Old Hardware Emulated : PockEmul - Miscellaneous Pocket Computers

 

The Emulation of Handheld Computers From The 80's.

By this point, it's no secret that Pockemul emulates various pocket computers of the 1980's and 90's. This article will provide a quick glance of the other various models of pocket computers that are emulated by Pockemul. I've skipped over several of the emulated models because there wasn't that much information about them besides the technical specs. Some of them, like the Seiko MC-2200, was a clone of the widely popular Sharp PC-1245 hand-held computer made by Sharp, and licensed to Seiko. I will cover Sharp's handheld computers in a separate article.
Epson HX-20
Epson HX-20 Laptop

Introduced in the Summer of 1982, the Epson HX-20 is regarded as being one, if not the first, laptop computers on the market. Made by the Japanese electronic giant Epson, the HX-20 had a introductory price was $795 (US). The computer was powered by two Hitachi 6301 processors, with each one running at 614KHz. Yes, that Kilohertz, and not Mega or Gigahertz. The HX-20 shipped with 16KB's of RAM, which was expandable up to 32KB. The computer also incorporated a LCD screen with 4 rows with 20 characters per row with a graphical screen resolution of 120 by 32 pixels. The handheld computer had a full-featured keyboard in place, which marked a sharp contrast to the calculator keys used on the fast majority of the handheld, portable computers of the time. The full-featured keyboard gave the appearance that this machine was meant to be a serious complement to desktop computers of that time.

The HX-20 was powered by a Ni-cad battery pack that could provide up to 50 hours of power to the portable computer. The battery life was shortened when one used the micro-cassette tape deck, the RS-232 serial ports, and peripheral devices. The HX-20 could communicate with the outside world using the two RS-232 serial ports that were incorporated into the machine. The 4-pin cable connector provided a data transfer of 4800 bits per second that was intended for a serial modem. A 5-pin cable connection operated at 38,400 bits per second and allowed the computer using this cable to accommodate a  external floppy or external video display. A micro-cassette tape deck was provided for the user to store programs written in BASIC. A printer could be connected to the expansion slot provided by the machine. The printer available was a dot matrix type that were typical with printing calculators and the other hand-held computers that were common during this time. The expansion slot could carry replacement software that was loaded into ROM chips, as well as other devices as well. 

As show in the screenshot above, the computer provides the options to either load Epson BASIC or the ROM Monitor program. The ROM Monitor was a machine code debugger that could debug code in programs written in either machine language or in BASIC. Of course, Epson BASIC is the program interpreter for the machine that allows the user to write programs written in BASIC.

This computer was a heavy influence on the much more popular Tandy 100 Computer that would be introduced a year later in 1983. For the most part, this computer was a failure in the marketplace due to a lack of software.

The emulation of the computer seems accurate for the most part. I haven't really used this configuration that much though, because as mentioned earlier, there was not a lot of software for this machine. Not only that, it seems that none of the software that has been known to exist has been archived either. By modern standards, there really isn't much that one could do with this machine now, as the HX-20 was meant for another time and era. Despite that though, this computer was a pioneer when it came to the development of the first laptop computers. As mentioned earlier, the HX-20 was a huge influence on the Tandy 100 Portable Computer, which was much more successful in the marketplace, and helped define what a portable computer should be. A technological family tree would spring up which would help pave the way for the modern, portable devices that we know and love today. A pioneer in handheld computing.

Panasonic HHC (Hand-Held Computer)
Closeup of the display
Japanese electronic giant Panasonic wasn't going to just sit around while there fellow competitors; Sharp and Casio, were going to eat up the market with there hand-held computers. The HHC was Panasonic's answer to the Sharp Pocket Computer. One thing that has to be noted that while one can't tell from the screenshot, but the physical device is too big to fit in the pocket. With that said, this was still very much a handheld, portable computer.

The HHC was introduced in 1982 with a price of $400 (US). The HHC was powered by a MOS/Motorola 6502 Processor running at 1MHz. The portable computer shipped with 2-4KB, depending on the model. The computer had a 44-pin expansion slot that was located on the side of the device. This allowed the used to attach a external, dot-matrix calculator printer, along with a cassette-tape adapter that allowed users to load/save programs that were written in BASIC. 3 sockets were provided to allow for software that could be loaded from ROM as well.

As noted in the article, this system was widely used by insurance salesmen and claims adjusters who were on the road a lot and needed to run there application on the go. This is what portable computing looked like in 1982!

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