Epson HX-20 saved from the trash

[Wickeycolumbus]

There's a bin at work for e-waste that always has all kinds of interesting things. A few days ago, I found this cool Epson HX-20, supposedly the 'first laptop' available. Way too cool/historical to throw away! They let me have it and encouraged me to take anything I wanted from there. It came with a micro cassette drive and a custom sidecar module. This is not the same as the commercially available expansion module, instead it is custom hardware for interfacing with cars for some type of calibration. Inside the module are two circuit boards filled with logic and other chips including a 6505 microprocessor. The unit won't boot with it plugged in, but works just fine with it removed.

 

Anyone else have one of these? Anything cool you can do with it these days?

 

Here's a picture of the computer, I've blurred out the company's logo (an auto company for those interested).

 

[+save2600]

Very cool! Reminds me of the portable TI and TRS-80 machines. Probably not much you can do with it today, but would make a nice and large calculator on the desk.

[Osgeld]

[Wickeycolumbus]

That demo is pretty cool! Going to try to find out if there is a way to hook it up to a modern computer with the serial port and send files to it.

[galax]

Looks like a good machine. The demo makes me wish I'd hung onto the Kaypro II I was given a bit longer. I think I got that to display a Mandelbrot set in about 4 hours or something. We could have started a demo crew.

[krslam]

I've got one of those! Mine has the Real Voice speech synthesizer attachment. Sadly, though, it's not working.