It had a 24-character LCD and could run for up to 300 hours on four coin-style watch batteries! But while it had the ability to load and store programs from tape and print to a tiny portable thermal printer, sadly it didn’t have a modem.įor that, prospective payphone warriors would have to wait until the PC-2. Released in 1980, it was an advancement over previous ‘programmable calculators’ in that it had a QWERTY keyboard and allowed for the writing and execution of BASIC code. The first step in this crusade was the Tandy Pocket Computer PC-1, a rebranding of the Sharp PC-1211. The Tandy Pocket Computer (PC-1) had 1.9 kilobytes of RAM, which doesn’t seem like much but its BASIC programs were ‘tokenised’ (that is, PRINT is stored as a single byte instead of five) which meant a program could have up to 1424 commands, allowing for rather sophisticated applications in a small package. With a modem, it was just as easy to become dependent on instant access to information, real-time news updates and social connections then as it is now, and for your 1980s digital pioneer the idea of portability – being able to do whatever you did in your computer room at home anywhere else – was the Holy Grail. And if you needed to compute, you had to be near a computer! If you wanted more practical information you had to look it up in an encyclopedia, or call someone to look it up in an encyclopedia. Most people learned about current events passively, either through the newspaper, the radio or the 6 o’clock TV news. While these days we take the ‘always connected’ nature of our mobile phones for granted, back in the early 1980s the idea of being able to access information on-the-go was mindblowing. What could be better than connecting to another computer remotely? How about remotely connecting remotely?
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