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Epson HX20 — a Computer from the German Bundeswehr
After publishing my review of the Epson PX8, some readers recommended paying attention to the Epson HX20, which actually was the first “true” portable computer in history. After a bit of searching on eBay, I found a model which was used in a German army. Well, it can be even more interesting:
I will check the hardware and software — let’s figure out how it works and what this computer can do.
Design and specs
The Epson HX-20 was released by the Japanese company Epson in 1982, and the most remarkable of that time was its portability. This computer was promoted as “the world’s first hand-held computer”, and this was actually true. The weight of the HX-20 was about 1.6 kg, and just for comparison, the CP/M-based computer Kaypro, released in 1983, was looking like this:
The Epson HX-20 was not only designed as portable, but it also had a good mechanical keyboard, a built-in printer and had up to 50 hours of battery life. In a review, published in the “Creative computing” magazine in 1983, the author wrote that “The HX-20 is a quantum leap forward in putting the power and capability of a full computer in a compact package”, and I can easily imagine, why. I was doing a review of the Compaq Plus Portable, made in 1983, and trust me, even getting this lovely 13 kg machine from the shelf, requires good physical effort. Having a portable device is something that we have for granted today, but in the 80s it was really new:
Of course, the portability of the HX-20 had its price — the functionality of the laptop was strictly limited. The HX-20 has only 16 KB of RAM, which could be extended to a “whopping” 32 KBytes, and two 614 KHz Hitachi 6301 CPUs (in fact, it was the first computer I tested with a processor running at a clock speed of fewer than 1 MHz). There were also no internal hard disk and no internal floppy disk drive. Even more — the HX-20 had no fully-fledged OS at all, in the default…
