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First portable computer?

cj7hawk said:
The Osborne was the first portable modern computer. I'd define Modern as CP/M and onwards, running a generic disk operating system and with a BIOS.

Though early versions of the Amust Executive *might* have come out before it based on anecdotal claims on the Internet - though 64K models didn't come out until 1983.
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I'm not sure when the Osborne came out but the first Amust Executive 816 advert I could find was in June 1983 saying it will be released mid August that year.
 

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ChickenMan said:
I'm not sure when the Osborne came out but the first Amust Executive 816 advert I could find was in June 1983 saying it will be released mid August that year.
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April 3 1981. I've seen dates that claim earlier on the Amust Exec, but they are never substantiated by anything.

Though if we look at the "816" it does infer there was once a 16 kbyte model early on and it was an era when things like this were getting build and sold in small volumes by word of mouth without being advertised. Even the later versions ( I have a 1988 version ) haven't changed manufacture from the point that it could still be manufactured by a small group of people without any tooling or facilities required. The major rework of the PCB suggests it was a small group that built it, since it would have taken a fair bit of time to run all the correction wires under the PCB. I never saw any later advertisements either, but the fact new versions were still coming out in 1988 suggests also there was a very small market that they were very close to since there was definitely no advertising in later years.

So it's entirely possible the earlier dates alluded to were anecdotal and genuine - and the 64K versions came much later on around 1983.

For those who aren't familiar with it, it's built into a samsonite briefcase with a small folded and punched metal frame to hold everything in place, and the keyboard likely came from a different model of computer and was never made by the manufacturer who simply designed the PCB for the main computer, bought and assembled the parts and sold them on an ongoing basis.

I'd love to meet someone who was involved in their company or who knew about it directly one day to ask more about it. If not for the computer I have, I'd almost imagine it never existed and never sold.
 
Of course there's going to be a compilation of 'me first' portable computers. What we should be looking at is the 'main stream' specimens that folks could actually trot down to the store and buy in the 70's and 80's not the left over lab 'protozoa'.
 
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Quagmire said:
Of course there's going to be a compilation of 'me first' portable computers. What we should be looking at is the 'main stream' specimens that folks could actually trot down to the store and buy in the 70's and 80's not the left over lab 'protozoa'.
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I made a portable ZX Spectrum in 1984. I connected a small portable TV handle to my ZX spectrum and ran the whole thing from a magnesium battery - it ran pretty well.

I imagine a lot of people also made portable computers during the era.

Once you apply the popular model filter though, the Osborne1 definitely comes out on top.
 
cj7hawk said:
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I made a portable ZX Spectrum in 1984. I connected a small portable TV handle to my ZX spectrum and ran the whole thing from a magnesium battery - it ran pretty well.

I imagine a lot of people also made portable computers during the era.

Once you apply the popular model filter though, the Osborne1 definitely comes out on top.
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Wonderful, but could you take it to the park and set down on a bench and do something or another with it or was it home bound?
 
Quagmire said:
Wonderful, but could you take it to the park and set down on a bench and do something or another with it or was it home bound?
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Yes, it was pretty useful. The batteries had a good life and it was a lot more stable than when it was on mains power and I also built in a printer and a microdrive and it ran for a few hours ( ZX Spectrums take about 5 watts of power ).

I used a TV a bit like this, except the handle was hard and swivelled below the screen as a stand so it was perfect to attach the computer to. I bought the TV for about $20 from a person entering a religious cult who had to sell everything they owned and give it all to the cult - my grandmother got really mad for bargaining him down from $80 to $20 so she went back in and gave him another $20 for food. I couldn't drive at the time, so she had taken me out to buy the TV.

port tv.jpg

But it used non-rechargeable batteries, which were expensive for a kid, so I didn't use it a lot. Adding rechargeable batteries would have cost quite a bit more.
 
cj7hawk said:
Yes, it was pretty useful. The batteries had a good life and it was a lot more stable than when it was on mains power and I also built in a printer and a microdrive and it ran for a few hours ( ZX Spectrums take about 5 watts of power ).

I used a TV a bit like this, except the handle was hard and swivelled below the screen as a stand so it was perfect to attach the computer to. I bought the TV for about $20 from a person entering a religious cult who had to sell everything they owned and give it all to the cult - my grandmother got really mad for bargaining him down from $80 to $20 so she went back in and gave him another $20 for food. I couldn't drive at the time, so she had taken me out to buy the TV.

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But it used non-rechargeable batteries, which were expensive for a kid, so I didn't use it a lot. Adding rechargeable batteries would have cost quite a bit more.
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Emerson sold TVs of broadly that ilk. Yeah, hard handle and propped up the screen. 10 D batteries think it took...or wall power. I played SNES through it for a while.
 
The desire for a portable computer was pretty strong in the 80s. To be honest, I had seen pictures of a portable computer when i was younger and that inspired me, so it's not like I didn't already have a model for it. I can't remember what computer it was but I think it was an Osborne. What I really needed was something I could carry on me that was convenient - and a TV and Computer hybrid was not. I did get the play with early LCDs around 1987, but they were very expensive and lacked graphics.

Laptops did come out shortly afterwards, but were always beyond my means. I had a lot of computers, but generally I had enough knowledge and worked on enough PCs when I was younger that I was always able to find parts for next to nothing, which fed my desire for a decent computer - but laptops were much harder to find since even broken ones had significant value. When I did eventually get a laptop it was around 1985 - and I used it to practice coding on the train ride to work. The battery lasted about an hour.
 
It's a bit surprising that it was uncommon to have combined computers that could both be portable with a small LCD screen and also be used with a regular TV/monitor? I.E. two editors, one for a small built in LCD and one for a larger screen. Perhaps have the video circuit and whatnot in a docking station, or perhaps have it all on the same PCB but only power it up when used with external power?
 
MiaM said:
It's a bit surprising that it was uncommon to have combined computers that could both be portable with a small LCD screen and also be used with a regular TV/monitor? I.E. two editors, one for a small built in LCD and one for a larger screen. Perhaps have the video circuit and whatnot in a docking station, or perhaps have it all on the same PCB but only power it up when used with external power?
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Not that uncommon. The Tandy 100 with DVI was one example. Compaq had an external display option as did nearly all VGA laptops. Even calculators had third party large screen displays though those were officially more for classroom use so all the students could read the calculator at the same time.

Prices were a bit of a problem since having a computer and a portable wasn't all the much more than the portable with docking station and secondary display.
 
krebizfan said:
Not that uncommon. The Tandy 100 with DVI was one example. Compaq had an external display option as did nearly all VGA laptops. Even calculators had third party large screen displays though those were officially more for classroom use so all the students could read the calculator at the same time.

Prices were a bit of a problem since having a computer and a portable wasn't all the much more than the portable with docking station and secondary display.
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Well, as soon as portable computers started to be PC compatible it became common.
Maybe I should had been a bit less vague - I'm thinking about "8-bit" style computers, usually with a built in Basic or similar.
 
MiaM said:
Well, as soon as portable computers started to be PC compatible it became common.
Maybe I should had been a bit less vague - I'm thinking about "8-bit" style computers, usually with a built in Basic or similar.
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It's not that surprising. From a technology perspective of the time, it meant that video either needed to be shifted between systems and memory mapping, which leads to software level incompatibility or you get the situation where the memory access must be performed by two independent systems. One to drive the LCD and one to drive the screen.

The Sinclair Pandora was going to do this - built in monochrome display, external color connection, but Sinclair got cancelled before he could build it.

He did build the z88 later, but that never had a video output.

Most early solutions to this problem basically just used the video output signal to drive an internal display, so that the hardware was consistent. My Sharp 386SX works like that - the plasma displays just back-ended off of a VGA card with different outputs - but the timing for both internal and external video was identical.
 
MiaM said:
Well, as soon as portable computers started to be PC compatible it became common.
Maybe I should had been a bit less vague - I'm thinking about "8-bit" style computers, usually with a built in Basic or similar.
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There was the Commodore SX64. The Osborne had an external monitor connector but required a shunt that turned off the internal display which was inconvenient. Probably some other 8-bit machines but I don't recall which.
 
krebizfan said:
There was the Commodore SX64. The Osborne had an external monitor connector but required a shunt that turned off the internal display which was inconvenient. Probably some other 8-bit machines but I don't recall which.
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When the 80 column upgrade came out, it did away with the 'EXMON' adapter. AN RCA output jack was added to the front panel on the right. You can run both displays, but usually turned brightness all the way down on the internal monitor and just used the big external one.
The internal screen was so tiny, it was just a distraction.
 
cj7hawk said:
It's not that surprising. From a technology perspective of the time, it meant that video either needed to be shifted between systems and memory mapping, which leads to software level incompatibility or you get the situation where the memory access must be performed by two independent systems. One to drive the LCD and one to drive the screen.
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Although ROMs had become cheaper at the time and thus it was reasonable to splurge with lots of ROM, the C128 shows that it was possible to have two different outputs(display without causing much trouble to regular users. Sure, it was two outputs for regular CRT monitors, but from a software point of view they worked very differently. The 40 col output uses a memory mapped display, 1000 bytes for the 40x25 characters, and 1000 "bytes" that is just nybbles (4 bits) for the foreground color information for each character. Meanwhile the 80 col output is somewhat similar to the Texas TMS9918 family in that it uses just a few I/O ports where you indirectly address the video memory (16k or 64k). Thus most of the screen handling code has to be different for the two outputs. (I assume that some things like limiting output to a "window" and such might be common between both displays, and also interpreting control codes (like for example translating color change codes to a four bit value - although the palette is not fully the same, most of the colors maps good enough between the displays).

I get that it would likely be more work to get something like this going if you have a Sinclair style screen editor, perhaps?

An interesting observation I just made is that while Commodores Kernal uses device numbers for all I/O including screen and keyboard (where IIRC 0 and 3 are screen and keyboard; can't remember which is which), it seems like this is not used to differentiate between the 40 and 80 col displays. BASIC even has a CMD command that redirects standard output to more or less any device. This was the somewhat hacky way to get listings to a printer, you'd open a file to the printer device (usually 4) and then CMD that file descriptor and then just do a LIST. This is the reason for why many vintage Commodore listings have an extra line with the "READY." prompt at the end of listings.

And sure, application software would of course have to be aware of the fact that the screen could either be very small or a regular full CRT display. But BASIC programs and anything else than action games could just use the provided APIs (or ABIs as people tend to say nowadays) and as long as what you printed would fit on screen it would just work.

My thought process here is that things like the Epson HX20 were a decent success thanks to it's abilities and being one of the earliest "full" computer with a keyboard that was better than mechanical typewriters and which would run for many hours without external power. I think that many of these were used in various custom applications.
If they had had a full screen display when at a desk they would had been more suitable for more productivity style work, and it would also had been easier to write software.

On the other hand, thinking about it, IIRC at some point in time in the 80's a Z80 or 6502 cost about $3 in single quantities, so there might not had been much savings in not just having two separate computers. But then you'd likely lost out on the ability to easily share data (and use the desk system to develop for the portable system).

Going further on into this tangent: I think that a mistake the computer companies did back in the days was to not agree upon standards for talking to more advanced peripherals. Sure, RS232 and Centronics were standards (or possibly a de-facto standard for Centronics?) and the low level Shugart interface for disk drives were also a common denominator. But there were no manufacturer independent way to talk to storage devices using a serial or parallel protocol.

Sure, there were GPIB but the standard only worked as far as sharing printers between different companies (I.E. you could use HP printers with a PET and I would assume that you could use a Commodore printer with a HP computer although that would be weird). The disk drives didn't work as-is. Technically you can connect a Commodore drive to a HP computer or the other way around, but Commodore had the file system code in the drive while HP had that in the computer, and although Commodore drives have commands to read/write individual sectors rather than use the file system code, those commands differ from the commands HP drives use. So to use a Commodore drive on a HP computer you'd need to at least patch some parts of how the HP computer talks to the drive, and to use a HP drive with a PET you'd need to write your own filesystem code that runs inside the PET.

And then Atari used their SIO which is kind of like RS232 but with data from the peripherals being wire-gated so anyone can transmit on a single line. Epson used regular RS232 to talk to the drives for their portable computers. Commodore developed a serial version of IEEE-488, but this used bidirectional clock+data lines rather than just data likes like RS232.

And then there were various manufacturer specific networks.

If the manufacturers had agreed upon one standard for raw block access to disk drives, and another standard for drives with a built in file system, things would probably had been way better when it comes to sharing data and such. Sure, if this had been a thing you'd then run into problems of tokenized basic vs text file basic, but still. (A marginally related tangent is that Atari can not only save but also load both versions, and they use the text file version as a work around to MERGE programs. Unfortunately it turns out that the command to read a file as if it was entered on the keyboard can't be used with the Atari 850 I/O thingie, a box with four RS232 ports (and IIRC a parallel port?). A bit unfortunate as you need to already have software on the Atari to get further data into the Atari).
 
MiaM said:
I get that it would likely be more work to get something like this going if you have a Sinclair style screen editor, perhaps?
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I've been rewriting Sinclair BASIC to run 80 columns and mostly it works well - though I've disabled the split screen presently, and have been sending it all to the same stream. It works well enough for most, but I still need to return to the split screen to separate the editing line from the text display.

I'm not sure this counts as two screens though - and even if it did, it would be problematic trying to run it as two screens when one is not always present.

You're correct that if the hooks are used, the outcome is transportable and flexible, but most people directly accessed the Spectrum bitmap - which doesn't lend itself easily to different geometries.
 
I didn't think religious threads were allowed? lol

This is a literally unanswerable question.

The US Army had one mounted in trucks, an expressly and literally portable computer. "hundred million bit disk file... each housed in a 2-1/2 ton utility truck"). I wrote about it some time ago. https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/ARTOC/index.html

So that illustrates the basic problem...

But more recently and narrowly, both portable and "personal" which I'll loosely take to mean mostly used by one person, and "sits on a desk" and can be picked up and moved abount without installation, you gotta go back, probably 1960s.

1970's, two off the top of my head:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_9800_series I remember these, personally. They fit the description handily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100 I drooled over these in magazines, never saw one, but oh man I wanted one!
 
ChickenMan said:
I'm not sure when the Osborne came out but the first Amust Executive 816 advert I could find was in June 1983 saying it will be released mid August that year.
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Looks very interesting and much more compact than the Osborne.
But I've never seen or heard of it.
The advert mentions Australia.
Was this some sort of local Australia only machine?
 
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