Sharp Computers


Sharp PC-1211 - 1980

Sharp also produced some hand-held computers such as the 1211. These were not calculators as they came with BASIC internally making programming so much easier. Released in 1980, this was actually a 4 bit computer though had two processors sharing the load. It came with a tiny qwerty keyboard and an LCD screen of 24 characters which scrolled across a full 80 characters in total. It came with 26 fixed variable locations (A-Z) and another 1,920 bytes of memory of which some could be used for more variable space. It had a very simple BASIC which ran very slowly. Also available was a CE-121 cassette interface or the CE-122 printer/cassette interface. The printer was a tiny dot matrix printing onto paper the size of a till roll. The processors were very odd. Each did one half of the required job (one read data in, one displayed data out and so on). The likelihood as this might have speeded things up a bit but also the amount of ROM available to one processor was not enough to do the whole job.

These were lovely little computers, also sold as the Tandy TRS-80 Pocket Computer.