There’s a little bit of Clive in every box.

The Cambridge Z88 (1987) was a slim, diskless, battery-sipping laptop computer similar to the famous TRS-80 Model 100.

Interestingly, former VC&G contributor Gnome wrote about this machine for us in 2006. He makes specific note of the Z88’s relationship to Sir Clive Sinclair of Sinclair Research fame.

I don’t have a Z88, but I love laptops in this monolithic, almost slate-like form factor. If you have one you’d like to get rid of, I’m all ears.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a laptop with a non-folding screen (i.e. not a clamshell design) like the Z88 above? What did you like or dislike about it?

This reminds me of a psychic parlor trick.

The Sony-designed 3.5″ floppy drive (1982) first made waves in the mid-1980s with its use in the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984. The format quickly gained popularity in the PC market and overtook the 5.25″ floppy disk in overall usage by the early 1990s. PC clone manufacturers, many of whom had supported both the larger and smaller floppy formats, eventually stopped including 5.25″ drives in their machines.

Today, 3.5″ floppy drives are rarely found in new PCs thanks to more capacious CD-Rs, removable flash media (especially USB thumb drives), and nearly ubiquitous computer networking. However, that hasn’t stopped Windows XP from requiring @#^$ RAID drivers on a floppy disk when it’s being installed.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you still use 3.5″ floppy disks regularly? What for?

Red Wizard, your life force is running out.

I’m presently so sick that I’m about to keel over and mop the floor with my head, so you’ll have to provide your own commentary on this one. All I know is that the TRS-80 Model 100 is awesome, I have two of them, and I took one apart for PC World last year.

And look — Christmas theme!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever bought someone a computer for Christmas? Tell us about it.

Younger computer fans may not know this, but for almost twenty years (1980-1999), Apple, Inc. sold Apple-brand printers for use with its computers — a fact that’s easy for us to forget today, ten years since Apple shipped its last printer.

That being so, Macworld recently asked me to write an article about Apple’s long history in the printer business. I was happy to take the assignment, of course, and a few days ago, Macworld published the result, titled “Apple’s Five Most Important Printers.” I structured the article along the same lines as the popular Mac laptops piece I did back in September.

In the course of writing the article, I learned more than I thought I’d ever know about Apple printers, and I enjoyed the research process quite a bit. Of particular interest was Apple’s original LaserWriter (1985, seen above), a famous peripheral that holds a monumentally important place in computer history.

I also created a companion slideshow of various Apple printers for Macworld, which you can see here. I hope you enjoy it.

Computer shopping in the Fortress of Solitude.

In this ad for the SOROC IQ 120 and IQ 140 terminals, we see a woman who clearly wants to interface with something — but what? Very few peripherals understand the cryptic FAJI/NA protocol (Female Anatomical Jiggy Interface / Network Access). Even with the proper connector and hardware handshaking, those few who succeed in uploading might end up with a virus.

Oh, I get it…they’re talking about the terminals. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever regularly used a text-based terminal to get serious work done? Tell us about it.

If you liked the NES Action Set Family, then you’ll probably enjoy my latest Technologizer slideshow. It examines ten early-1980s computer magazine advertisements, all of which focus on a happy family gathered around the ‘ole family PC.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The snail was not amused.

Wow. $5,350 for a 10 megabyte hard drive system that’s almost as big as your computer. What a bargain! It’s like a tiny coffin for your data.

In case you’re taking notes, this Corvus hard disk system sold for $15,915.07 in 2009 US dollars. Its retail price constituted a whopping 53% of the average American’s yearly income in 1979 (about $10,121). Yes, in 1979, you could spend half of your annual salary on a single 10MB hard drive setup.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you owned a hard disk for your PC before 1985? Raise your hand.

Not many, and now you see why. Even as prices dropped, most hard disks were well out of the realm of affordability for most home PC users in the 1970s and 80s. Even at 1/5th the cost, this hard drive would have still been beyond the reach of most US households.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the size (data capacity) of your first computer hard drive?

Jason Scott is a singular fellow. He’s the man behind the BBS Documentary, the upcoming Get Lamp documentary (on text adventure games), and creator of textfiles.com. He also spearheaded a recent attempt to archive all of Geocities before Yahoo took it down recently.

This fellow historian, friend of VC&G, and archivist extraordinaire recently lost his long-time job as a system administrator. Like many who have found themselves unemployed recently, the situation inspired a little soul-searching from Scott, who realized his stressful years as a system administrator had worn down his health.

Something important dawned on him: he already spent so much of his spare time and money on his main passion — preserving and documenting computer history — why not try to do that full time?

That’s where the Jason Scott Sabbatical fund at Kickstarter.com comes in. Scott is seeking donations from people around to globe to fund a 3-4 month sabbatical wherein he can focus on his history and archiving work full time. So far, hundreds of people have chipped in (including myself), but he still needs more donations to push him over top of the hill.

I can honestly say there’s no one else out there like Jason Scott, and we will likely never see another single individual so fiercely (and I mean fiercely) dedicated to preserving the overlooked backwaters and forgotten alleys of our digital history. Scott’s goal is a worthy one, and he does monumentally important work that future historians will thank him for.

This sabbatical concept via Kickstarter is a somewhat radical idea, I know. Some of you will have doubts about it — for example, if he will spend the money properly. But I don’t fear that outcome: that’s for Jason Scott to sort out, and for his own conscience to live with.

If you contribute a modest amount, you have little to lose. If he blows the cash, so what? But if you contribute and Scott does what he promises to do, I predict that history will have a lot to gain — not only in terms of added, productive years on Jason Scott’s life, but in countless terabytes of priceless historical data that will serve as the foundation of our ancestors’ understanding of the past.

As a historian, I need Jason Scott to continue his work. As a human with a responsibility to the legacy of your species, you need Jason Scott to do his work. Please consider helping him out.

Thirty years ago this fall, Atari shipped its first entries in the personal computer market, the Atari 800 and 400 computers. I’m particularly fond of the Atari 8-bit series because I grew up with an 800 as my first computer and video game machine — it was especially potent and impressive in the pre-NES days.

Sadly, no publication I queried was interested in a full in-depth history of the computer (although I was poised to do one), so you’ll have to settle for my latest slideshow on PCWorld.com.

In “Inside the Atari 800,” I dissect my family’s beloved Atari 800 unit and explore what makes it tick. This article is the eighth entry in my “workbench series” of tech teardowns, and it might be my best. If nothing else, it sports my favorite self-designed introduction slide yet (seen above) — I should turn that into a poster.

By the way, PC World drastically improved its slide show system, so if you weren’t a fan of it in the past, check this one out. I think they’ve retrofitted all my old slide shows to the new system as well. (Even so, I’m not too happy they made my sharp photos look terrible with extreme JPG compression.)

So give it a look-over; I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to share your Atari 8-bit memories and well-wishes here. I’d love to know how many Atari 8-bit fans we have out there.

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Here are my previous teardowns, if you’re interested: Commodore 64, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, IBM Model M Keyboard, TRS-80 Model 100, and Macintosh Portable.

Amongst all the heady VC&G anniversary festivities (I’ve been to five parties this week alone*), I almost forgot to tell you about a new VC&G-related article that popped up last week on Technologizer. It’s by a guy named Benj Edwards, which probably explains why I’m writing about it here.

For my latest Technologizer article, Classic PCs vs. New PCs, I selected six vintage personal computers from yesteryear and figured out what you could buy today for the same price. And we’re not talking original retail price here; I took inflation into account.

For example, the Commodore 64 — once considered a low-cost home computer — originally sold for the equivalent of $1,331.62 in 2009 dollars. Today you can get quite a bit for that much money. How much? That’s what we’re going to find out.

* Five all-nude FORTRAN coding jamborees, invitational