[justinlloyd]

I had the Atari ST Book. Somewhat dreadful machine.

And I had the Amstrad PPC 512 portable which could also be powered by ten regular C-cells. It would eat NiCads by the hour.

And I also had the Sinclair Z88, which lasted about a week or two on a few AA batteries which I used all through college because laptops were new and bulky and the keyboards were noisy and so a number of professor's banned laptops, but the Z88 with its squishy dead-flesh keyboard was all but silent.

The great thing about the Z88 was everything was pre-loaded on to ROM, and your documents held in battery backed RAM for weeks at time, though you flash your files to the EEproms for safety. There was enough capacitance in the Z88 that if you pulled the batteries out to change them for fresh ones, you had about two or so minutes before the contents of RAM was lost.

A friend of mine, Ken, (who worked for Apple at the time) has a prototype Apple portable (pre-powerbook, IIc line I believe) that runs on C-cells. He keeps it on top of his fridge.