SFF Computing is older than most people realize. Popular Science checks out one of the oldest mini-computers with the Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer. Powered by a Zilog Z80, this little machine was the Palm Pilot of its day. Pity the people of those days. I actually remember buying one of these at a neighbors garage sale when I was five years old for a dime. A literal dime. $0.10 US.
…and I was ripped off.
Turns out learning BASIC to make this thing do anything was a bit over my illiterate five-year-old head. Even if I had been a coding savant I would have been disappointed by what ultimate proved to be trying to reduce a command line desktop computer to a single line of calculator class pixels and a tiny receipt printer for output.
Yeah…that was a thing.
Still, it was novel for its time and managed to put the power of a mainframe in the palm of your hand.
