My friends ;-)

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

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Not quite pocketable.

The TRS-80 Model 100 and its descendants were the first truly portable laptop computers when they appeared on the market in the early 80s. They have a full sized keyboard. The machine is roughly of A4 shape but thicker than a sheet of paper.
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A lot of reporters used them long after regular notebooks came into being. Mainly for the fact that they ran on four AA batteries, which could be picked up almost anywhere.

We used one at work many years ago. We had a very large specification that had to be put together in a hurry (over 1,000 pages long). Our spec writer would take it everywhere and just enter spec sections directly into it as a straight text file. We had set up some special codes for formatting purposes. Each morning, I would dump the text file and then ran a program that converted the formatting codes to a form that worked directly with Microsoft Word for Dos. Once imported to MS Word, the attachment of the Word Style sheet automatically formatted the document ready for printing. Worked great and we met the deadline for issuing the spec.

Bill