When thinking of home computers and their portable kin it’s easy to assume that all of them provided BASIC as their interpreter, but for a while APL also played a role. The most quaint APL portable system here might be the Ampere WS-1, called the BIG.APL. Released in Japan in November of 1985, it was a very modern Motorola M68000-based portable with fascinating styling and many expansion options. Yet amidst an onslaught of BASIC-based microcomputers and IBM’s slow retreat out of the APL-based luggables market with its IBM 5110, an APL-only portable in 1985 was a daring choice.
Rather than offering both APL and BASIC as IBM’s offerings had, the WS-1 offered only APL, with a custom operating system (called Big.DOS) which also provided a limited a form of multi-tasking involving a back- and foreground task. Running off rechargeable NiCd batteries it could power the system for eight hours, including the 25 x 80 character LCD screen and the built-in microcassette storage.
Although never released in the US, it was sold in Japan, Australia and the UK, as can be seen from the advertisements on the above linked Computer Ads from the Past article. Clearly the WS-1 never made that much of a splash, but its manufacturer seems to be still around today, which implies that it wasn’t a total bust. You also got to admit that the design is very unique, which is one of the reasons why this system has become a collector’s item today.
“APL (named after the book A Programming Language)[3] is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
IBM provided a special Selectric ball with APL’s symbol set.
APL is a very “dense” language. Here is Conway’s Game of Life in APL:
lfe:((2×+⌿⊃¯1 0 1⊖¨+⌿¯1 0 1⌽¨⊂⍵)-⍵)∊5 6 7
8h battery life?! That was probably the best laptop battery life until Apple switched away from Intel!
Nope: the Z88 from Cambridge Computers offered 24 hours working and up to a year in standby with just four AA batteries. In 1988.
To be fair that “year of standby” is due to a lithium coin cell, just like the Amstrad NC100 which came a bit later. And they get ridiculous life out of AA’s, mostly because there’s no backlight and the system spends most of it’s time halted.
Never available in the US? Huh. I remember receiving a flyer and an order form for the WS-1 but I never could come up with the necessary funds.
It may have been grey market. Items that were not intended for the American market, but were imported here anyway.
Not really grey market, that implies there was an “official supplier” in the region. Instead, these importers were the primary supply chain.
A retro-computing poem from that age:
There are three things a man must do,
Before their life is done.
Write two lines in APL,
And make the buggers run.
A fun computer. It had an optional external floppy drive.
My Ampere, and also the only other I’ve seen, is suffering from having a very very dim LCD screen.