One of the advantages of growing up the son of an engineer is inheriting castoff computers. This benefit is particularly of value in college.
My friend Matt and I were two such lucky college kids. Not only did we get old computers, but they were portable! That meant we could bring our computers to the popular San Francisco coffee houses, libraries, even to classes to take notes.
Um… No, we couldn’t.
“Portable” simply meant that when we had to move out of our respective domiciles at the end of the school year, we had an easier time packing our computer than, say, our stereo.
The year was 1986, and Matt and I each had different portable computers. We frequently debated as to which one was better (nerd alert). Matt had the slightly older Osborne 1 while I had the Kaypro II. There were many similarities but the two computers were vastly different.
Matt’s Osborne 1, built in 1981, sported the Zilog Z80 microprocessor (the very same chip used in Radio Shack’s TRS-80 models II and III) with a super fast clock rate of 4.0 Mhz. It, of course, had 64 kilobytes of RAM. It packed 24.5 lbs of technology into its sleek plastic suitcase-shaped case (the top of which contained the keyboard).
My Kaypro II on the other hand, built in 1982, had a slower Z80 chip, only 2.5 Mhz. It also weighed a heavier 26 lbs and was in a squared off metal case (the top of which contained the keyboard). Fine, the Osborne 1 looked sportier. But drop the Osborne and you run the risk of damaging the inside, while the Kaypro was boxy but safe, just like a 1982 Volvo sedan.
But even more than that, the Kaypro II had dual 195 kb floppy disk drives (way back in the 1980s, computers had disk drives for “diskettes” that were 5 ¼ inches in diameter which were indeed floppy. These diskettes held more data and were far easier to manage than their 8 inch predecessor. Can you imagine carrying around 8 inch disks? No, 5 ¼ inch was the way to go). So my Kaypro II was able to put a program disk in Drive A with software that was up to 195 kilobytes in size. I could also put a second data disk in Drive B that could store up to 195 kilobytes of files.
Matt, on the other hand, had measly dual 91 kilobyte drives. That meant that the word processor he was using, for example, was as much as 100 kilobytes smaller and thus far less powerful than mine.
Matt’s display was also a paltry 5 inches wide and could only display 53 characters across! Whereas the Kaypro II had a 9 inch display that could display 80 beefier characters on the same line. And who says size doesn’t matter? Not only that, but the Kaypro II’s display was green (from electronically charged phosphorous) which, legend has it, was easier on the eyes.
Both computers sold for about $1,700 when they were new. They both used the CP/M operating system (a lot like MS-DOS, but without all the fancy bells and whistles). But I think you will agree with me that the Kaypro II was by far the superior machine.
Of course, the reason that we got these computers was that our fathers got new computers and no longer needed these. I don’t know what Matt’s dad got, but my father replaced the Kaypro II with the state-of-the art in mobile computing: the Compaq Portable II. Understand, that a lot had changed between 1982 when the Kaypro II was made and 1986 when the Compaq Portable II debuted.
The Compaq Portable II was simply a lot more computer that you could also carry around. It cost more too, with prices closing in on $5,000. But you got the latest Intel 80286 microprocessor that had a clock speed of at least 6 Mhz but maybe as much as 8 Mhz! You only got a single 5 ¼ inch double-sided floppy drive, but it held 360 kilobytes of data! It also came with 256K of memory (or as much as 640K!). It still had a 9 inch monitor for 80 character lines, but it had something else that neither the Osborne 1 nor the Kaypro II ever had: a hard drive. An actual drive that stayed inside the computer at all times where you could store all your programs.
The hard drive on my dad’s Compaq Portable II was a whopping 10 Megs! To put that in perspective, you would need just over 51 of the 195 kilobyte floppy disks to store all the software you could on just one 10 megabyte hard drive. Can you imagine carting around 51 diskettes? (Actually, you could, because in order to back up the hard drive, you had to save all the data on 28 diskettes, but that’s beside the point).
You no longer had to use CP/M. It was replaced with MS-DOS (a lot like CP/M, but with fancy bells and whistles).
By the way, the Compaq Portable II weighed 26 lbs, the same as the Kaypro II. But as you can see from this picture, the Compaq Portable II was a quantum leap in mobile computing from the Osborne and Kaypro dinasours it replaced.
How far has mobile computing come in the 20 years since the Compaq Portable II hit the market? The Dell notebooks used by Mobility Public Relations weigh less than 5 lbs and have Intel’s Core Duo T2400 microprocessors with a clock speed of 1.83 Ghz (somewhere in the neighborhood of 230 times faster than the Compaq’s chip, but the chip actually processes data far faster than that), comes with 2.0G of memory (roughly 3,125 times the amount of memory the Compaq could max; but the Dell can go to 4.0G), and has an 80GB hard drive (which holds 8,000 times more data than the Compaq’s). That’s important because Microsoft Word is 11.5 megabytes (that’s 1.5 megabytes larger than the Compaq’s hard drive and about the size of 60 floppy disks on the Kaypro II).
The display on the Dell is a 14.1 inch wide-screen set at 1280 by 1024 pixels with four bazillian colors or something like that (as compared the two colors of the Compaq) which means the Dell can do one more important thing that the Compaq, Osborne and Kaypro never could: play video games!
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