This little beauty dates from 1983 and is an early “ultra-portable” computer. It sports a massive 2 kilobytes of memory and an LCD display of 12 characters. You might wonder just how useful something so weedy could be. Well very useful actually.

 

Friend Roland Saam who ran a London based outfit called Micros for Managers had a contact at the GPO (General Post Office) who, at the time, were responsible for all the country’s phones as well as losing mail. Their engineers often needed to do complex calculations while out in the field relating to signal strength and cable length and stuff. They gave us the formulae, we wrote programs to work out the answers and Roland sold them packaged solutions they could put in a pocket. And I bought this one to test the results on the actual hardware they were going to run on.

 

Like the early Sinclair machines it used a tokenised BASIC programming language so that a program fragment like.....

 

FOR L = 1 TO 100

X = Y + Z

NEXT L

 

.......... occupied just 15 bytes not 31 (including spaces) - thus making the most of the meagre memory. These days we wantonly shove 2Gb RAM into a computer so Microsoft can waste 40% of it.

 

The program memory came on a removable card (see photo) and came with 2Kb as standard. You could, if you were rich, get a 4Kb one but they cost fourteen arms & seventeen legs. At the back was a port that could connect to a little docking unit that, amongst other things gave you access to a real serial port but that involved parting with more arms & legs so I never got one of those either.

 

Unlike today’s PDA’s this thing will run for a million years on two coin cell batteries (2025’s I think) and it retains it’s memory when those run out through the use of a backup battery. Contrast that with a Pocket PC device that flattens it’s battery in a minute & a half then forgets everything you poked in with the stylus unless you were lucky enough to get a backup done via the “wonderful” Active Sync. That’s progress for you.

 

Anyway this machine still works and I often use it as a calculator - very good ‘coz the scrolling display allows easy editing if you miskey something. As you can see from the picture though the LCD element is beginning to break up. Still I wonder if the dreaded Loox will still be alive in thirty four years time ?