"Woz" IIgs, & Dynabyte computers...

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Nov 3 14:38:29 2003

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Witchy wrote:
> The first true portable was the Osborne 1 wasn't it?
NO.

At the West Coast Computer Faire (produced by Jim Warren), I shared part
of my booth with ElCompCo, who mostly made computers for monitoring
elevators. They had converted a variety of machines into portables,
including TRS-80. They finally came out with their first retail machine,
the BMC-80, which was a Z80 based computer with a 5" CRT, with the whole
thing mounted into a Halliburton attache case.
They set up, and sold off almost their entire first production run
(counted in the dozens).
Then Adam Osborne came over, shook my hand, drank one of my beers, and
said how nice it was.
EIGHT HOURS LATER, his people finished building their giant booth, and he
held a press conference announcing "the FIRST portable".
The Elcompco BMC-80 (and probably LOTS of others) were out and FOR SALE
(he was only taking orders) before his was.

> The Compaq Portable was
> the first true IBM compatible portable after Compaq spent a million dollars
> and well over a year creating a BIOS that didn't infringe IBM's
> copyright.....

Colby preceded Compaq. They made a portable case for clone motherboards,
but had supply problems with the motherboards, so ended up discontinuing
complete machines and just selling the cases.

> Next after the Osborne was the Semi-Tech Microelectronics Pied Piper,
LOTS more before them.
> according to several articles I've read, though that one didn't have an
> integral screen....you could, however, take it home and plug it into your
> TV. Can't tell you what the picture's like 'cos none of my machines have
> modulators :)

well, ...
I bolted the cpu and ei of my model one TRS-80 to a piece of plywood, in
order to carry it between classrooms that had NTSC overhead
monitors (including Evans 10), without disturbing the flaky ei connections
- does THAT count?
Received on Mon Nov 03 2003 - 14:38:29 GMT