$5,399 Laptop From 1997 - Gateway Solo 2200

Say hello to the Gateway 2000 solo 2200 model S 5-166 .

And this cost $5399 in March of 1997 or around $8073 adjusted for inflation in 2017 , when this was new , it truly was one of the best laptops that money could buy .

Well for a few months , at least this kind of machine is what I imagine whenever I hear the term Moore's Law and in case you're not familiar with that , it is an idea that came from Intel co founder Gordon Moore and his observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years .

That was definitely the case with the solo 200 .

In fact , just five months later , the 9100 was available from Gateway for the same price and it was better in every way and by 18 months or two years or whatever , it was completely obsolete .

Nevertheless , the Gateway solo 2000 series of laptops were billed as desktop replacements allowing for more computing , more places , more computing , more places , more computing more places , more computing , more places finally held more computing in more places , man , they really doubled down on that tag line .

Anyway , the 2200 was one of the early laptops to feature the brand new Pentium MX CP boasting near desktop performance that you could carry with you and only weighing £7 .

It was more good enough for your average consumer and very much suited the business needs of business users as well as being the computer of choice for the Dakota key keeper guy as used in gateway 2000 advertising .

I don't know exactly why but you know whatever solo 2200 take it in the snow and cabins and stuff .

But yeah , the Pentium MX processor really was the big deal with this particular laptop , it new and it was exciting and in case you're not familiar with what exactly made it .

So these MX processors featured a more advanced CP core , larger L one cache and 57 additions to the X 86 instruction set allowing it to outperform even the faster Pentium processors and even the Pentium pro , which meant you had speedier applications and games , especially when they supported the MX instructions .

PC game developers and publishers really leapt onto the MX bandwagon around 1997 with Ubisoft's pod being one of the first games to do this running nicely with no 3D acceleration at all .

In fact , the solo 2200 is a very solid machine for Dawson Windows .

95 gaming with great sound and video support in Windows and DOS modes .

Just listen to Tyrone's L three soundtrack through this .

The biggest problem here is that you're stuck with black borders for low res on the LCD panel unless you want to deal with ugly non integer graphics scaling through software or of course , you can just plug it into a CRT and it's going to look fine .

This is true across the whole range of systems in the gateway solo two XXX line , including this 2100 system that I also happen to have .

Because why not ?

This was one of the lower end models .

Although externally , these systems are almost completely the same .

It's just on the lower end , they started at $2299 which came with a Pentium 120 megahertz and 16 megs of ram among other lower specs .

But back to the 2200 what you got for 5.5 $1000 after tax in 97 which starts with a 166 megahertz Pentium MX CP Windows .

95 is an operating system with a whole bunch of bundled software from Microsoft Correll and others .

80 megabytes of AM .

Yes , that's right .

80 megs which was absolutely genuinely massive in 97 with most systems still peaking at 32 a respectable 2.1 gigabyte .

4200 rpm ide hard drive , a two megabyte SVGA graphics chip set , a 16 bit integrated wave table sound chip and stereo speakers which are annoyingly covered up by your hands when you're typing a couple of zoom video compatible PCM CIA slots with a 8.8 data fax dial up modem card included a four megabits per second infrared port for doing wireless printing and such topped off with a 12.1 inch active matrix LCD panel with an 800 by 600 native resolution .

And of course , he had optical and magnetic storage with an eight speed CD ROM drive and a 1.44 megabyte 3.5 inch floppy drive .

And these were actually plugged into a modular bay , which meant that you could , we have either the CD ROM or the floppy drive at the same time unless you were to use an external drive in addition to these .

And pretty awesomely that same bay could also accept a second lithium ion battery pack to double your battery life from two hours all the way up to four .

Holy crap .

And if that wasn't enough of a desktop replacement , they sold a variety of docks and port extenders .

Most of them being rather small but one at least being large enough to fit multiple expansion cards .

Yeah , that's right .

Full sized PC expansion cards .

Delightful and absurd .

Yeah .

All right .

So maybe this all sounds a little bit silly today .

And really it is , there's nothing that particularly special about these machines now .

And really they can be found for pretty cheap on ebay .

I got each of these for like 30 bucks total .

But to me , I just like Gateway 2000 laptops , the solo line in particular , they just always impressed me .

When was a kid ?

I mean , that massive 12.1 inch active matrix panel .

I mean , that thing just looked amazing .

I know it doesn't look great in this particular shot because camera issues and beyond the nostalgia factor , I just think it's interesting to look at a computer like this .

That was so ridiculously expensive when it launched and was so quickly replaced by stuff that was cheaper and way better , which just really represents the rapid obsolescence of pcs in the late 19 nineties and beyond .

And if you enjoyed this , look at a little old computer , then perhaps you would like some of my other videos .

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And as always , thank you very much for watching .