Pocket Computers from the 1980s

[Music] [Music] today everybody carries a computer around in their pocket in fact my iphone here has about the same computational power as a cray supercomputer would have had back in the 1980s it's really hard to believe actually of course pocket size computers have been around for a while if we go back to 1996 a few notable devices entered the market such as the us robotics pilot now this is the original model before it was renamed to palm pilot now at first you might question whether this was really a computer or just a personal digital assistant or pda but it did have the ability to load in new applications so i say it qualifies of course the pilot was almost useless without the dock which you would have to connect to your personal computer in order to transfer information or even new applications to it also of course you couldn't program the computer on the computer software development was done on desktop computers on the bright side despite this product being 25 years old the calendar does appear to work even for the year 2021 the pilot had numerous built-in apps such as a calculator address book a memo pad etc but pretty much all data had to be entered with a stylus and if you wanted to enter text you had to use graffiti this was written on the back to help you remember each letter had to be drawn in a certain way for it to recognize what you're writing as i recall it took me several days to become proficient in graffiti and it seems i've forgotten quite a bit of it at this point another pocket computer that came out the same year was the much more expensive compact that ran a new operating system called windows ce i also owned one of these at the time unfortunately this one i have here doesn't work so i can't show you much it also had a stylus you could use as well as the keyboard it had a single card slot where you could put in things like storage modems or network cards these were ultimately somewhat of a flop in the marketplace and likewise there were some oversized pda products like this one from tandy called the zpda which ran a version of geos i also have the same product marketed under the ast brand name these were huge compared to the pilot with a screen over twice as big maybe three times but they were horribly slow and clunky to operate and these flopped on the market very quickly but a somewhat more interesting computer of about the same size came out several years earlier in 1991 this is the hp 95lx pocket computer and what makes this one special is that it actually ran ms-dos and while it had several built-in applications such as an appointment book a phone book memo pad and even had a small version of lotus one two three but i think what most people liked about them is that you could drop to a dos prompt and run most any text based dos software a later versions like the hp 200 supported cga graphics so this meant you could run most games at the time or in this case even planet x3 and of course i have to at least mention the atari portfolio which came out a few years earlier even though i don't own one and that's because it was the computer john connor used in the movie terminator 2 to hack pin numbers but that was all the 1990s what about the 1980s well it turns out there were quite a few options available back then now here in the usa the most popular pocket computers were made by tandy my friend eddie malthus lives here in town and he has quite an impressive collection of mostly trs-80 computers sometimes i'm sad that i don't have a space like this to actually set up all of my collectibles where they can be on display and actually connect it up working like this and of course he has one of every tandy pocket computer as well starting from the pc one going all the way to the pc8 the tandy models were the ones i wanted to focus on with this episode so eddie let me borrow several of them from his collection okay so here we have represented basically all eight of the tandy pocket computers this is one two three four five now six looks and works exactly like five and i don't have the six here but basically it looks just like this and then seven and then eight and i wanted you to be able to see the size comparison between them for example the pc2 and the pc3 are very different in size i mean both thickness wise and and overall footprint but they have relatively the same screen size so yeah big difference there but anyway let's go through and take a look at some of these more close up now one thing i want to point out before we go much further is that one two and three were manufactured by sharp then four five six and seven were manufactured by casio and then with eight uh we go back to sharp again and so outside of the usa these computers were marketed under their respective sharp and casio brands so the pc-1 for example was the same computer as the sharp pc 1211 and you can see they even look pretty much exactly the same the pc2 is more or less the same as the sharp pc 1250 but you can see some significant design changes between the two even though at their core they're the same product and so it's sort of important to keep this in mind as we go through the different models the first one the pc one was introduced in july of 1980 so almost 41 years ago from the time of this video you can see it listed in the radio shack catalog for 249 dollars which was certainly not cheap at the time the headline says this is its actual size computer power that once filled a room can now be carried in your pocket and that's not really an exaggeration if you were to go back just 10 years earlier that would be 1970. most computers were pretty darn big except for maybe the guidance computers using the apollo spacecraft which is still big by comparison the pc-1 has a pretty similar amount of computing power as that in fact it uses a 24 character lcd display and it has one voice sound generator and it uses two custom cpus and both are believe it or not 4-bit cpus and they run at 256 kilohertz or basically 0.25 megahertz so what could you do with these uh well for starters these are scientific calculators for example you could type out a complex equation like this and have it solve it i'm not aware of any pocket size calculators of the time that could do this sort of thing in fact the casio fx7000g is considered to be the first graphing calculator and it didn't come to market until 1985 several years after the pocket computers the texas instruments the king of graphing calculators in north america didn't even bring one to market until 1990 with the ti-81 which was 10 years after this product and the other thing of course was that you could write your own programs in basic remember at this time basic was still all the rage pretty much every computer on the market was designed around basic even high school math books of the time would often have little basic programs at the end of each chapter to show you how to use what you just learned on a computer these types of programs could easily run on these pocket computers moving along let's take a look at the pc2 it came out in late 1982 with quite a few upgrades it now uses an 8-bit style z80 cpu with 2 kilobytes of ram it has a 26 character display but it can also display graphics at a resolution of 156 by 7 pixels other than the display that puts it about on par with the timex sinclair 1000 in terms of computing power in fact the catalog actually describes it as as fast as many desktop computers as you can see it was sold alongside the pc one which had been reduced in price to 149 dollars on the side it has a bus connector for peripherals which i'll talk more about later and one reason the pc2 is as thick and as heavy as it is because it uses standard double-a batteries which was actually kind of a good thing back at the time because like the little button cell batteries were actually very hard to get back then and they were very expensive and so the computer would have run a lot longer on these batteries and when you did need to replace them they were fairly easy to find in this compartment you could put in a rom card with extra software on it or a ram expansion card expanding it up to 16k moving along here's the pc3 this one works but the left side of the screen is just a bit messed up notice the interface on the side is different this isn't a full bus interface more like a serial port the pc3 was in many ways inferior to the pc2 however is sold for a fraction of the price often available for 69 dollars and here's the pc4 now this one of course made by casio uh this one doesn't work unfortunately it has a smaller screen and the i o connector is on the back now i should mention that all of these pocket computers are essentially incompatible with each other i mean even if they're made by the same company i mean not that it matters since there wasn't exactly a huge software market for these and here's the pc5 i actually had one of these as a kid actually i had the pc6 which looks exactly the same i think the only difference is the ram i think this unit has 4k and the pc6 has 8k this one also has a machine language monitor which is pretty cool anyway this one has the alpha characters up here on this membrane keyboard which is actually sort of a pain to type on compared to the previous models the pc5 was sold for 119 alongside the pc4 which was half the price now we'll have a look at the pc7 which is also made by casio and it looks a lot like a regular calculator of the time the average person probably wouldn't have even recognized it as a computer i also have the box here which is sort of interesting because you may notice the back side is blank and there's no advertising here i suspect that's because these were always stored behind the counter at radio shack and thus customers generally couldn't pick them up and look at them admittedly this one is quite inferior to previous models with a much smaller screen and the keyboard is laid out in an abc format instead of qwerty and it also has no interface ports at all and last here's the pc-8 the picture on the box is almost life-size and again the back of the box is more or less blank other than saying it was manufactured in japan more specifically this is a sharp model again like the originals now one interesting thing is they finally gave us a hardback shell like many fancy calculators of the era we're starting to offer um again this is pretty cut down version of the previous pocket computers okay so now that i've shown you all eight of the tandy models i wanted to show you a little bit more in depth of the pc2 and the reason is because i happen to have the docking station for this as well as a significant amount of software to demonstrate also a big thanks to matteo sarasota for loaning me a functional pc2 now i want to mention something else i mentioned earlier that i had owned one of these pocket computers back in school but that i was never really able to do much with it because i did not have the docking station and the docking station on these things often cost as much or more than the computer itself unfortunately the only way to connect up a cassette recorder to load and save programs was to own the docking station so you were kind of limited as to what you could do without one and so here we have the docking station for the pc2 now as you can see it also has a little printer built in these two metal domes here are actually power and you can see they make contact here on the computer and then the system bus controls everything else and this just inserts in here like so and um on the side of the dock here we have a port for power and perhaps more importantly we have a port for cassette storage and i want to show you this cute little cassette recorder that was marketed as an official accessory now this thing is really small for a better comparison this was the typical radio shack cassette recorder of the time it's longer wider and taller in fact you can see both of them here in the catalog interestingly enough the smaller one was actually 10 cheaper than the larger one so there are three cables one for earphone one to control the motor and of course one for the microphone now you may have noticed the docking station technically has two remote jacks but why well if you take a look at the manual for the docking station it actually shows that you can connect two cassette drives however one of them is configured for read only the other one can read or write this was useful for copying data from one tape to another or just having access to additional storage now i have here about a dozen cassettes with various software for the pc2 some of these sound pretty boring like business finance but uh but this looks kind of interesting uh various games are on this one and uh here's another one with more games i'm sure this was never meant as a game machine though here's some math software uh this seems to be the most common sort of software for these computers so to demonstrate the cassette system let's try loading one of these games we just need to stick the cassette in here like so then we type in c load which stands for cassette load and then we push play after a moment you'll actually hear the sound of the data and the name of the program will pop up on the display it loads for about two minutes but then i get this error 44 which according to user manual says a checksum error has occurred i've tried several times and keep getting this so i'm just going to try the next program on the cassette and hey this cassette's 39 years old so let's cut it some slack so this time it finds hangman better still it loads correctly okay well let's do one player okay so i guess it's waiting for me to pick a letter so i try several here that are apparently not correct but eventually i find some and i actually win this game by the skin of my teeth so up there you go that's hangman i know don't throw away your xboxes and playstations just yet right one thing i'd like to point out is you can actually break out of the game and then list it because the game is after all written in basic and that's how you edit basic on this computer you use the up and down keys to scroll through the lines of code and then you can use the left and right keys to scroll a line if it's longer than the screen okay so let's load the next game on the tape i'm sure this one will make you want to throw out all of your game consoles rush out to buy one of these this game is called sound off and is basically like simon says interesting thing this game actually uses custom graphics although not very impressive anyway so the idea is here to repeat the patterns and i got it wrong but you have to give me a break because i'm looking at this from an extreme angle so the camera can see what's going on enough of games let's talk about real uses for these computers back in the early 1980s now i had said before these were some of the best scientific calculators money could buy at the time and one of the things it could do was plot graphs but not on the screen because there isn't enough room but that's where this little attached plotter comes in handy and i'm just putting in some parameters here and then let's have a look at what i'll do with that [Music] and so uh there's our graph plotted and notice it can write text as well and so this is what you did in the days before graphing calculators were a thing in fact here are some other examples of various types of graphs that can be plotted even some in three dimensions as you can see here and the plotter could do more than just graphs it could actually plot text so for example if you wanted to print out your basic program listing you could do that and if you wanted the text a bit smaller you could change the size and fit quite a bit more if your eyes are good enough to read it now there's something else i want to point out about this let's open up the panel here now you see this little metal cylinder here this is actually the pen that writes on the paper now you may notice there's an empty spot here on the other side where another one can fit in fact you can actually fit up to four pins in the plotter so that it can print in four colors and here are the red green and blue pens that you would use for that now matteo asked me not to open these since they were still factory sealed but at least you can get a look at them so yeah in theory it could print some nice colorful graphics and it looks like the original owner of this pc2 used the plotter to make labels for his cassettes showing what was stored on them it looks like he was using this between 1985 and 1986 okay so let's have a look at this panasonic handheld computer now um actually believe it or not um i can't show you this one work because you might think oh we'll just put some batteries in it nope that's actually rum and ram sockets so it actually has no battery compartment because it uses internal nickel cadmium batteries which of course have long since died and i don't really feel like taking it apart to uh put some new ones in but this thing is actually enormous here it is compared to the tandy pc2 which is already a fairly hefty pocket computer it's actually it's pretty darn big so anyway i don't know anything about this one other than it apparently existed and uh i can't show it and then of course there's the casio pb700 released in 1983 for a retail price of 189 now this has got to be the absolute best pocket computer of the time as you can see it has a four line display with 20 characters across and not just characters it actually had a pretty decent graphic display of 160 by 32 pixels that was enough to use as a decent graphing calculator years before actual graphing calculators existed and in theory could have been a decent portable gaming machine six years before the nintendo game boy came to market unfortunately the only games i could find were some type in programs and basic like this really sluggish breakout clone the one thing i wanted to mention about programming in basic is it has the more common basic commands listed above the keys in some ways it's similar to the sinclair line of computers but where it differs from the sinclair machines is that it's optional so as you can see i can type out the command one letter at a time and it's totally fine with that or i can press shift p and get the same command printed out with a single key press much like other pocket computers the pb700 also had an optional docking station with a four color plotter and a micro cassette recorder for storage and being it was almost the exact same size as the tandy pocket computer 2 there was honestly no comparison and the pb700 was better at just about everything the pb700 was the pocket computer that all of us nerds deserved but we never got now i followed the market about as closely as anyone could at the time being a time before the internet and i'd never actually heard of this product until it was donated to me a year or two ago i've tried searching to see what retailers in the usa sold this product and i just simply can't find any now i'm not saying it wasn't sold in the usa i'm just saying that it obviously wasn't widely available um and it certainly wasn't available in any of the electronic stores here in the dallas area because if if it were i would have owned one i have one more similar computer i want to show off but it isn't exactly a pocket computer it says wrist module but it's actually a wristwatch computer it has a 10 by 4 character screen and actually runs basic and as you can see it's roughly the same size as my apple watch and this is actually the smaller of the apple watches because i have a small wrist and what we have here in the other box is the docking station for it and as you can see it has a little plotter built in as well as a rom socket which appears to have something installed in there already now the way this works is you fold this little thing up here like so and this is called the transmission circuit and then you just place the watch in here like so and it actually communicates wirelessly now i'd love to show you more of this device but the battery is dead so i thought i'd take the back cover off and see if i could replace it now these screws are very small but uh not as bad as these next four screws these are insanely small by the way it looks like you can take the entire watch unit out like this okay so i finally got the battery out and it's a br2325 which i've never heard of and here's where we sort of run into a problem i thought i'd run to the store and get one rather than ordering one online so that i could get this up and running today but out of all of the button cell batteries at walmart they just didn't have this one i went down the street to cvs pharmacy and they even have a nifty device where you can drop in your battery and it'll tell you which kind it is but they still didn't carry this one now this is sort of what i was trying to explain earlier about the benefits of using double a batteries in some of these computers because not only could some of these batteries be hard to find but just look at the price on these things it's ridiculous and yes i know you can buy them cheaper online but not 1983 you couldn't anyway apparently the seiko watch will have to wait for another episode i'd also like to give an honorable mention to the laser 50 portable computer and while not quite a pocket computer it had essentially the same features as a pocket computer only with a better keyboard so this product was sort of like a cross between a pocket computer and a more capable laptop computer of the era such as the tandy model 100 of course i did a whole video on this product a couple of years ago one little anecdote that i want to share which is not exactly about the computers themselves but more about society of the time so if you were a kid in school in the 1980s and you owned a personal computer you were the exception not the rule and and it certainly didn't make you cool uh quite the opposite in fact and while i did own a personal computer and i also had a pocket computer back in the time i actually seldomly if ever took it to school with me now why you might ask take a look at this photo of me in my 5th grade class i show this because it's the last photo that was taken of me where we were all arranged by height see that poor kid on the bottom right there yeah sucks to be him because he's the shortest kid in the class oh wait yeah that's me i was the shortest kid in the fifth grade and continued to be the shortest kid in the sixth seventh and eighth grade as well as such i got bullied a lot not only because i was the shortest kid in school hence the easiest target but also because i was a nerd which was not a good thing back in the 1980s and besides having a pocket protector full of pens about the only way you could more loudly announce your nerdiness to the world would be to carry a pocket computer with you to school and being that the bullies like to punch me and kick me and trip me and take my books take my possessions and throw them in hard to reach places and things like that i simply couldn't risk taking my pocket computer to school because it would likely get broken or possibly wind up on the roof of the school or something like that where i'd never get it back um so yeah it was just not a cool thing for uh junior high kids back in the time that's for certain but today i'm glad it's kind of changed because now everybody carries a computer in their pocket so what happened to the pocket computers of the 80s well during the late 1980s basic started to become less and less popular and i think looking at the radio shack catalog for 1990 explains it pretty well i think this was the last year the pocket computer 6 was on sale which actually outlasted the pc 7 and 8 but notice that there is a whole new line of the products that look an awful lot like computers but aren't really these are essentially just databanks or what we later started to call them pdas they had big screens and various bits of software built in but they didn't provide any means for the user to write programs either on the device itself or even install new programs from a computer these sort of devices essentially replace the pocket computer for a time anyway so i wanted to mention the end of another era so this will be the last episode filmed in this room so uh the new studio is almost finished and as soon as i'm finished editing together this episode then i'm gonna start the deconstruction of this room and um future videos will be filmed in the uh the new studio so that about wraps it up and as always thanks for watching you

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 891,201

Rating: 4.9499669 out of 5

Keywords: Casio, Sharp, Tandy, TRS-80, Pocket Computer, Computer, BASIC, LCD, Character, Programming, scientific, graphing, calculator

Id: d3NIe1jTZMc

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jukeboxhero10]

As always great video.

[u/44problems]

Would love this to be a series. Used to love to tinker with those Databanks and pocket computers in the 90s from Franklin and Rolodex. Had a great reference handheld called the Franklin Bookman that even had cartridges with different reference books.

Or the ones for kids. I loved my Casio Secret Sender.

[u/dvisorxtra]

Thank you David, as always very educative

This kind of machines weren't available in my country and knowing some of them were rare even in the U.S. is very interesting.

I grew up with D.O.S. and IBM PC's, I've always have thought that computers were less powerful then but people could do more, I mean, yes, the iPhone in your pocket has lots of computing power, yet you are limited by options, design, operating system and so on. In the end you actually have less power as a user

[u/[deleted]]

Cool video. Shows how pocket computing went from something a businessman would need something everybody would need.

And how the emphasis switched from managing data to communication

[u/squeeowl]

I know it's an 80's focused video but I found it kind of funny that he said nothing at all about the Newton when he was briefly covering what was available in the 90's at the start of the video. Seems odd for someone who used to be the iBook guy 😅

Also his tangent about getting bullied in his childhood towards the end of the video was really out of place and kind of awkward?