Epson PX8 Laptop with a CP/M OS and a Tape drive — when Laptops were fun

I will not be terribly wrong if I say that most laptops nowadays look the same. But it was not the case at the very beginning of the era of portable computers. Let's take a look at the Epson PX8 — a laptop with three microprocessors, RAM disk, microcassette tape drive and a full-fledged OS CP/M, released in 1984:

My review, as usual, is based on using a real device, which I bought on my own on a local web market for about 100$. As I mentioned in previous articles, any specs can be easily found online, but only having a real thing can give you a true feeling of how it really works — is it comfortable, easy to carry, how good is the keyboard and so on. A “professional” copywriter can write about everything without touching the real hardware, from the ISS to the Hadron Collider, but in my opinion, it is just not professional, and I prefer doing it the right way. Also just because it’s fun.

Let’s get started.

Hardware

Let’s say, you are the hardware engineer at the beginning of the 80s, at a time when a portable computer was looking something like this: