The Sharp PC-3000 was a palmtop computer introduced in 1991. The "SPC" was designed and developed by

Distributed Information Processing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

Research Ltd. ("DIP") in the UK. DIP had earlier designed the Atari Portfolio and the two machines shared many design features and ran the same

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

clone called

DIP DOS The Atari Portfolio (Atari PC Folio) is an IBM PC-compatible palmtop PC, released by Atari Corporation in June 1989. This makes it the world's first palmtop computer.

Features

As with desktop IBM PCs, this one-pound device's screen displayed 80-column 25 lines.

Peripherals

The machine was one of the first to support the PC card interface, at the time known as PCMCIA. Printers, floppy drives, dial-up modems, Fax modems were among the supported peripheral devices.

System software

Choice were MS-DOS 3.3 and Microsoft Windows 3.0 (running in

real mode Real mode, also called real address mode, is an operating mode of all x86-compatible CPUs. The mode gets its name from the fact that addresses in real mode always correspond to real locations in memory. Real mode is characterized by a 20-bit seg ...

with a mouse).

Application software

The machine came with a suite of built in application providing a simple word processor, calculator and 1-2-3 compatible spreadsheet. With some tweaking, it was also possible to run WordPerfect, Windows Word and Windows Excel.

Sharp PC-3100

A 2 MB model was produced: the 3100.

Notes and references