“Even the baggy-trousered fashion of the time didn’t have pockets that big!”
“Get a pocket computer, try to do what you used to do, yeah” sang Debbie Harry in the Blondie song “Picture This”. It appeared on the group’s ground-breaking 1978 album Parallel Lines, and I’ve been obsessed ever since. As a teenage boy I was naturally obsessed with Debbie Harry, but my longer-term obsession has been with that line about a “pocket computer”.
It was actually a prophetic lyric, because back in 1978 when the album hit the shops, there was no such thing as a pocket computer. It’s astonishing just how much progress was made in the last couple of decades of the 20th century, but 1978 was still the era of 5.25in floppy disks. There were no spreadsheets; VisiCalc was still being written. Even Intel’s 8088 CPU, which heralded the first machines that we think of as PCs, was a year away, and the UK’s own ZX80 wouldn’t appear for at least a couple more years.
In 1978, computing magazines did exist, but rather than lovely Real World columns like this, they contained listings for square root functions in 6800 assembler code. Pocket computers weren’t just a dream, they were pretty much unimagined. Even our fictional view of the future via the original Star Trek and the recently released Star Wars didn’t have pocket computers.
The internet will tell you that the first pocket computer arrived in 1980 with Tandy’s TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1, but I respectfully disagree with that. By the way, the Tandy Pocket Computer wasn’t in any
