24k #10 -- Unbearable Lightness

Our tenth installment of 24 x 24k for 2024 comes from Czech novelist Milan Kundera, though perhaps not directly. Kundera himself is said to have used a Swiss Hermes 3000 typewriter as his word processing machine.

In his novel ”Immortality”, Kundera’s character of himself muses that he would like to call his new novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, to which his editor responds that Kundera already used that name on a novel. “Yes, but this is what I meant“ is his response.

So it is here at Paper Tiger. I suggested that installation 8 of this series paired well with ‘Picture This‘ / ’Parallel Lines’ / Blondie, 1978

”Get a pocket computer
Try to do what you used to do yeah”

Well, this is what I meant. This is the one. Let’s get a pocket computer and do what we used to do. Unfortunately, the pocket computers available in the early to mid eighties when both Blondie and Kundera peaked in popularity had a lightness in Kundera’s sense and not just in the pocket. Microsoft Windows might be destined to recur endlessly but each of the pocket machines lived only once.

David Chapman claims to have invented the pocket computer with a 1977 “Interface Age” article (original still available on your pocket computer here) and wonders how it came to be referenced in “Picture This”. Certainly, one possibility is that Deborah Harry read Interface Age. Why not? I think it’s just as likely that the phrase comes from Blondie’s January ‘78 tour of Japan. Harry herself suggested that the lyric just sort of wrote itself. We should all be so lucky!

The machine often regarded as the first “pocket computer” was the Sharp PC-1211, released in Japan in 1980. Was it really the first machine called a pocket computer, or am I looking at the echo of a 1995-era web ring of sites about it that all repeat the same claim. Was this even Sharp’s first pocket computer?

In fact, this was not Sharp’s first pocket computer. Sharp released a “pocket computer” with the ELSI MATE PC-1200 Pocket Computer in 1977. Did Harry think of this as her pocket computer after picking one up while touring in Japan? It says “pocket computer” on the front for starters. Why might the internet’s pocket computer snobs not think it to be a proper pocket computer? Well, the PC-1200 slots into calculo-taxonomies as a programmable calculator. You see? I think this distinction is blurry. The 1200 lacks the wide bitmap display of its successor and lacks also the qwerty keyboard that would sit in the space underneath. It accepts programs of around a hundred steps rather than a thousand steps. Does that make it not a computer?

I don’t think so. The qwerty layout of the PC-1211 accommodated Kana users barely better than the numeric pad of the PC-1200. That numeric keypad had more features than the numeric pad of the MOS Technology KIM-1. The PC-1200 had about the memory of the 256-byte base configuration of the desktop-sized MITS Altair 8800 from only three years earlier.

So what is the difference? Commodity computing was moving pretty fast in the late ‘70s. Perhaps 1974’s single-board computer is nothing more than 1977’s programmable calculator. By this reasoning, though, the PC-1211 would have no more been a computer in 1980 than the PC-1200 was in ‘77. Perhaps it’s about expandability. The base Altair, the KIM-1, and the PC-1211 were all systems that were nominally expandable and offered at least a path to external rewriteable program storage. I don’t think that’s it, either. If the PC-1211 was a pocket computer, it was so even without a cassette tape or printer in your pocket, or in your budget.

I think the difference is mostly that the PC-1200 looked like a scientific calculator and the PC-1211 looked like what Americans thought a computer should look like. By that standard, the 1978 TI Speak & Spell would have been an early laptop. Perhaps it really was! With the possible exception of Deborah Harry and a handful of others, the PC-1200 wasn’t seen by Americans. It wasn’t exported to the US. The PC-1211 was — rebadged for Radio Shack as the TRS-80 pocket computer. Americans knew it as a computer. It had all the letters that English-speaking Americans expected. It was semi-expandable. Like many machines of the era, it was short lived.

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was eclipsed by another Sharp machine. Radio Shack introduced the incompatible Sharp PC-1500 as the Pocket Computer 2. The PC-2 accepted a RAM upgrade. Years after the machine was discontinued, a 24k expansion was made and is still available. The entire line of Sharp pocket computers were unbearably light and unlikely to recur, however much we might wish it. Get an original in serviceable condition, though, and it might last another 45 years. Get it and do what you used to do. Yeah.