Epson Advert - July 1988

Here's an amusing advert from Epson for its "PC Portable", otherwise known as the Q150A, which was launched at the beginning of 1988 - with the hard-disk version being launched in March of the same year.

It considers the Epson as one of the best three take-aways of all time - albeit from a particularly-short list which includes "4-bit lager" and "8-bit biryani". The PC Portable is apparently "hot", but hopefully not in the overheating sense.

It ran the NEC V30 processor, which was an enhanced version of the Intel 80C86, and had the standard MS-DOS ration of 640K memory, although unlike its contemporaries, that was it as it couldn't be expanded.

The first version out came with two 3.5" floppy disks, with the later hard-disk model including a 20MB hard drive.

Its review in February 1988's Practical Computing was mixed, with Ian Stobie concluding:

"Epson has set out to provide a mass-market IBM compatible portable with some extra frills. It has the extra frills, but some of the basic details go a bit wrong. Hardware performance cannot be criticised: discs and processors were quick, and as the portable equivalent to a PC or XT, the PC Portable does a good job. Exceptional documentation and the Lap-Link file-tranfser utility are valuable bonuses. Details such as the uncomfortable handle, vulnerably-positioned ports and noisy disc drives let the machine down. Battery life is nothing special either. It is hard to recommend it in any general sense over its competitors^[1]".

As a device, with its common-at-the-time CGA display of 640x200 - with the square pixels of an LCD display rather than rectangular pixels of a CRT monitor, so it looks like a letterbox - it's not quite reached the design of what would be considered a modern laptop.

Especially as the 11lbs, or 5kg, it weighs is the same as a large and quite heavy cat.