A Slip of the Keyboard Read Free Page A

ago. It weighed in at about a pound, and came with its own built-in software, including the usual “electronic Filofax” yuppie bait of simple word processor, calculator, spreadsheet, and phone book. The word processor wasn’t too bad; I typed tens of thousands of words on it, admittedly not very fast. But it wasn’t perfect.
    Rule Number One is: Weight is important. Rule Two is: What else do you need to buy?
    Sir Clive Sinclair was able to sell the first sub-£99 computer by redefining what a computer was. It didn’t need a dedicated monitor, or internal mass storage of data or a standard communications port, or a keyboard fit for steady typing—not if you were prepared to hook it into the TV, store programs on a normal tape recorder, and type very slooowly and carefully. It didn’t need more than one kilobyte of memory. So it didn’t get it.
    Since then I’ve always been wary of machines that need extra bits before they start becoming more than a useful toy. The Portfolio needed an add-on module if you wanted to increase memory to something closer to an acceptable amount. It needed a comparatively large plug-in module before it could print, and another one if you wanted a serial port. Without them, everything stayed locked in.
    The theory was these bits stayed at home. But I do a lot of typing when I’m away from home for long periods, and you get very nervous if you can’t print out or dump stuff onto another machine.
    They also caused trouble at airport security. Security men could accept the basic machine, but the box full of mysterious plastic prolapses upset them. “Show us this working,” they said. “Certainly,” I said, “please get me an electrical outlet and a laser printer.”
    I found too many small, light machines that had the word “(optional)” in their descriptions. (Optional) means you’re going to have to pay to do what you want.…
    After two years of looking, I ended up with, and indeed am typing this on, the Olivetti Quaderno. It cost me almost £600 and must have been one of the first on sale last year (pioneers are penalized; my agent bought one a few months later and they threw in a free add-on disc drive, and now there’s been a sizeable further price cut amid reports of a new souped-up model). What it is, simply, is this: it’s the desktop PC I boughtin 1987, shrunk to A5 size, one inch thick and weighing a little over two pounds. I’ve never weighed the little power supply and battery charger—I’ve never really noticed it weighing anything very much. It certainly fits in my briefcase. I can lose it in my briefcase. But most importantly, it runs all my software, accumulated over years of trial and error.
    It runs memory-resident programs like Sidekick and the in-comparable Info Select. It runs WordPerfect 4.2 (the classic version). I don’t have to look at a screen like a letterbox, or be forced to use someone else’s idea of the “right” software. It’s got a twenty-megabyte hard disk, which means you can write a novel on it and have it all there, all in one go. There’s half of one on it now.
    People say: Yes, but what about the
keyboard
? Well, it’s better than any other similar-sized one I tried—Hewlett-Packard’s HP 95LZ, an otherwise interesting machine, practically had calculator buttons—and I can touch-type on it.
    People say: Ah, but can it run Windows? Not in any way that a committed Windows user would accept. Windows demands high-resolution screens and a 386 processor and a fair amount of RAM and a user who is on a salary so that they can pass away those lengthy office hours by fiddling with the colours or selecting super new icons. I don’t need that. And the Quad’s screen is murky—there’s no backlight, so lighting has to be reasonably good.
    But it’s real and it’s here now. It’s not a toy. I can carry around work in progress and my diary and the spreadsheet, all versions I’m familiar with and which gently move like a tide between the