped-up 386), while others used full desktop chips.
Color displays were common for the first time in 486 laptops, in both Passive and Active Matrix types (see page 2 for info on LCD types). Grayscale Passive Matrix still ruled the low end during this time though, they're still extremely common to find.
486 laptops also marked the first time that we'd see laptops with sound cards built-in, but it's still very rare to find one with them. Sound-card equipped 486 laptops were mostly made up of the later ones, and it was still an option on many. See: List of 486 Laptops with built-in sound cards.
Batteries in 486 were mostly NiMH, although some of the early ones still used NiCad, and some of the later ones did use Lithium Ion chemistry.
Most 486 laptops do have a built-in pointing device, but MANY of the early ones still didn't. The vast majority of them that did have them also put them in a weird and often un-ergonomic location.
CD-ROM drives were still pretty much non-existent during this generation, with most brands offering large external docks with desktop drives. Of course, you've got to have your rare exception, which was IBM in this case with the ThinkPad 755CD. Even that one also came with a Penitum option though, so does it REALLY count?
1994-1999
The earliest Pentium laptops I've seen came out in 1994, and the latest I've seen released in 1999, although the vast majority came out from 1995-1998. By this point, you can expect that you're getting a built-in pointing device, sound card, and a color screen, although some exceptions may exist to that. CD-ROM drives in laptops also became "a thing" during this generation, with them appearing during 1995 and then becoming common by 1996. Also, by this time, most manufacturers had figured out that putting the pointing device below the keyboard made the most sense.