/ Cory Doctorow / 11:41 pm Mon Mar 16, 2009

Miraculous portable computers, ca 1982

I remember the first generation of portable computers -- the luggables -- and the intense, burning desire they aroused in my breast. Now I routinely carry four or five devices that are more powerful than the ones depicted in this 1982 (between phones, cameras, watches, laptop, etc), in a package that weighs less than the power-adapter on one of these behemoths. But I still yearn for one.

Just what is the difference between a pocket computer and some of the more sophisticated hand-held programmable calculators?

From a practical standpoint, it all depends on the type of information (data, if you will) that you manipulate. For many problems, numbers and mathematical formulas are all that are involved. And if number crunching is your game, either product may be suitable. (Astronauts, in fact, have often used programmable calculators to determine the data to be entered into on-board spacecraft computers.) Pocket or hand-held computers, however, not only allow you to crunch numbers (and in greater quantity), but to save them. You’ll also be able to save and manipulate letters and, in some cases, graphic symbols. This opens up problem solving to other-than-strictly-mathematical areas. In fact, it opens up the whole field of information storage and retrieval for virtually any purpose, from nuclear physics to household recipes.

Among the machines currently making their way to the marketplace, the two that most amply fit the criterion of pocketable are the Radio Shack TRS-80 Pocket Computer (manufactured by Sharp and also sold as the Sharp PC-1211) and the Quasar/Panasonic HHC (developed jointly by Matsushita of Japan and Friends Amis of San Francisco–those wonderful people in Silicon Valley who originally brought you the Atari video games and the Craig/Quasar/Panasonic language translator).

COMPUTERS THAT ARE REALLY PORTABLE (Mar, 1982)

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  2. *sigh*

    I still pine for my old luggable Commadore SX-64 sometimes. What a fabulous old beast that was.

  3. Home computers of that era always seemed to promoted as a place to store recipes. Did they really think at the time, your average housewife would replace her box of 3’x5′ cards with a big, clunky box with a screen? A box that could break down and take Great-Grandma’s Prize Winning Lemon Meringue Pie recipe with it? They had to make the boxes smaller and more reliable, and able to talk with the rest of the world before computers became more than just a toy for us geeks.

  4. I vividly remember working on my senior project for my undergrad in 1984 – one of the guys on our team had a Kaypro, and we all openly lusted after it.

    We had to reserve a meeting room, and he had a luggage cart that he would use to lug the thing around campus from his car.

    As the fastest typist, I would type as the others would dictate the pieces of the completed paper that they had written on their home computers — or by hand, in a couple of cases.

    We’d then make copies on 3-1/2″ floppies (god forbid we leave those in the car in the Florida sun – the heat would eat the data) and all go home to print them out on our dot matrix printers.

    Quite a different twenty years later when I finally got around to my master’s — my PHONE has more processor muscle than that Kaypro — and we only rarely met face to face, as most of our sessions were done at odd hours over IM and email.

  5. @#3: actually, my mom did this exact thing. i remember the period when she painstakingly transcribed all her recipes from index cards to the home computer. she printed it all out and proudly presented each of us a copy of her “cookbook” in a big three-ring binder on christmas day. i still have that binder, and her recipes are still scrumptious as hell today.

    way to go mom!

  6. I remember the first portable computer I ever saw (believe it was an Osborne), back in 1983. That was the future, man! Soon, these things will weigh only a few pounds and store megabytes of data…

  8. I used an Apple IIc to compose my Carnegie Mellon application essays in 1985 and a Smith-Corona manual typewriter to type what’s on screen. Couldn’t afford a printer in those days.

  9. This reminds me of the intermediate, somewhat forgotten, generation of pocketable devices, the usually Windows CE- based pocketables like the HP Jornada or the Diamond Mako. More computer-like than PDAs (they had keyboards), they never seemed to catch on much. Most lacking was communication ability, although the Jornada did have a CF slot and someone (HP?) manufactured a Wi-Fi CF card that worked.

    Now, I think big smart phones like Nokia’s Communicators (is that the name?) have taken the pocketable computer space.

  10. Best of all was the cover of the Kaypro magazine, with a svelt woman on roller skates, zooming across the page with a luggable Kaypro at the end of her outstretched arm. Talk about a balancing act. I hated to part with mine… and am still amazed at all it did with only 64k of RAM!

  11. @KAOSDEVICE
    you beat me to it!
    a few years ago a friend of mine (skinchip) purchased a portable (!) C64. The size of a large briefcase and weighed a ton.
    i still lust for it.

  12. @ #3: I still would rather keep my recipes on paper than in my computer. Mostly because I’m such a messy cook that it’s safer if my computer is out of harm’s way.

  13. well that photo brings back memories. I had a couple different Radio Shack portable computers (the PC-4 and the PC-8) like the one in the picture. 4K of battery backed RAM to store your programs in. I used to carry it around with me in 8th and 9th grade so I could copy programs out of the “Red and Yellow” BASIC Game books. It’s how I learned to code, trying to take programs made for much larger machines and rewriting them to fit in a smaller space. Ah the joys of cassette backups and a 16 column thermal printer (which matched the 16 column display).

    I’ve still got mine in a box somewhere with all the attachments and a bunch of old tapes.

  14. Me, too! I had the Radio Shack PC-2 in tenth grade. I used to put chemistry formulas in REM statements to cheat on tests. Good times. I later managed to squeeze programs for Ohms law, Hamurabi and a few other little things in the 2K memory, selectable by a numeric menu. I still have it and it still works. I bought a smaller Sharp model on eBay a few years ago that also works just fine.

    BTW, I think what was especially nice about the pocket computers vs. programmable calculators was BASIC. It was much more accessible to young home computer enthusiasts than say, an HP calculator.

  15. My college boyfriend had a portable Compaq and I would borrow it from time to time, lugging it to campus to use between classes. It was like carrying my mom’s sewing machine around. But damn if I didn’t look cool.

  17. If you really still lust for one of those old portables, Cory, I’ll think about selling you my Kaypro II. It was my first computer, and I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it when I got around to upgrading. I’m still hanging onto it because I figure at some point it will be worth something as an antique. As far as I know it still works and I think I’ve even still got the software disks — it had no hard drive, no permanent installation of software, and as a bonus it ran CPM. But you can get 40 pages of double-spaced text on one floppy. And it was a huge improvement over the dedicated word processors used in offices in the early 80s.

    It weighs about the same amount (and takes up about the same amount of space) as a portable sewing machine of the same era. In fact, I think I bought a sewing machine at about the same time as I bought the Kaypro. The sewing machine was much cheaper — I think I paid $100 new — and I’m still using it.

  18. How about late ’70s?
    I used a Texas Instruments TI-59. It was a programmable calculator with a magnetic strip reader/writer to store programs and data.
    It could output alphanumeric characters to a printer!
    I remember thinking one day as I was carrying it in its padded pouch that I was carrying a COMPUTER in my hand!
    Plus it had LED coolness!

  19. I just watched a Magnum PI episode in which he was stuck in the hospital and the nerdy kid in the bed next to T.M. taught him how to use an outfit much like that photo. It somehow displays on the hospital TV and they somehow hack into the CIA database.

  20. Hey, I’ve got that Radio Shack handheld with the printer! Just found most of the accessories while I was cleaning up the garage. I’ll have to dig up some batteries and see if it’ll still run.

    I’ve also got something that looks very much like the terminal in that briefcase. Never knew who made it, though, because when I got it at a ham radio swap meet it had all of the name plates removed. I’m pretty sure I’ve still got all the parts for it, at least. That one I actually put to use a few times, dialing in to a chat BBS with a 300 baud acoustic modem.

  21. I wrote a review for the Quasar HHC in InfoWorld back in 1982. I happened to come across it just yesterday. Cool little gadget for its day.

  22. I was hooked the weekend I borrowed my company’s Compaq luggable for the weekend.

    For years I had my whole life on a Radio Shack Model 100.

    I was one of the first in line to buy a Toshiba T-1000. And again for a T-1200HD

    Up until three years ago, an HP 200LX followed me wherever I went. You’d be surprised what you can get done in DOS. Especially when you have some 50,000 free DOS programs and utilities to choose from.

    Now I’m trying to make do with an iPhone-as-netbook, and hoping against hope that when Dataviz’s Documents-To-Go arrives, it won’t suck.

  24. My dad got something similar in the mid-80s. He was a salesman with a remote route, and his little mini saved him from hours on the phone dictating orders to someone scribbling madly on the other end — and from the transcription errors and resultant irate customers.

    So, clunky, yep. But useful? You bet. We loved the extra hour or two we got with him every day.

  25. My dad used to tell me about the portable mechanical telephone exchanges when he worked at British Telecom. Sure, it took ten men to lift one, but they had handles, so they were portable.

  26. did I mention my state of the art first computer?

    It was an NEC desktop – and man, was I the shit when my dad upgraded it. It was 16-bit, and it was FAST. It would run CP/M, and WordStar ran like nobody’s business.

    And then we got a new dot matrix print that output in NLQ…bayyyybeeee.

    *splort*

  28. I think I just had a geekgasm thanks to all the memories in the article and comments. Thanks everyone.

    I want to know what the “selection of games” on the “Eleven ready-to-run cassette programs” were. =)

  29. Memories :)

    I still remember my dad while using such stuff and how I was fonded about how they operate, and the passion that blast in my heart for such stuff.

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