Sounds like my original IBM Portable which would have sold for about £1000 thirty years ago. Heavy but neat machine which had a detachable thermal printer. Two floppy drives, no hard drive, small amount of RAM that programs could be loaded into. No battery, huge 12V transformer. I think I was still using it ten years later, despite difficulty getting priter ribbons and paper. Converted to Apple with the gift of my brother's old IIe machine, which I seem to remember just had 40Mb hard drive. I used to program ICL System 4 and later 2900 range mainframe machines. "Tight" coding was essential then because of the exorbitant cost of storage. As costs came down, ways of organising storage changed. When I transferred Word Perfect files from my old Apple machine to MS Word files for the the next computer (a beige G3) about 2000, I was horrified to see my files expand from 2Kb to as much as 40Kb each - but the 4GB hard drive still wasn't full five years after. Ross
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