Portfolio palmtop

[tlake]

I was watching Terminator 2 the other day and noticed the character John Connor using a small piece of Atari hardware to work out the pin no. for a stolen credit card and steal cash.
It looked interesting so I went to the Atari museum website and found out it was their palmtop computer the Portfolio, quite a neat little device for its day. :cool:

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/pccomputers/portfolio.html

[llbbl]

damn that's cool looking!

[tlake]

And it can break into banks, lets not forget that! :thumb

[llbbl]

can you get on ebay? how much ??

[tlake]

I haven't tried looking for one on ebay, but this place still sells them for $150

http://www.myatari.com/

I haven't had any dealings with them, any Atari stuff I have was bought new in the old days. Apparently the Portfolio was the world's first palmtop when released back in 1989. Of course there was the worldwide economic recession of 1990!
I would love to know what software that palmtop was using to work out the credit card pin number. From what I could see in the movie Connor had the stolen credit card attached to an IDE cable and the cable connected to an IDE port on the back of the Portfolio. As the character said "Easssy money". :thumb

[llbbl]

How do you connect a CC to an IDE cable?

[tlake]

I don't know exactly, that part of the movie moves very quickly. But, the connection between the CC and the Portfolio was definitely an IDE cable. Maybe there was some kind of sensing wrap over the card that was attached to the cable? Any experts out there have any theories?