Z88 - Vintage Sinclair

The Cambridge Z88 was launched in 1987 by Sir Clive Sinclair's new company, Cambridge Computers Limited. He lost the Sinclair name after he sold the rights to his Sinclair Research company to Alan Sugar's Amstrad in 1986.

It was a lightweight, A4-sized mini-laptop, with full sized keyboard and an LCD display. Functionaly, it was like a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) which became so popular in the 1990s with the likes of the Psion Organiser range.

It came with several built-in applications which ran from ROM :

Diary - an organiser for 'to-do' lists, schedules etc
Pipedream - a combined word processor, spreadsheet and database. A nice feature was the display of a mini-version of the document being edited on the right-hand side.
BASIC: a version of BBC Basic, minus the graphical and sound functions.
PrinterEd - For creating printer drivers
Terminal - VT-52 emulator

Also, several utility programs known as 'Popdowns':-

Calculator - performs calculations
Calendar - look up dates
Filer - File management tool
Panel - customise Z88 settings
Imp-Export - The file transfer utility
Clock - current time and date
Alarm - Set alarms and reminders
Indexer - Enter applications, popdowns, suspended activities and memory cards

Serial Port on the right-hand side.

Specification:
Power: 6V mains adaptor or 4 X AA batteries for 20 hours use
Dimensions: 294mm x 210mm x 23 mm
Keyboard: 64 key QWERTY keyboard
I/O: RS-232 serial port (9-way D-type)
Processor: Zilog Z80A 3.27 MHz
Memory: 32K RAM, 128K ROM
Expansion: 3 slots taking cards up to 1MBit each
Display:  64 × 640 pixel LCD (104 columns X 8 lines of text)

Photo shows thumbwheel to change the display contrast and a socket for the mains adapter.

Running the BASIC application.

The PipeDream word processor application.