From 1981: the World's first UMPC

The Register ^ | 3 May 2007 | Tony Smith

[-YYZ-]

It seems to me that Radio Shack (Tandy, to be precise) sold a very similar portable computer to this one which, if my memory serves me, was also actually made by Epson but rebadged and subtly modified to Radio Shack’s specs.

[ccmay]

I had a friend who was a photojournalist and owned one of these things for filing stories. The last time I was at his house was in 2003 and he was still using it then, more than twenty years after he bought it. He dragged it all over the Third World. In all that time it had never crashed or malfunctioned in any way. I've been asking for years when he is going to get himself a nice Powerbook, but he refuses, saying his old Epson is pretty near indestructible.

-ccm

[ejonesie22]

Tandy had the Tandy 100/102 by Kyocera. Neat little machine.

[narby]

They made the TRS-80 Model 100 in 1983 (according to Wikipedia). Although it was originally made by Kyocera and sold in Japan, so possibly it came out earlier there.

The interesting thing about the Model 100 is that it was the last computer that contains code written personally by Bill Gates (according to an interview he gave several years ago).

[-YYZ-]

Not directly related to the Epson machine? Well, anyway they were very similar in concept - I suppose one of them was probably a rip on the other.

[Filo]

Neat article. I've got one in my collection along with the Osborne and others.

[ASOC]

32K of memory - hummmmmmm.

WOnder if there is a LINUX distro........

[antiRepublicrat]

I preferred these:

Basically the same, but the Olivetti (below) had a tilt screen that made it easier to work with. My friend had the Radio Shack. It was funny trying to share peripherals at first, thinking they weren't compatible, until we figured out the Olivetti's motherboard, and thus the connectors, were upside down.

The very tough Radio Shack is still in wide use today in harsh environments such as marine research vessels.

[-YYZ-]

Yeah, a lot of people dissed Radio Shack “Trash-80s” back in the day, but they did build a pretty solid machine, or at least spec’ed one.

[PAR35]

I still have my Osborne in the bottom of the closet. I also have an Underwood that looks like the Royal pictured in the thread.

[TalBlack]

I had a friend who was a photojournalist and owned one of these things for filing stories.

Your friend is going to absolutely lose his mind when his trusty hardware finally goes down for the count and he has to buy a laptop and the laptop starts screwing him in all the ways a laptop can screw a guy.

[Sloth]

So while the HX-20 combined not only a full QWERTY keyboard, a display, storage and even a printer into its 28.4 x 21.3 x 4.4cm casing, but also a rechargeable Ni-Cad battery.

$5 to the first person to correctly diagram this sentence...

[qam1]

Xer Ping

Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.

Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.

[Bob]

That would be a bit difficult to do since the 'sentence' is missing those helpful little items like a subject and a predicate. I'm thinking that it should have been written:

So while the HX-20 combined not only a full QWERTY keyboard, a display, storage and even a printer into its 28.4 x 21.3 x 4.4cm casing, but it also ran on a rechargeable Ni-Cad battery.

[Fawn]

Huh? What’s a typewriter?

[Incorrigible]

Tom’s Hardware has a current article on the UMPC as well:

The UMPC dies. And no one notices.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31899/113/

[FierceDraka]

Yeah, a lot of people dissed Radio Shack “Trash-80s” back in the day, but they did build a pretty solid machine, or at least spec’ed one.

We had TRS-80's in our "computer lab" in 9th grade

They had a Star Trek game on the "network" where the object was to hunt down and destroy Klingons (Represented as a "K" on a grid).

Seeing as it had been written in BASIC, it was pretty simple to hack the source code, and modify it to suit my little bastard tastes.

I changed any mention of the word "Klingon" to "MUZZIE", and the K on the grid to an M, representing the Muslim enemy.

(The enemy had just completed construction of the Islamic Center of North America in my hometown of Plainfield, IN)

I had thought that the changes I had made to the program were only running on my machine, but it turned out that my modifications ended up being saved to the master tape drive, and everyone afterwards who tried to play Star Trek ended up playing Muzzie Hunt.

Lucky for me, it was the last week of school, and I did this in the pre-fascist early 1980's.

Had I been born 20 years later, I'd have been arrested and charged with a (insert whiney New York liberal voice) "hate crime for being intolerant of Muslims".

[antiRepublicrat]

Cool thing was you could run for days off of four AA batteries. Try that these days. Of course it helped that everything happened in RAM, no moving parts.

[Shion]

Born the same year as me.

I have a much more versatile display however.

[Shion]

>>Huh? What’s a typewriter?<<

You know, I’ve come to value the blank looks I get from coworkers my age when I tell them to press the “Return” key.

“Return, return! Carriage return! Like then the carriage goes back to the other ..... you have no idea what I’m talking about do you?”

I learned to type on a monstrosity of a typewriter that very well could have been steam-powered.