I ran into this little item in a nostalgia piece in a UK magazine called Gadget, and it brought back a lot of memories. I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years, some better than others, and one of them involved trying to sell these things–
I’ve been involved with the personal computer industry in one way or another since 1979, and in 1983/1984 while I was back in college studying business, computer science and electronics, I was also working a part time job for a business supply company that sold, among other things, this — this thing.
Epson’s claim to fame was making relatively inexpensive, relatively well made, dot matrix printers. Not computers. And when the company decided to move into the lucrative personal computer market, things didn’t go all that well for them, largely due to things like this, and the famous, (or infamous if you had to try to sell the damned things) QX-10 computer.
The HX-20 was, to put it bluntly, utterly useless. The 4 line, 20 character long display was was too small for any kind of serious work. And while the built in thermal printer was a nice feature, well, it doesn’t do you much good if you don’t have any software that actually does something useful, and the HX-20 had pretty much no software support at all. As the blurb above points out, the rechargeable battery usually didn’t. Recharge, I mean. And it certainly didn’t last 50 hours, especially if you used the printer or the tape.
The Epson factory rep took me out to dinner and dumped one of these things on me in the hopes I’d help him get my boss to buy them. I fiddled with it for an hour, the battery went dead, the printer only worked when it felt like it, and the tape deck immediately ate the one cassette tape I tried using. With the wonky battery, the dodgy tape deck, the ridiculously tiny display, and total lack of any kind of useful software, I refused to have anything to do with it.
Somehow he managed to talk our boss into ordering a dozen of the damned things, and now it was my job to try to sell them.
Meanwhile Radio Shack was coming out with the TRS-80 Model 100, which was the same size, had a 40 character by 10 line display that was actually useful, all kinds of goodies like a built in modem, built in bar code reader, real standardized I/O ports for RS-232, a ROM port for speciality software, and, better still, you could buy actual, real and useful software for it. And it cost less.
The things are probably still sitting in a box in storage somewhere. We certainly never sold any. They’re probably with the dozen or so QX-10 computers he was talked into stocking that we never sold, either.
grouchyfarmer 