Atari's compact clamshell ran an MS-DOS compatible operating system - DIP-DOS, from Guildford-based Distributed Information Processing (DIP) Systems - on a 4.92MHz Intel 80C88 processor. The Portfolio has 128KB of memory on board, 32KB of which was reserved for data storage exposed as the C: drive, this was backed up by the three AA batteries the Portfolio ran from. -A built-in long-life cell protected the memory when the batteries needed changing.
The Portfolio's display was a 40-character by eight-line, with a 240 x 64-pixel graphics mode, mounted next to the unit's speaker and above the calculator-style QWERTY keypad. A slot on