My First Laptop Computer

[MineralMan]

40. Yes. It was not a great PC, by any means.

It worked, though, and that was enough. It was portable, and that was great, when you compared it to those huge portable PCs that weighed 25 lb. or so and had a CRT screen. That particular Zenith model was developed for the IRS, which bought most of them. Their field workers used them. I got mine from a discount mail-order company that bought up a warehouse full of them and sold them for cheap. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but it was about $200 in 1987 or 1988.

One of its floppy drives quit working a couple of years later and parts were unavailable, so I switched to one of the great new laptop computers. It weighed about 10 lb and had a battery life of about an hour and a half. Lots of weird stuff has passed across my desk over the years.