First portable computer?

[krebizfan]

The Amust article lists that the company was a Kaypro distributor beforehand. Kaypro Kaypro itself released a maching a year after the Osborne taking advantage of the half height drives to include a larger CRT. The planned standard Amust design was supposed to use the Tabor 3.25" drive which would reduce the size of the system. On the other hand, only a few thousand Tabor drives were sold which puts a cap on Amust sales. The alternate PPC-8 seems to have high density 5.25" drives plus S100 slots so it would be even larger than the Kaypro.

One expects that several years of shrinking drives would result in a smaller system.

 

[ChickenMan]

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?

Yes local designed and made in Melbourne, Vic, Australia. I have a working one also.

 

[johnx993]

Yes local designed and made in Melbourne, Vic, Australia. I have a working one also.

Then I guess it's true what they say about evolving to smaller forms on an island!
-J

 

[cj7hawk]

Then I guess it's true what they say about evolving to smaller forms on an island!
-J

Generally not here... We tend to gigantism.

We have large cats in Australia bigger than cougars - the biggest anecdotally reported over 2 meters long ( a bit over 2 yards )... Lots of rumors about being panthers, tigers etc. that escaped captivity in zoos and began living in the outback.

Except once in a while someone kills one and brings back it's tail or something and they test it, and they always turn out to be domesticated house cats gone feral... Something switches on or off in their genes here when they go feral and they just grow huge. https://www.australiangeographic.co...animals-in-australia-become-distinct-species/

The suggestion is that house moggies released into Australia are evolving into a new species.

Though I am kind of impressed how they made the Amust Exec so small. It's pretty cool. I'll post some photos as I get some time to complete repairs on mine.

 

[orac81]

I remember an article some time back claiming the 1961 minuteman rocket guidance computer as being the first "portable" digital computer, weight about 17 lb, 32 bit CPU with the maths for calculating the path, implemented with cutting edge transistor logic..
It was definitely a product launch that ended with a big bang!

 

[Quagmire]

I remember an article some time back claiming the 1961 minuteman rocket guidance computer as being the first "portable" digital computer, weight about 17 lb, 32 bit CPU with the maths for calculating the path, implemented with cutting edge transistor logic..
It was definitely a product launch that ended with a big bang!

Interesting Wiki article covers this:

D-17B - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[johnx993]

Makes you wonder...
If the USA wasn't so far behind the USSR in rocket technology, how would that have impacted the development of microelectronics - and microprocessors?
According to the Wikipedia article mentioned above, there was a push to electronic miniaturization because of the rocket tech gap.

 

[krebizfan]

Miniaturization was going to happen anyway. Consider the development of the proximity fuze with the associated small disposal electronics.

 

[orac81]

Thanks I read about it in this article:
 https://www.theregister.com/2009/06/05/tob_minuteman_1/

I was way off with the numbers, 28kg, 24 bit, 4 bit instructions, 1500 transistors, 6000 diodes..

Maybe this machine of Doom could run Doom!

 

[Quagmire]

Miniaturization was going to happen anyway. Consider the development of the proximity fuze with the associated small disposal electronics.

Miniaturization was the name of the game back in the early 60's. For example, the ARN-21 TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation) system was a 'black box' that provided azimuth and distance measuring for airborne aircraft, only made possible by miniature electron tubes.

 

[orac81]

There was lots of 'cross-pollination'.
I still get amused at the newbies that think Apple invented the Mouse.

Didn't you get the memo? Apple invented EVERYTHING! They are just so brave.

Another "first" claim is the colour portable, taken by the Commodore SX64:
https://www.theregister.com/2008/01/20/tob_commodore_sx_64/

Note the CBM advert in there, the guy heaved his 10kg SX64 to the poolside, running it with invisible mains leads, yet presumably with 5000v EHT on the tube next to that wet pool.

I liked the "sx64 vs Macbook Air" comparison chart- Macbook wins with a backlit keyboard!

 

[Istarian]

I suppose the computers in the early space capsules qualify as pretty portable if we're going to get further and further into it. A portable computer should be mobile, contain everything you need to run it, and be relatively easy to set up and tear down. Batteries or power probably count also, and while it's possible to run an Osborne on batteries, that's not how the battery interface is designed. Something that only plugs into other infrastructure to work is more relocatable than portable.



So how would you establish the eras of computing and where in those eras would you place the Osborne and how did it compare to other portables of that era? There's going to be some overlap or eras too I'd imagine.

As for the MicroStar - it looks pretty cool - I wonder if it inspired Kaypro more than Osborne? I didn't know about that one - thanks for mentioning it.

There is no language/linguistic basis for the distinction you're making. The word portable derives from the Latin verb portare meaning 'to carry'.

An Osborne 1 is something a single person could carry and therefore a portable (or luggable) computer, whereas a DEC PDP-8 would be more on the relocatable end of things.

In any case, 'transport' is a related verb meaning 'to carry across' and has beeb used as a noun to mean a vehicle that carries someone or something.

However, I wouldn't describe an Osborne 1 as a laptop for obvious reasons.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Maybe this machine of Doom could run Doom!

It’s about two orders of magnitude slower than a typical late-70’s microprocessor, so, no, probably not.

(I mean, sure, it’s Turing-complete so strictly speaking it could “run” it, but you’re going to need a lot of time and a very large external memory.)

 

[MiaM]

Didn't you get the memo? Apple invented EVERYTHING! They are just so brave.

Another "first" claim is the colour portable, taken by the Commodore SX64:
https://www.theregister.com/2008/01/20/tob_commodore_sx_64/

Note the CBM advert in there, the guy heaved his 10kg SX64 to the poolside, running it with invisible mains leads, yet presumably with 5000v EHT on the tube next to that wet pool.

I liked the "sx64 vs Macbook Air" comparison chart- Macbook wins with a backlit keyboard!

Related tangent:
I wonder how hard it was for Commodore to get a color CRT that small that actually produced a decent picture?
I have one of those portable radio-cassette-TV combinations from the 80's, this one is a NEC, with a color CRT and the dot pitch is so bad that it's almost a bit hard to read subtitles, which tend to be way larger than the C64 40*25 text screen.

Another tangent: Although battery life would be bad, it wouldn't had been unthinkable to have a portable computer with a monochrome CRT display with battery power. Typically a 12" monochrome TV that could run on 12V (car battery) consumed about 1A, so a motorcycle/moped size sealed lead acid battery could last a few hours assuming the rest of the computer consumes almost nothing (I.E. cmos and whantot) and any disk drives and such are used sparingly. (I would assume that those TVs were fairly optimized when it comes to power consumption. Weirdly it seems like smaller CRTs don't scale down to much lower power usage, or at least the smaller battery powered CRTs seems to also consume about 12W or so.

 

[orac81]

Commodore chose the wrong thing to copy. They looked at the Osbourne 1 and said "lets make that with c64 colour", what they should have looked at was the Epson hx20, make a 64 with an option for an LCD and battery/cmos storage, but also colour out for a hotel TV, like the Apple2c. Power is still an issue for the 64 chipset though.

Sinclair was messing with flat screen TVs for the zx too, but the future was always going to be lcd. He later made the z88, arguably the best thing he did.

A local comp shop had an sx64, but it was never used as a portable. When I actually needed a 64 for ORAC Draughts for a computer checkers competition (there was such things back then) I just took a 64+tape in a bag and borrowed a TV at the venue, way easier than lugging an sx64 on trains/buses.

When I was doing that I thought a single line LED/LCD display on the user port would be a useful peripheral.

 

[MiaM]

Commodore were on the way of creating something like the Epson computers, but with a way larger display, afaik even larger than the PX-8 display.
Unfortunately they decided to focus on the C128 instead. Although I like the C128, the LCD would had been a way better product.
Afaik it wouldn't had been compatible directly with the other 8-bit computers, but it would had been similar enough to the other 8-bit computers that anyone familiar with programming one of them would be able to write software for this one too.

Afaik Clive Sinclair just wanted a tiny portable TV, not necessary related to the computers. I.E. the portable tiny CRT TV was a separate path (that combined with the C5 was the things that dragged down Sinclair...).

Re single line display: That reminds me of some versions of the Grundy Newbrain computer. I never fully understood the intended use case for that single line display, but it's cool

 

[vwestlife]

Related tangent:
I wonder how hard it was for Commodore to get a color CRT that small that actually produced a decent picture?

It doesn't. The dot pitch is pretty coarse and makes low-contrast text colors difficult to read.



BTW, some sources online claim the Sanyo MBC-775, a luggable PC with a 9" color CRT, was introduced in 1982. Nope! It was introduced at the Fall '84 Comdex show in November 1984.

 

[MiaM]

Oh, it's worse than I remembered. Still I think it's better than the NEC portable radio+cassette+TV combination I have.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Unfortunately they decided to focus on the C128 instead. Although I like the C128, the LCD would had been a way better product.

They wisely canned it because they knew it was doomed. When the prototype surfaced they bandied about a $500 price point for it, and if they actually could have gotten it out the door in the first half of 1985 at that price they probably would have sold some, but neither of those things were going to happen. Even if they could have hit the price they would have already been aware of the fact that other early 80 column portables like the PX-8 and NEC Starlet were having trouble convincing people they were enough better than the simpler and easy to read portables like the Tandy Model 100 to be worth the price and eye strain. (Also the LCD weighed almost twice as much, but still didn’t have a built in storage device.) Also by this point everyone knew that portable PC compatibles were going to be coming down in price by the end of the year, which they did; they still cost a lot more than $500, but by the time you added external storage and other accessories to the “toy” portables you weren’t that far off and the functionality difference/software library access was actually worth it.

Commodore was a dumpster fire in 1985. They’d just had the TED line utterly flop, what was left of the business PET line had stopped being relevant years ago and its replacement (the B-128 and friends) had also crashed and burned. Maybe the LCD would have been worth trying for a company that was healthy enough to risk the loss, but Commodore needed to diversify in more profitable directions at this point, not race to the bottom in yet another doomed niche.

 

[compaqportableplus]

BTW, some sources online claim the Sanyo MBC-775, a luggable PC with a 9" color CRT, was introduced in 1982. Nope! It was introduced at the Fall '84 Comdex show in November 1984.

I was always skeptical that the MBC-775 was really as early as 1982, although I never gave it much thought. 1984 makes a lot more sense!

As far as "first," I do see a LOT of people saying the Osborne 1 was the "first" but that's obviously not the case. I always have thought of the IBM 5100 as the first truly portable, all-in-one computer.

"First commercially successful portable computer" is what I have always called the Osborne 1. In my opinion the Osborne was the first one that really made sense for the average user, with a good balance of cost, usability, size and weight.