Experiments with the 1983 WorkSlate from Convergent - a handheld spreadsheet appliance

Convergent’s WorkSlate (seen previously in The Liberator from Thorn EMI (or, what Dragon did next) is thoroughly explored explained and extended in this article:

we’ll examine the hardware, wire into its peripheral bus, figure out how to exchange data with today’s future, create a simple game, draw rudimentary graphics and (with some help) even put it on the Internet with its very own Gopher client — after we tell of the WorkSlate’s brief and sorrowful commercial existence, as this blog always must.

(Another thread mentioning the WorkSlate here:
VideoBrain Family Computer - runs APL! On an F8!
)

via dragonfly digest

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The closest experience to the Convergent WorkState I experienced was briefly looking at PipeDream on my sister’s Z88. :smile:

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The article at Old Vintage Computing Research is a great review – thanks for the link!

A few remarks:

  • I had no idea of the variety in Convergent systems! (The MegaFrame in its Four-Phase Systems variant was mentioned on the forum in a few threads, though.)

  • Only nitpick: The history of the Kyocera portable is, I think, a bit backwards.
    (It seems, the system was licensed to NEC, which brought it to the Japanese market as the NEC PC-8201 [without an “A”, which designates the second, international version], and NEC seems to have relicensed this to third parties, like Olivetti. At least, this is what I found described in some contemporary magazine articles, which, of course, could have been also wrong. There seems to be common ROM source behind the various variants, with NEC dressing it up more like it’s NU BASIC, while the Tandy version is probably closest to true MS BASIC. Kyocera’s own Kyotronic 85 seems to have come last, as it resembles both in hardware and ROM a stripped-down Model 100. But there is no definite source on these events.)

  • What a pity that nothing came of project “Ultra” – this may have been the most fscinating portable/handheld of the 1980s!

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