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Epson PX-8 Geneva |
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COMMENTS This is the HX-20's bigger brother. Bigger in screen, features, memory, accessories, and operating system. While the 20 had a proprietary operating system, the PX-8 utilized standard CP/M which was in a ROM chip making for pretty snappy loading. The PX-8 also had applications which loaded from ROM's, including Wordstar, a decent BASIC, telecom program, and Supercalc, and even dBase II. |
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| Are you seeing double? No. Actually, the PX-8 was a bit of a odd bird in that it actually came out in 3 versions, the Geneva and the PX-8 and one without either on the lower right facia around the screen. What's the difference between the 3? If I've heard correctly, the Geneva was the European version and the PX-8 was the U. S. version. Who knows with the blank one! Internally, they are exactly the same. |
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The PX-8 also incorporated power saving features such as automatic power
down after a given time of inactivity, the operating system in ROM giving
the PX-8 decent battery life of 8 hours or better before a recharge was
required. Not bad for a laptop which came out in the mid '80's. The weakest part of the whole system was the 3.5" drives which
were prone to dying due to CMOS technology sustaining a shock. The
5.25" floppies weren't the best in the world utilizing a serial interface
which really slowed transfer rates down.
The PX-8 also had a bigger brother, the PX(HC)-16 which upped the line count to 16 and also added a standard parallel port. It was also DOS compatible. This was sold primarily in Europe. It incorporates many of the power saving techniques developed with the PX-8 and the HX-20, and of course the HX(C)-40. |
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