The Epson PX-8 was a small laptop computer released in 1984. It was also known as Geneva. It was moderately successful after price drops in the USA, and competed against the likes of the TRS-80 Model 100.

It had a Z-80 compatible microprocessor, and ran a customised version of the CP/M-80 operating system as well as various applications from a pair of ROM cartridge slots. For file storage, it had a micro cassette drive.

The PX-8 did not have any internal disk drive, instead allowing either memory to be partitioned into application memory and a RAM disk, or an external 64 KB or 128 KB RAM disk module to be attached (as our model has). The RAM disk module also had a backup battery for the RAM disk and an additional ROM (64 KB version only) cartridge slot.

The PX-8 had an 80 column by 8 line LCD display, which was monochromatic and non-backlit. It used an internal nickel-cadmium battery, and had a battery life in the range of 6-8 hours when using word-processing software.

Small ROM modules can be installed in the bottom of the unit which can including Wordstar, Supercalc, dBase II, and others. These ROM appear as drives to the operating system, and are accessed as such.

The system also included a Epson P80-X Portable Printer:

Thermal Transfer Printing
Unidirectional (Left to Right)
2 lines per second (at 1/6 inch/line
96 Roman Characters
96 Italic characters
32 Graphics characters
8 international character sets
Line spacing: 1/6 inch (default). 1/8 inch programmable

All combined in a Samsonite hard case. The system was put together by Telsoft Ltd, a British company which was primarily established for the Financial Planning markets and was marketed as a Portable Profit Centre which had software pre-loaded.

We are extremely grateful to Michael Houghton for his kind donation.

Manufacturer: Telsoft Epson
Date: 1984

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH32123. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.

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