Here’s my very first “portable” computer, dating from way back in 1984.

 

Televideo were well known for manufacturing “dumb” terminals and were determined to try and make it in the PC market. At the time an equivalent IBM or Compaq machine cost around £3000 (like £8000 in todays money) and Televideo were pricing very aggressively to gain a foothold. From memory this cost around £1600. It has two 5.25 inch floppydrives but came with no hard disk. Still when my main programming language (Turbo Pascal) took up just 39K for both the editor and compiler who cared ?

 

Later I added a hard drive into an expansion slot - one of those neat ones that had both disk and controller mounted on the same card chassis.

 

Even though it weighs half a ton it was still a major breakthrough - being able to pack it up quickly to go to client premises made it worth its weight in gold. The keyboard unit clips in place over the screen & disk drives so keys and screen are protected in transit.

 

The Boddingtons can is not some weird optional extra - it’s just there to give a sense of scale.

 

The Televideo also came with real manuals - in this case in two large A4 ring binders - these together weigh way more than the new Toshiba (see Shopper 236)

 

Amazingly it still works.