Strangest Computer Designs of the '80s

OMG Mr. LGR!!! You made my day showing the Seiko computer watch series. I collect these things and Have almost  the entire lineup up including the weird UC-2200. The only one I'm missing is the "wrist mac" which was essentially a Seiko RC4400 but marketed and sold for Apple. It could be considered the first apple watch!

That design for the Elwro-800 actually seems pretty good and I wish I had it for the C64 back in the day. That wire holder could have been used for holding a computer magazine with a user made program which they always had in the magazines back in the day. Even now it would be good for data input from a written copy, or even writers who like to get their pre-writing done on paper.

They were the machines we were taught Turing language on -- and compiling even a tiny Turing program on them was unbelievably slow.  I really liked the GUI on them though, but we never really used the GUI much; all the programming we did was in a text file run through a compiler from the QNX shell.  The ADAM did enjoy some success around here, I knew a few people who were real enthusiasts for them. In the 90s, there were those who had upgraded them using 2400 baud modems and hard disk drives and actually ran BBSes on them.

The 1980s. The decade of the microcomputer explosion. As somewhat unique for the time, there were countless standout machines designed to snatch up every morsel of this new market. So, let’s take a look at a bunch of computers that stand out for their weirdness, in regards to overall look, usability and specifications alike. Starting with the Holborn 9100. 

Introduced in 1981 in the Netherlands, the Holborn 9000 series of computers have some of the most unique case designs around, with its monochrome monitor protruding from the top of the keyboard case like an alien head.

Several models also featured a proprietary multi-user Holborn operating system that could be navigated by touching a light pen to the screen, as well as housing its processor, RAM, and multiple 8-inch floppy drives in a massive box in a convenient size of a small refrigerator. 

The ACT Apricot Portable. and still looks sleek and stylish today, but it was host to a number of standout features in 1984. The detachable, slim line keyboard connected wirelessly, its screen was the first 80-column, 25-line LCD of its type on a portable, from Sony for removable storage. And to top it off, there was a built-in microphone with speech recognition software allowing users to input and output information using a vocabulary of up to 4,096 words.

Applied Technologies Computer-In-A-Book From the company most famous for the MicroBee computer systems in Australia, Except for the whole book part. Sort of. This was actually just a MicroBee 64 from 1983, Volume 2 would give you a secondary drive, and so on – up to four different volumes. resulting in the power supply overheating and killing it. The Coleco ADAM. they infamously dipped their toes in microcomputer waters in 1983 with the ADAM. But it was plagued with problems.

Such as, unless the printer was plugged in, the ADAM wouldn’t start, since the computers power supply was contained inside it. would be wiped clean every time you turned it on due to an electromagnetic surge generated. 

The ADAM ended up costing Coleco tens of millions of dollars and they stopped making computers soon after. The Unisys ICON. Originally designed by the Canadian Educational Microprocessor Corporation, the ICON was a workstation introduced in 1983. Since they didn’t feature any local storage, up to 20 ICONs could address a central 10 MB server known as the Lexicon.

This allowed teachers and classrooms to share lessons and communicate with each other by running the Unix-like QNX operating system it contained. The ICON also had the ability to run a graphical user interface on top of QNX, known as ICONLook, which gave its huge built-in trackball and keyboard something useful to do. The Seiko UC-2000.

In 1984, the term smart watch was nowhere to be found, This stylish beast featured a 4-by-10 block dot matrix-style LCD display and stored two whole kilobytes of data, typed in using a QWERTY keyboard attachment. 

And for more serious computing power, you could attach it to the UC-2200 Docking Station, providing a thermal printer, 4K of RAM, and a 26K ROM via a plug-in Microsoft BASIC ROM pack. And you could even play games and plug it into your desktop computer when you were done!

The Micro writer. This one isn’t exactly a computer, but it’s kind of close, co-designed by author and director Cy Enfield. This housed an 8-bit CPU, 16K of RAM, a liquid crystal display, built-in software and had a keyboard with only six keys. 

But with the correct combination of key presses, it was possible to enter every letter of the alphabet along with numerals and punctuation marks using only your right hand. You could even plug in a monitor,  communicate with networks with an acoustic modem, and attach a data set to it to save your work.

The IBM PCjr. Probably the most well-known computer on this list, but the IBM PCjr, nevertheless, is one strange little thing worth mentioning. Not only because it proved to be one of IBMs biggest flops, requiring users to install sidecars to the... side... for anything from RAM to parallel ports, extending the computer horizontally, to infinity and beyond.

The Access Computer. Released in 1982 and re-released as the Actrix DS in 83, with a single portable computer. Its all-in-one design crammed a Zilog Z80 processor, an optional Intel 8088, 20MB hard disk, 256K RAM, dual 5¼-inch floppy drives, detachable keyboard, 9-inch monochrome monitor, Fully decked out, this weighed about 40 pounds, It didn’t matter. 

Nobody wanted it! And finally, the Elwro 800. Released in 1986 by order of the Polish Ministry of Education, the Elwro 800 series of computers were meant to be cheap Sinclair ZX Spectrum compatibles appropriate for use in Poland’s schools. You see that wire on top of the case?

That’s because this was originally a toy piano, and that wire was meant to be folded upward to hold sheet music. And that’s all for this episode and if you enjoyed it, then thanks!

Perhaps you’d like to see some of my others. I’ve talked about some super-strange computers from the 90s and 2000s as well, and you can click those here, or stay tuned. There’s new videos every Monday and Friday here on LGR. And as always, thank you very much for watching.

Strangest Computer Designs of the '70s