The MoPR Blog

Remember briefcases?

A long time ago, people would carry important “papers” around with them in small suitcases called briefcases. You would put these papers, sometimes in something called a manila file folder, something that strongly resembles the folder icon used in Windows.

Why did we carry papers around in suitcases? Because we didn’t have storage. Let’s go back to 1985. Computers were expensive and many didn’t have hard drives. We spent a lot of time working on hardcopies because softcopies were inconvenient. We didn’t have email, so if we were sending edits back and forth on a document, we had to print out the document, and send it on something called a “fax machine.”

There were “portable computers” but they were too big for briefcases. They came in their own case. We used the briefcase to carry the floppy disks with data and applications we needed to run the computers. That’s right, we needed two hands to carry our portable computers around. You know something else? In 1985, we didn’t have shoulder bags either. You really should read the MoPR Mobile Minute on portable computers to get the full idea. The bottom line, in 1985, mobile computing meant we schlepped around a lot of stuff, and it wasn’t always convenient.

But one entrepreneur saw real mobility looming on the horizon. Seeing that portable computers lacked portable peripherals, he created a self-contained printer that could fit inside a briefcase. His company was called Ergo Systems (of Menlo Park, California) and the printer was the groundbreaking Hush 80 – available in a parallel, serial and Commodore-compatible models.

When I say self contained, I mean aside from the power cord and printer cable, everything was inside, including a roll of thermal paper. The paper was treated with a chemical to make it heat-sensitive, turning the paper black on the area exposed to heat. A print head with seven heat-emitting dots would sweep back and forth across the paper creating characters in a 5 x 7 dot matrix. Each roll could print just over 100 pages and you never needed toner.

This printer was cool. Aesthetically, it matched the look of virtually every portable computer on the market. It was only 11 ½ inches long and less than three inches tall. Including 100 feet of paper, the printer weighed 36 oz. It was small enough to fit in a briefcase laden with papers and diskettes, and light enough to carry without adding tremendously to the already heavy (relative to today) portable computing load. In fact, the dimensions of the Hush 80 made it the only convenient element of a portable computer setup.

It printed the full 80 character lines. And because it was dot matrix, it also printed graphics.

You could either plug it in the wall or run it off rechargeable batteries – something new in the 1985 world of mobile computing.

The Hush 80 sold between $139 and $159. It’s only been recently that printers have fallen below that price point, and most printers today still cost more. Because the printer never needed toner, the cost of operation was also low.

The printer was well received by reviewers and it seemed that Ergo Systems was poised to launch into an early lead in the nascent mobile peripheral category. But it didn’t work out.

Why?

Well, one drawback was that the thermal paper came in rolls and the Hush 80 had no apparatus to cut pages in long documents. It drew a dashed line every 11 inches and users were required to cut their own pages, or crease them and tear them (which was rather easy, actually). Also, the thermal paper wasn’t the most user-friendly of papers. It curled, it smelled, and it would fade and discolor rather quickly. To preserve documents, people would have to make photocopies.

Although the price point was certainly attractive, it didn’t impact portable computing. The portable computers of the day cost more than $5,000 and were still a novelty in the business world. Today more notebook computers are sold to businesses than are desktops, and a sub $500 price point has spiked adoption of mobile computing in the consumer market. But in 1985, the number of portable computers shipped was still counted in the thousands.

Furthermore, the people laying out five grand for a computer were interested in different features than the Hush 80 possessed. The Hush 80 was quiet, inexpensive and portable. But power users of computers were seeking features like “near letter quality” instead. The 5 x 7 dot matrix Hush 80 had better-than-average print quality for its class, but was not close to letter quality.

The low price point was attractive to a market buying lower priced home and small office computers, but where the portability was of no use. Therefore there was no need to compromise the print longevity of the commonly used tractor-fed fanfold paper (is it too nerdy that I know about this stuff?) for the lighter, more portable but more inconvenient (in this context) roll of thermal paper.

But how many times have you been connected at a place like Starbucks, doing some sort of work and wishing you could print something out? Ergo Systems was a company ahead of its time. The founder and CEO of Ergo Systems was my dad, George Sidline. He understood more than 20 years ago – long before there was a mobility technology industry – that people will desire the ability through technology to have anything they want, anytime they want it, anywhere they are.

Mobile peripherals of course did catch on. Only today, most of these devices aren’t peripherals, they are built right into the computer.

And even though 20 years have elapsed, no one has yet made another high-quality portable printer. Nothing that will fit in my globebox anyway.

Did you have a Hush 80 printer from Ergo Systems? What were your earliest mobility technologies. We’d like to hear from you. Leave us a comment.

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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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