Correction: You literally needed a lap (or a pull-down table larger than the ones on airlines) to operate a lap-top outside of the office.

The notebook was as much of an incremental size difference to a laptop as a netbook is to a notebook today. That's why they were called notebooks. You literally needed a lap (or a pull-down table larger than the ones on airlines) to operate one outside of the office. When notebooks first came out, they were actually thought as being "hardly" bigger than a notebook. Granted, the screens then were smaller (my first notebook had a 13" B&W LCD screen), so they were smaller than many of the notebooks on the market today, but they were a quantum leap size-wise when they first hit the market.

I lived in Singapore in the early '90s. The country became a signatory of international copyright law in 1989, so what you recall is incorrect. The Sng government was active in pursuing copyright compliance ... at least on the brick-and-mortar level (i.e. no "vending machines," no bins of pirated cassettes as existed before 1990, etc.). Given the level of government control over the Internet there, I would find it difficult to believe they would allow any Singapore-hosted server to distribute warez. On the other hand, Johor Baru, Malaysia is less than 30-minutes away by car. In the '90s, you could buy $10 copies of Photoshop or anything else you might want. I haven't lived in the area for some years now but would not be surprised that pirating still goes on there on some level.