Hardware Heritage—Briefcase-Sized Computers

Abstract

The computer industry was a vivid place in the 1980s. IT systems and technologies thrived, and the market offered ever better, smaller, and more useful machines. Innovative technical solutions or intelligent designs that satisfied customers’ needs are often listed as computer hardware milestones. Consequently, they became a permanent part of the computerisation history and can be considered hardware heritage artefacts. The purpose of the paper is to analyse the usability of selected portable computer systems. The foundation of the work is a literature review that includes technical specifications, industry reviews, and research papers. Archival materials were obtained from the Internet Archive. Studies have revealed that the main problems design engineers of portable computers had to tackle in the 1980s were the reduction of mass and size of the computer system, portable power (self-power), and the quality of the displayed image.

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“…While there is an entire journal dedicated to the history of computing (IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, ISSN 1058-6180), only a very small number of papers have considered the tangible aspects, primarily the material culture of computing, such as mainframes [8], portable computers [9] or desktop publishing [10,11], as well as collections and collection methodologies dedicated to the history of computing [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. A limited number of other studies have looked at the intangible aspects of computing heritage, and primarily in terms of oral histories [22,23], software design [24] as well experiences when playing computer games [25].…”

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“…While claiming to be future-oriented [9], the profession has often struggled with the recognition and management of recent and emergent heritage [10,11]. A developing field is the heritage of the digital age, as expressed in its tangible material culture [12][13][14][15] and in born-digital content [16][17][18]. An emergent discourse is the conceptualization, subsequent documentation, and management of digital heritage in the form of hardware heritage, digital artifacts, virtual artifacts and digital ephemera [19].…”