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PIVOT
November 23, 2013
When I was young and naive, I tended to
snap up new consumer products much
faster than you would guess from my
present state of cynical perfection...
I thought the original price-breakthrough
on Texas Instrument calculators (a basic
scientific calculator for only $15) was For years I wore digital
amazing, and my first "programmable watches strapped to my wrist,
calculator" was the TI-58c (my roomate my first one being a TI.
was jealous of that newly appended "c", Brand loyalty, no less.
his TI-58 didn't have "constant memory",
every program had to be typed in anew).
The claims of the HP fans that their
entry mode was superior to TI's left Perhaps my first technical
me cold, but I grew tired of TI's religious war... TI used
cheap buttons and switched to an an algebraic entry mode
HP-19 which I use still (on occasion). that most found intuitive:
"3 x 2 =" and it would
respond 6. The HPs were
When my roomate (the same, designed by nerds, for
aforementioned roomate, nerds, and gave you direct
unsuprisingly) wanted to access to a small "stack":
get a new Atari-800 (no "3 enter 2 enter x", and
Apple II herd-follower it would respond 6.
him), I bought an Epson
MX-80 dot-matrix printer to With more complex operations,
use with it-- I'd long you'd save a few keystrokes
gotten tired of copying with the HP-style.
columns of numbers
generated by my calculator. As with most technical
religious wars, the right
thing to do is to ignore
it... the real issues
lie elsewhere.
I was fascinated by the idea of portable computers.
The Osbornes seemed too clunky, but when there was
a *real* breakthrough, I dove right in, and bought
a Morrow Pivot (later bought and rebranded as a
Zenith, but you've never heard of that one, either).
The Morrow had a main unit like a vertical box,
roughly the same height as a modern laptop,
but instead of the screen flipping up, the keyboard
flipped down. It used a black-and-white LCD
display, where they had to cheap out and go with
only 16 lines instead of the standard 24, promising
to upgrade to 24 later. When using it with IBM
PC compatible software, you needed to use a special
toggle button to flip back-and-forth between
displaying the top and bottom of the screen. It
came, however, with "NewWord", a "Wordstar" clone
that had been compiled with the 16 line display in
mind.
The real selling-point of this unit though,
was that it came with *two* 5 1/4 floppy
drives (and no hard drive, you understand):
this was a *real* system you could stick a
program disk in one drive and a data disk
in the other and get some real work done
without swapping disks constantly.
I picked up a power adapter to plug in
to my car's cigarette lighter and went Yeah, I drove cars
traveling around the country. in those days too.
A 10 year-old
In practice, I found it incredibly Toyota Corrolla.
difficult to get much of anything done
using this while seated in a car.
And using it in public libraries was
a bit awkward: no one else had any
gear like this and the drives made
some strange noises no one was used to.
Then it was stolen from my car while
it was parked at the beach at Santa And I lost the TI-58c
Monica. when my car was parked
in lower Manhatten.
From this I learned two things I learned later that
about portable computers: leaving something
(1) they're less useful than you "locked" in a
The smart think, because you need to be Toyota hatchback
phone somewhere to think. was like leaving it
zombies (2) they're very portable. on the sidewalk with
you see a "don't take this"
shuffling sign.
around on And we might throw in a third thing:
the street if you're an early adopter, by
still definition, you're using something
haven't before the bugs are out...
learned
point (1).
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