NEC PC 8201A

I am amazed how close the layout is to the devterm by clockwork pi, the company is also on the frontpage right now. https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-devterm

These are great little machines. If considering acquiring on of these, be aware that the NEC PC-8201A has a somewhat different BASIC to the better known TRS-80 Model 100, for it, while sharing large portions of the ROM, being compatible to NEC's N85-BASIC.

You can read about these differences between the various siblings (NEC PC-8201A, TRS-80 Model 100, Olivetti M10, and Kyotronic 85) in this little project log here (2016): https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/01/ (It was to be a cross-platform version of Maze War in MS BASIC, but it eventually became just a dungeon crawler.)

Jamel Tayeb has a great page on these machines on his homepage, with lots of pictures and even videos: https://jameltayeb.com/2014/12/21/field-dream-machines/

I had one of these in high school, they were great little devices, very portable for it's time. The keyboard on it was really nice. I bought a barcode scanner and wrote software to help my mom manage our kitchen inventory, which she thought was very nice and never used.

Kept it into the early 2000s, the serial port was still very useful for connecting to network hardware and embedded systems.

I've been experimenting with the idea of fitting a very small low power SoC IoT jobber into the expansion port on the bottom, plugging it into the serial port, and getting this baby online. Termcap entry in this modern age is no longer packaged in any OS I am aware of but I was successful in digging one up somewhere. I've been able to log into and use several IoT devices which fit into the bay without an issue after importing the termcap entry. Only problem is packaging the thing properly and figuring out how to do it in an expansion pack which doesn't require modification of the computer.

Add a light and boom, the first laptop is also a fine cyberdeck for terminal hacking.

The I/O socket is interesting. It lists a 51.2KBps transfer rate on a machine with only 16KB of memory. Fast enough you could do some banked external memory shenanigans assuming you were careful to not swap the banks too often.

So to this day I have a project in the works where I recreate a device like this with a ESP32-S3 or similar as the CPU, so it can get excellent stand-by battery life while still having modern conveniences, specifically as a weird "typewriter" of sorts.

The sticking point I keep running into is finding a screen that works. Does anyone know of any wide LCD panels, ideally SPI based (QSPI would be ideal but I can make the framebuffer work with slower) in a similar form-factor to this PC? Wide, black and white would be fine but colour is also okay?

Ever since I used a Model 100 at a collector friend's house, I've wanted try my hand at making something in this form-factor with a Raspi Zero.

This was my "laptop" for a month when I was in Malaysia. Still have it, still works.

It’s pretty cool that you can just use a serial cable and a terminal program to sync up to a PC and doesn’t need anything proprietary. You could probably hook up something like an AirConsole to make it wireless.