Forgotten but not gone
The Fair brought up some entire categories that I'd forgotten. This is the Sinclair ZX PBS+ Executive IV from 1985:
Yes, it's pretty neat with the included printer. But the USP was that it came in a suitcase:
It also has something you'd never expect to see on a Sinclair:
...which is a decent keyboard.
The predecessor was this – we had one of these in our attic. Note the screen size. There's far too much emphasis on graphics these days, this was pretty "immersive", in its own way:
Another category I'd forgotten about was the early portable. Sinclair's Z88, launched in 1987, ran off 4 AAs. (More here).
Amstrad was offering something similar as late as 1993:
(More on that here).
Here an attendee shows a more recent vintage:
Over in the Amiga users' tent was a wide range of business computing. I'm impressed if you can tell what machine this is, without cheating:
Next page: Any old iron
COMMENTS
Fear the wrath of the Welsh Dragon!
Fancy not recognising the Dragon 32 - one of Wales' biggest high-tech exports in c.1984! How old is the reporter? They were only EVER "over here"!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32
BTW it's based on the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) featuring the rather nice 6809 CPU.
Re: real hard to guess
The sub-editor responsible has been taken out and shot.
(Not really. But we have tied his shoelaces together)
Lovely
Articles like this on El Reg always make me want to break out the old computers from back in the days when the instruction manual was 500 pages long and was to be read under the covers at night with a torch.
The photo of the old magazine ad made me feel old - it doesn't seem so long ago that we called them 'discettes'. Nowadays, my spell-check insists giving it a red squiggly underline.
Where's the "nostalgia alert" icon?
One thing that amazed me was......
.....the fact that a lot of the 'modders' there were'nt even born when this kit was in the shops.
I'm gald I was 12 years old in 1983 and could enjoy that wonderful 8bit period of UK microcomputing. It burnt so brightly but fizzled out just as quick.
The memories will last forever.
Ex Dragon Owner.
I still have a Dragon 64 Boxed Up with it's OS9 Drive and Discs (I upgraded from a 32 to 64), eventually however I moved to a spectrum then to an Atari 520 ST/FM before finally entering the wonderful world of PC's on a DX2/66 processor. My prize computing possession is a boxed up ZX81 1k :)
I feel old after going through that list.
