It's the Little Things

Recently I heard about a crowdfunding campaign for the GPD P2 Max, which the manufacturer claims will be the world's smallest ultrabook. There's clearly interest in the project, evidenced by the fact that GPD has raised seven times the money it needed to start making these systems. I'm happy to see this much love for small scale computers, but at the same time, I have to wonder why it took so long for people to appreciate them.

image from Digibarn

See, small computers aren't a new thing... they've been around for decades. Take for instance the Epson HX-20, created way back in 1980. This system packed an insane amount of technology into an insanely tight space... Epson included a comfortably sized keyboard, an LCD screen, cassette storage, and even a printer into a system roughly the same size as an open magazine. It's an engineering marvel that was later imitated by Kyocera for its own portable computer, rebranded the Tandy 100 in the United States. Lemme bring up a picture of that one...

image from OldComputers.net

This computer kept the spacious keyboard but prioritized a larger screen over the Epson HX-20's more extraneous features. It was just large enough that journalists could use it while on location, punching in a story, checking it over for typos, and sending the finished product back to the front desk. The 300 baud modem wasn't an especially speedy way to get it there, but in the year 1983, when the high bandwidth we take for granted now may as well have been science fiction, you had to take what you could get.

image from Pocket.free.fr

Sadly, such computers were for professionals, not cash-strapped kids. I had to settle for another Radio Shack product, the PC-8. Originally designed by Sharp, this tiny computer was roughly the size of a calculator, with specs to match. Its screen was a single line of sixteen characters, the keys were rubber nubs, and errors had to be expressed with two digit numbers rather than a more verbose explanation of what you did wrong. Despite all this, I was happy to have it... it had BASIC built in, which meant that I could program just about anywhere I could see that little LCD screen.

image from calculators.torensma.net

I really wanted to get my hands on this guy, and years later, I finally did. This is the Tandy PC-6, a Casio-designed pocket computer with four times the RAM of the PC-8, a whole lot more keys to press, and... uh, a similarly crappy screen. Hey, at least it's twenty-four characters wide this time. My last pocket computer came straight from the Shack, but this one was found in a Goodwill, apparently mistaken for a calculator and priced to move at a couple of dollars. Admittedly, I didn't use it much, since it was 2010 and the technology of the PC-6 was eclipsed many times over by my first iPod Touch. Still, when you're a collector, it's sometimes more about the thrill of the hunt than the usefulness of your target.

image from PhoneDB

My first mini-computers of any practical use were the NEC MobilePro 780 and later, the Asus EEE 701. The MobilePro 780 was released at the turn of the century, and certainly shows its age, with Windows CE as its operating system and a feeble 32MB of RAM. However, you could give the system a respectable amount of storage with the CompactFlash slot on the side, compensating for its limitations. It didn't have wifi out of the box, but frankly, it was liberating to work without the constant distraction of the internet. Sometimes you need a little seclusion to be able to concentrate on your work.

image from NotebookReview

The Asus EEE started its own sub-genre of laptop, the small and inexpensive netbook. It generated a lot of excitement on the internet, and I wanted to be the first on board that hype train, so I picked up the 701 model from an online retail shortly after it was launched. Would I want to go back to it twelve years later? No, not really. The keyboard was painfully small, an SD card was all but necessary to supplement its meager four gigabytes of internal storage, and the resolution was a claustrophobic 800x480 pixels. Still, the EEE could do a lot more than you might have expected from its size and price. People were running Mass Effect on this thing, a pretty big feat for a computer much smaller than an Xbox 360.

The EEE was a hit at first, inspiring competing products from Dell, HP, and Acer. Unfortunately, its popularity was quickly derailed by tablets, and by meddling from Microsoft. The company drew a line in the sand on how powerful a netbook could be, and jacked up Windows licensing fees for anyone who dared crossed that line, preventing the systems from growing along with the rest of the industry.

Netbooks may be history, but if the success of the GPD P2 Max crowdfunding campaign is any indication, we may not have seen the last of subcompact computers. Personally, I'd like to see them make a comeback... they may not be as powerful or comfortable to use as their full-sized cousins, but there's always something fascinating about making a molehill out of a mountain of technology.

Special thanks to Wikipedia and the Pocket Museum for providing information for this blog entry.