I Used One of These For My First Job Out of College

The Compaq "luggable" computer weighed 28 pounds and was the size of a sewing machine:

To transport it, you locked the keyboard in place over the front and carried it by the handle on the other side, like a suitcase.

The first time I ever had to get treated for a rotator cuff injury was after traveling with one of these.

It was state-of-the-art. Nice, bright monochrome screen, two 5.25" floppy drives, and 128K of RAM standard, whether you needed that much or not.

You put the MS-DOS floppy in one drive, then you put the application floppy in the other, say, Wordperfect for DOS or Lotus 1-2-3. That's right, there was no hard drive. Everything was saved to floppy. Which could easily melt if you left them out on your carseat on a warm day.

I wrote a Lotus macro for one assignment and the chief IT person at the company - who I think was also the benefits person - called me a "power user."

It cost $3,590, I just learned, which is $7,618 in today's dollars. Wow.

Here's the review of it from the January, 1983 issue of Byte Magazine.

(Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.)

Comments

[Cheap Computers]

I think this was the first compaq computer some years ago.......It was having 28 pounds of weight.....
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