Part One: Taking over the typing pool
By Tony Smith ? Get more from this author
Posted in Hardware, 12th November 2012 12:01 GMT
Feature In 1985, the UK home computer boom was over. Those computer
manufacturers who had survived the sales wasteland that was Christmas
1984 quickly began to turn their attention away from the home users
they had courted through the first half of the 1980s to the growing
and potentially much more lucrative business market.
The IBM PC had been launched four years earlier, in 1981. The 5150 and
the clones it had inspired at Compaq and other computing firms new and
established were winning an increasing share of the market. Some
British manufacturers were content to follow the American lead and
offer clones of their own. Others, however, believed they could win
with systems of their own design.
[...]
If that's the Liberator I think it is, I would not call it a laptop
computer. Yes, it was microprocessor controlled, and yes, there was
something very liek CP/M in the ROM. But it was not user-programamble. It
ran a dedicatedtext editor thing. There was an optional terminal emulator
ROM module, I ahve neve rseen any other software for it.
And like most UK computers of the time, the keyboard is horrible!
-tony