Epson Advert - December 1982

Considered by some as the first "true" laptop, Epson's HX-20 was actually designed - in 1980 - by Yukio Yokozawa, an employee of Seiko.

It ran two Hitachi 6301 CPUs - a clone of Motorola's 6800^[1] - at a little over 600KHz and was first announced at 1981's Comdex in Las Vegas. It came with 16K RAM, which was internally upgradeable to 32K, and - according to the advert at least - could run for 50 hours on a single charge of its Nickel-Cadmium batteries.

And like most other computers of the era, it came with Microsoft's BASIC, stored in 32K ROM.

Inside the impressive gate-fold magazine insert, which even included a square hole cut-out so you could see the executive type in a waistcoat through the front page

A lack of software and poor distribution meant that it wasn't widely available until 1983, the year after this advert^[2].

Most of that software wasn't yet available when the machine was reviewed in Personal Computer World's December 1982 edition, however it still came out well, with Dick Pountain writing:

"I feel rather shell-shocked having reviewed the HX-20 so soon after the excellent HP75C. Both machines advance the art of portable computing beyond recognition - if in in subtly different directions. There is not much you can do with the naked machine, unlike the HP which has lots of 'super calculator' firmware for the busy executive. On the other hand, the Epson is at least the equal of the HP in power and leaves it standing in the quality of its keyboard ond the convenience of its built-in printer and tape drive. When a decent word processing package can be had for it then writing on the train or aeroplane can become an affordable reality at last".

Somewhat prophetically, given the time the machine took to really get going, Pountain concluded that

"Given Epson's marketing clout I expect to see a lot of these in about 12 months' time and this also bodes well for the supply of third-party software; from previous experience of Japanese firms I wouldn't expect a lot of software support but Epson does seem to be trying to do things differently. The choice of a 6800-alike chip is rather unfortunate as it will definitely hinder the conversion of many existing programs but I expect it top open up whole new areas of application where this is not so relevant".

When launched, the HX-20 cost £411 with a travelling case, which is about £1,760 in 2024. Given that Epson expected its software to ship in cartridge form, these were quite pricey at £45 each - about £190 now^[3].