Hewlett-Packard Advert - March 1985

Staking a claim to the entire industry of laptop (or lap-held) computers with a highly generic name of The Portable, HP's laptop was from the era of portable computers with chunky cases and ultra-letterbox LCD displays, thanks to its 80x16 character - or 480x128 pixel - display.

Unlike modern portables, The Portable - otherwise known as the Model 110, or Nomad - had no storage devices of its own, although battery-powered external disk drives were offered as an option.

Instead, the operating system - Microsoft's MS-DOS 2.11 - and various application packages were supplied as ROM versions, which made it difficult for users to install random packages of their choice, unless they were also available in ROM from HP itself^[1]. The upside was that the machine booted a fraction of the time of conventional desktop machines.

One of the packages it did come with, however, was Lotus 1-2-3 - the all-conquering spreadsheet, database and charting program which was said to have been the IBM PC's first killer app, and which helped sales of the PC in much the same way as the first spreadsheet - Visicalc - had saved the Apple II in 1979.