The late, great TRS-80

Just to give the 9830 another plug, a quick recap of what it was: - general-purpose computer with built-in high-level language - all-in-one package - easy to use out of the box - truly functional: it was sold to do, and did do, useful work - it was not a prototype or proof-of-concept machine. Yes, it was expensive; no, it did not see much use in the home; so it's outside the lineage of what we tend to think of as 'home computers', but it was very much a real, practical, representative indication of what was to come, years ahead of the others. I'm not that familiar with the market situation of the IBM 5100, but I'd hazard a guess there were more HP 9830s produced and sold (and actually used) than IBM 5100s. Did the 5100 have a market niche at all? A couple of comments on the display of the 9830: - the 32 character 5*7 dot-matrix LED display had large, very easy to read characters (1/2 to 3/4") and there were keys for horizontal scrolling through an 80 character (IIRC) line. - the printer was fast: it didn't take very long, for example, to get a full program listing (not like waiting for a teletype to clickety-clack across the page). It was a dot-matrix thermal printer with (IIRC) a full horizontal row print-head (printed an entire dot-row at once).