The evolution of portable computing as told through advertising.

1983

1986

1988

1989

2006

2008

It’s a device we keep in our pocket or handbag and take everywhere we go: the mobile phone. But not too long ago putting a cell phone in our pocket or purse was impossible.

MuMoH has a collection of 1980s and 1990s era mobile phones, and we’ll have information up about them soon. In the meantime, enjoy these vintage commercials when the cell phone was brand new:

Circa 1989:

Circa 1990:

One of the most unique computers in the MuMoH collection is the Amstrad PPC 640. The Portable PC with 640 KB of memory was introduced in the Fall of 1987 together with its little brother, a portable PC with 512 KB of memory, aptly named the Amstrad PPC 512. These IBM PC compatibles featured a full keyboard including number pad and a built in 9 inch LCD display that was located on the far left of the computer. But while other portable computers of the day sold for thousands of dollars, the Amstrad PPC 640 and PPC 512 were highly affordable, starting at less than $700.

Here’s an excerpt from an October 1987 news article in the British publication Computer Business Review covering the debut of these computers:

AMSTRAD VAPORISES LAP TOP PRICE UMBRELLA WITH UKP400 PPC

29th October 1987 | From Issue Number: 799

Amstrad Plc will change the economics of owning an MS-DOS portable in January when its PPC range, unveiled in London yesterday, becomes available. There will be four PPC models, with an entry price that at UKP399 plus VAT is roughly half the cheapest competition. For that money, customers get an 8MHz 80C86 processor, 512Kb RAM, one 3.5″ 720K floppy drive, full AT-enhanced keyboard, MDA and CGA compatible graphics, 80 by 25 line 640 by 200 resolution black-on-green Supertwist LCD with six tilt positions, serial and parallel ports, a further port to attach an, as yet unpriced, four-slot expansion box with 20Mb hard disk, 8 hours life from alkaline batteries, MS-DOS 3.3, and a carrying case. For just UKP100 more, they get either an extra 3.5″ drive or 640Kb RAM and a 2,400 bps auto-dial, auto-answer Hayes-compatible internal modem with Softklone Distributing Corp’s Mirror II communications software, and for UKP200 more – UKP599 – they get the extra drive, 640Kb RAM and the modem. As can be seen from the picture, unusually for an LCD, the screen has the aspect ratio of a CRT: it folds back and then the keyboard folds over it to create a long narrow package with the handle at the side. The 17.8″ by 9″ by 4″ PPCs weigh a touch under 12lbs and will be delivered after the Which Computer? Show in mid-January. They will be shown at Comdex in Las Vegas next week. Prices in overseas markets excluding local sales taxes will be similar to those in the UK. After coming a cropper on his estimates for first year sales of the PC1512, Amstrad boss Alan Sugar said he would never again talk about expected volumes but he did admit he hoped to look back in five years time having sold several hundred thousand of the PPCs. He also hinted that Amstrad was considering a portable version of its PCW word processor. The UK unveiling of the PPC is avoid criticism of its products being launched overseas first.

In October 1987, UKP399 was approximately $680 U.S.

The gray PPC 640 and the beige PPC 512 both employed the NEC V30 processor running at 8MHz, one or two 720k 3.5″ floppy drives, a built-in modem, and standard peripheral connectors for serial (RS-232), parallel (Centronics) and video (CGA/MDA). Both computers were powered by ten C-size alkaline batteries when portable, but also came with AC adapters and the ability to power the unit from the car cigarette lighter.

As these were IBM PC compatibles, they used MS-DOS 3.3. Programmed into ROM memory was the Organizer software, a suite of utility applications that included contact mangers, calendar, calculator and modem dialer. The PPC 640 also came with Mirror II, a communications package for use with the built-in modem. The MS-DOS boot disk also included a utility which could be used to switch between the internal display and an external monitor without rebooting.

References

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPC_512

www.thepcmuseum.net/details.php?RECORD_KEY(museum)=id&id(museum)=370

www.sinasohn.com/cgi-bin/clascomp/bldhtm.pl?computer=ppc640

www.amstradcg.nl/eppc.html

At 20.5 inches wide, 14.5 inches deep, 8.5 inches tall (all with the case closed) and weighing just over 26 pounds, the Osborne 1 was the first “portable” computer. Portability was obviously a different concept in 1981, when the Osborne 1 was release, than it is today. But the attractive design, self-contained nature of the machine and its relative affordability made the Osborne 1 the first commercially successful computer in the new portable class. Because of its weight and girth, this class would later become known as “luggable” computers.

With its keyboard becoming the lid, the Osborne 1 folded up into a suitcase that held virtually everything an executive could want or need in a computer: two disk drives (one for the application disk and one on which to save data), a keyboard and a monitor. The Osborne 1 came with a built-in CRT monitor that was all of 5 inches, apparently a design concession so the unit could also include two 5 ¼ inch disk drives. The computer ran off the CP/M operating system, which had to run off one of the diskettes. The Osborne 1 also came standard with bundled software, akin to buying a laptop today with an office suite. Most units came standard with Wordstar (the leading word processor from MicroPro), Supercalc (the leading spreadsheet software from Sorcim) and CBasic/MBasic (a programming language from Microsoft). The retail price for this software would come to roughly $1500 if sold separately, making the $1795 computer plus software bundle a very good deal.

Back in its day, the Osborne 1 became practically an overnight success, with the Osborne Computer Company shipping as many as 10,000 a month. However, competition from computers like the Kaypro II, which worked exactly like the Osborne using the same CP/M operating system and associated software, but came standard with double density disk drives and a much larger built-in monitor, began eating into the Osborne 1’s market share. Soon enough, the business world started to “standardize” on IBM-based computers and a new operating system called DOS from an emerging software company called Microsoft. By 1983 the Osborne Computer Company had filed for bankruptcy. But its legacy is the era of portable computing led by its innovative Osborne 1.

The MuMoH physical collection includes an Osborne 1 “B” computer, serial number 118781.

Specifications:

SIZE measured with case closed

• 20.5 inches wide
• 14.5 inches deep
• 8.5 inches high

WEIGHT

• 26.2 lbs (shipping weight 34 lbs)

MAIN PC BOARD

• Processor – Z80A, 4 MHz CPU click
• Memory size – 64K bytes programmable (RAM)
• 4K read-only memory bank-switched
• 60K of programmable memory available for software

DISPLAY

• Video monitor size – 3.55” horizontal, 2.63” vertical
• 24 lines of 52 characters visible
• 32 lines of 128 characters video memory over which window may be moved

DISKS

• 5.25 inch diskettes, single sided, soft sectored (92K per diskette)

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/osborne/
http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html
http://www.mobilitypr.com/blog/2006/06/29/mopr-mobility-minute-portable-computers/

A month ago Digibarn co-founders Allan Lundell and Bruce Damer presented items from their portable computing collection on CNET Live. Watch this fascinating tour in the history of mobility:

We’re very proud to say that MuMoH has these same items in our own physical collection, and we look forward to sharing more details about them with you in the coming days. Please visit the Digibarn Blog when you have a chance, too.

The Sinclair ZX8I is a part of the UK-based Sinclair ZX Spectrum family and was the successor to the ZX80. Sinclair Research Ltd is a consumer electronics company founded by Sir Clive Sinclair in Cambridge, England.

Launched in March 1981, the ZX81 was based on the Zilog Z80 CPU and came with a one new chip, replacing the 18 chips in the ZX80. The machine cost £69.95 or, if you wanted to assemble it yourself, £49.95 in kit form. Sinclair also offered an add-on ROM to convert the ZX80 to the ZX81.

The ZX81 came in a sturdy black case and with various features, including a TV jack that let users plug it in to their color TVs, producing black characters on a green background.

Sinclair also offered a small printer to work with the ZX81 later in the 1981. The ZX Printer very compact, using a special metalized paper, and would print 32 characters to a line and nine lines to the inch. Users would plug it into the back of the computer using a stackable socket. The print was clear and readable.

The model in MuMoH has a memory pack with a whopping 16K RAM that can be plugged in the back to give users more memory.

The computer sold well in the UK as well as in the U.S. – mostly by mail order. Eventually Timex was granted a license to sell it in 1982, opening the door for even more users.

The ZX81 had originally been produced as learning machines for the person wanting to find out about computer programming, such as BASIC.

It can be noted, though, that the Sinclair might have been responsible for the industry we know today. Sinclair produced a whole new industry that included vendors offering software, user’s clubs, peripherals and even its own publication.

During the mid-1980s, the company Micronet800 launched a service allowing users to connect their ZX Spectrums via a Prism Micro Products modem to a bulletin board system known as Micronet hosted by Prestel. Though very similar to the Internet, the service was proprietary and fee-based.

References:
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/046/sstory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research

Also known as “the brick,” Motorola’s Lazer was first introduced on the market in 1984. Weighing a whopping two pounds, priced at almost $4,000 with a half-hour talk limit before needing charging, it was an instant hit.

The Motorola phone has roots tracing back to the early 1970s. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission was giving AT&T the green light to build a network to provide wireless service in local markets. AT&T was also considering its own wireless phone.

More than a decade and millions of dollars later, the analog phone was released in 1983 and stayed in the market until the mid 1990s, shrinking in size until it was recast as the Motorola Razr in the early 2000s.

An interesting 80s retro sidenote: Shops in China are hacking old versions and selling them with new color LCD screen and component. The LCD is only 4096 colors. All the menu works but the shortcut buttons is at the bottom part of the keypad, instead of under the LCD screen.

The MuMoH physical collection includes a later 1980s model, no serial number.

References:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7432915/
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellphones/retro-brick-cellphone-modern-gsm-guts-inside-237967.php

The Game Boy was the first cartridge-based gaming system to allow up to four players to be linked through serial ports on their own systems for multi-player fun. The compact video game system manufactured by Nintendo was released in 1989 in the U.S. and Japan. The Game Boy was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, former creator of the UltraHand, an expanding arm toy made and sold in 1970.

The Game Boy ran on a CPU with integrated sound generation and allowed users to pop in different cartridges, known as Game Paks, to play a variety of different games. Yokoi designed the Game Boy to be a small, inexpensive entertainment device in which the cartridge would provide the data, logic and rules of the game to the processor.

Originally sold with the puzzle game Tetris, Game Boy soon developed many games for their system, including sports, action and fantasy games, available for around $15 a pop. The most popular Game Boy games include: Tetris, Zelda, Mario Brothers and, more recently, Pokemon. The system itself cost around $90 in 1989 and ran in four shades of “gray” which appeared as green to dark green.

Eventually, Game Boy developed the Game Boy Color, making games viewable in additional colors, and in 1995, the company produced a rainbow of colored cases for their systems. Since then, Game Boy has released several versions of their original system, including the Game Boy Advanced and Game Boy Evolution.

Other Game Boy-related products include the Game Boy Camera which was released in 1998 with the Game Boy printer, which allowed users to print black and white, low resolution photographs.

The MuMoH physical collection includes an early 1990s version of the Game Boy.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy
http://www.vidgame.net/NINTENDO/GB.html

The Texas Instruments Compact Computer 40 or CC-40 was truly a compact, mobile computer, weighing a mere 22 ounces.

Manufactured in 1982 and released on the market in 1983, the battery-operated portable computer was priced at $249 and was powered by four AA batteries or an AC adapter. It was intended as a portable business computer, and uses Texas Instrument’s TMS70C20 CPU, an 8-bit microprocessor that ran at 2.5 MHz.

The CC-40 had 6 kilobytes of RAM (expandable to 18 KB), 34 KB of Read Only Memory and a 31-character LCD display.
Other features, according to the original packaging, included:

• Standard typewriter keyboard layout plus quick-entry numeric keypad and special purpose keys.

• 31-character 5×8 dot matrix LCD that scrolls to show 80-charcter line.

• Built-in enhanced BASIC language.

• ‘Constant Memory’ feature that retained stored information even when the computer was turned off.

In lieu of a feature that stored data, there was no disk or tape drive released with the unit. The promised Wafertape Digital Tape Drive unit that is featured on the computer’s box was never released. The sticker on the box and the note that came with the manual proves this.

The promised Wafertape Digital Tape Drive turned out to be far too unreliable for mass production. Users couldn’t save files to a cassette recorder, like most inexpensive computers, either. The only method of loading files was by inserting a read-only ‘Preprogrammed Solid State Software’ cartridge, though users still couldn’t save any data to them.

It was this inability to store data that led to the possible downfall of the CC in the marketplace.
However, the CC-40 had ports for connecting a printer and a modem. Expansion was to be through a “HexBus” interface, arguably prototypical to USB, providing hot-swappable plug-and-play functionality, according to Wikipedia.

The HexBus interface was also available for the TI-99/4A and was built into the prototype-only TI-99/8.
Software was only available on cartridge, or by typing simple programs into its built-in BASIC interpreter.
In March of 1984, Texas Instruments stopped manufacturing all its computers and dropped out of the computer market for good.

The MuMoH physical collection includes the original packaging and unit, still sealed.
References:
http://oldcomputers.net/cc-40.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Compact_Computer_40

Remember briefcases?

A long time ago, people would carry important “papers” around with them in small suitcases called briefcases. You would put these papers, sometimes in something called a manila file folder, something that strongly resembles the folder icon used in Windows.

Why did we carry papers around in suitcases? Because we didn’t have storage. Let’s go back to 1985. Computers were expensive and many didn’t have hard drives. We spent a lot of time working on hardcopies because softcopies were inconvenient. We didn’t have email, so if we were sending edits back and forth on a document, we had to print out the document, and send it on something called a “fax machine.”

There were “portable computers” but they were too big for briefcases. They came in their own case. We used the briefcase to carry the floppy disks with data and applications we needed to run the computers. That’s right, we needed two hands to carry our portable computers around. You know something else? In 1985, we didn’t have shoulder bags either. You really should read the MoPR Mobile Minute on portable computers to get the full idea. The bottom line, in 1985, mobile computing meant we schlepped around a lot of stuff, and it wasn’t always convenient.

But one entrepreneur saw real mobility looming on the horizon. Seeing that portable computers lacked portable peripherals, he created a self-contained printer that could fit inside a briefcase. His company was called Ergo Systems (of Menlo Park, California) and the printer was the groundbreaking Hush 80 – available in a parallel, serial and Commodore-compatible models.

When I say self contained, I mean aside from the power cord and printer cable, everything was inside, including a roll of thermal paper. The paper was treated with a chemical to make it heat-sensitive, turning the paper black on the area exposed to heat. A print head with seven heat-emitting dots would sweep back and forth across the paper creating characters in a 5 x 7 dot matrix. Each roll could print just over 100 pages and you never needed toner.

This printer was cool. Aesthetically, it matched the look of virtually every portable computer on the market. It was only 11 ½ inches long and less than three inches tall. Including 100 feet of paper, the printer weighed 36 oz. It was small enough to fit in a briefcase laden with papers and diskettes, and light enough to carry without adding tremendously to the already heavy (relative to today) portable computing load. In fact, the dimensions of the Hush 80 made it the only convenient element of a portable computer setup.

It printed the full 80 character lines. And because it was dot matrix, it also printed graphics.

You could either plug it in the wall or run it off rechargeable batteries – something new in the 1985 world of mobile computing.

The Hush 80 sold between $139 and $159. It’s only been recently that printers have fallen below that price point, and most printers today still cost more. Because the printer never needed toner, the cost of operation was also low.

The printer was well received by reviewers and it seemed that Ergo Systems was poised to launch into an early lead in the nascent mobile peripheral category. But it didn’t work out.

Why?

Well, one drawback was that the thermal paper came in rolls and the Hush 80 had no apparatus to cut pages in long documents. It drew a dashed line every 11 inches and users were required to cut their own pages, or crease them and tear them (which was rather easy, actually). Also, the thermal paper wasn’t the most user-friendly of papers. It curled, it smelled, and it would fade and discolor rather quickly. To preserve documents, people would have to make photocopies.

Although the price point was certainly attractive, it didn’t impact portable computing. The portable computers of the day cost more than $5,000 and were still a novelty in the business world. Today more notebook computers are sold to businesses than are desktops, and a sub $500 price point has spiked adoption of mobile computing in the consumer market. But in 1985, the number of portable computers shipped was still counted in the thousands.

Furthermore, the people laying out five grand for a computer were interested in different features than the Hush 80 possessed. The Hush 80 was quiet, inexpensive and portable. But power users of computers were seeking features like “near letter quality” instead. The 5 x 7 dot matrix Hush 80 had better-than-average print quality for its class, but was not close to letter quality.

The low price point was attractive to a market buying lower priced home and small office computers, but where the portability was of no use. Therefore there was no need to compromise the print longevity of the commonly used tractor-fed fanfold paper (is it too nerdy that I know about this stuff?) for the lighter, more portable but more inconvenient (in this context) roll of thermal paper.

But how many times have you been connected at a place like Starbucks, doing some sort of work and wishing you could print something out? Ergo Systems was a company ahead of its time. The founder and CEO of Ergo Systems was my dad, George Sidline. He understood more than 20 years ago – long before there was a mobility technology industry – that people will desire the ability through technology to have anything they want, anytime they want it, anywhere they are.

Mobile peripherals of course did catch on. Only today, most of these devices aren’t peripherals, they are built right into the computer.

And even though 20 years have elapsed, no one has yet made another high-quality portable printer. Nothing that will fit in my globebox anyway.

Did you have a Hush 80 printer from Ergo Systems? What were your earliest mobility technologies. We’d like to hear from you. Leave us a comment.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations