Texas Instruments made a line of laptops called "Travel Mate.

The 4000E meets the system requirements for DOS, Windows 3.x and 95, but not Windows 98. According to the manual, it came with 4MB of memory, which could be upgraded to as much as twenty megabytes.

The Travel Mate 4000 series of laptops had a 486WinDX2-50 CPU, Which is a 50 MHz 486 with better performance than a standard 486. Internally, the laptop is composed of several major component parts: disk drives, modem, motherboard, I/O card, LCD Screen, power board (and switch) and battery.

The hard drive is a standard laptop hard drive, about 200 megabyte, but the floppy disk drive is not standard. Only another drive from a 4000e will fit a 4000e. The TravelMate 4000 drives may be compatible, however. An internal modem is an option in a TI TravelMate 4000e. It plugs in to its slot, and you plug the phone line in to it. Unlike a desktop modem, there is no pass-through for connecting a phone. If you wish to connect both the modem and the phone, you'll need a phone line splitter.

The motherboard contains the CPU, RAM, processor and system buses. It's on the proprietary I/O Card that the video, parallel port, hard disk and floppy disk controllers are. The I/O card also contains about 10 LED (Light Emitting Diodes) status lights. There is one that is a multi-colour LED, marked by its 3 pins. The rest of the LEDs are the green T1 size.

The cost in March 1994 was £3300. Our machine has a serial number of 28705400732 and a part number of 2646616-0002. This was very kindly donated by Helen Williams.

Manufacturer: Texas Instruments
Date: March 1994

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH16827. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.

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