The Baby! 1 is a transportable microcomputer released by STM Systems Inc. of

Mont Vernon, New Hampshire Mont Vernon is a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 2,584 at the 2020 census, up from 2,409 at the 2010 census. Spelling It is not clear why the name of the community is spelled differently from the ...

, in late 1976. The computer was based on the

MOS Technology 6502 The MOS Technology 6502 (typically pronounced "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two") William Mensch and the moderator both pronounce the 6502 microprocessor as ''"sixty-five-oh-two"''. is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit microprocessor that was desi ...

microprocessor and came in a small enclosure that fit inside an attaché briefcase that came shipped with the computer. ''

Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

'' magazine in 1985 called it the first portable microcomputer, although it more closely resembled the

home computer Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a s ...

s of the 1980s such as the

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in ...

than early laptops like the

Grid Compass The Grid Compass is a family of laptop computers introduced in 1982 by the Grid Systems Corporation. The design for the Compass was rendered by Bill Moggridge. Owing to its clamshell design—the first in a portable computer—some historians ...

Development and specifications

The Baby! 1 was announced in August 1976 by start-up company STM Systems Inc. of

. A

single-board computer A single-board computer (SBC) is a complete computer built on a single circuit board, with microprocessor(s), memory, input/output (I/O) and other features required of a functional computer. Single-board computers are commonly made as demonst ...

, the Baby! 1 is based on the

microprocessor and features between 2 KB to 4 KB of

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and a

machine code monitor A machine code monitor ( machine language monitor) is software that allows a user to enter commands to view and change memory address, memory locations on a computer, with options to load and save memory contents from/to secondary storage. Some f ...

ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...

. The computer's acrylic case houses the mainboard, keyboard, and

power supply unit A power supply unit (PSU) converts mains AC to low-voltage regulated DC power for the internal components of a desktop computer. Modern personal computers universally use switched-mode power supplies. Some power supplies have a manual switch f ...

and measures while weighing approximately 10 pounds. Its built-in keyboard features 62 full-sized keys. The Baby! 1 came shipped in an attaché briefcase for carrying the computer. The computer's power supply feeds the Baby! 1 5 volts and up to 3 amps DC, rectified from a fully regulated 110 volt AC input. The computer was sold fully assembled, with no kit version available. A 1200-baud cassette interface chip is included on board to allow audiocasettes to be used as data storage with the use of an external portable cassette deck, sold separately. The computer's

character generator A character generator, often abbreviated as CG, is a device or software that produces static or animated text (such as news crawls and credits rolls) for keying into a video stream. Modern character generators are computer-based, and they can ...

chip meanwhile is capable of displaying the uppercase and lowercase Latin alphabet, the uppercase and lowercase Greek alphabet, numbers, and various symbols. Each character is composed of a 7 by 9 pixel grid; the video chip is capable of displaying 512 total characters on screen, as 16 lines of 32 characters. While the computer was initially not sold with a monitor, a portable 9-inch black-and-white

CRT CRT or Crt most commonly refers to: * Cathode-ray tube, a display * Critical race theory, an academic framework of analysis CRT may also refer to: Law * Charitable remainder trust, United States * Civil Resolution Tribunal, Canada * Columbia ...

television manufactured by

Panasonic is a Japanese multinational electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Kadoma, Japan. It was founded in 1918 as in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Fukushima by Kōnosuke Matsushita. The company was incorporated in 1935 and renamed and c ...

was later included as a top-of-the-line option. An external 5.25-inch

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

drive unit for the Baby! 1 was announced at the

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Personal Computing expo of 1976 but discontinued on account of cost. It was to retail for $350, STM apparently taking a $40 loss from the average price of a 5.25-inch floppy drive, though it may have been intended to be a

loss leader A loss leader (also leader) is a pricing strategy where a product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services. With this sales promotion/marketing strategy, a "leader" is any popular artic ...

to encourage more sales of the Baby! 1. The Baby! 1 itself sold for $850 to $1000 in August 1976, depending on if the customer purchased the 2-KB or 4-KB variant. STM promised the same drive again in November 1976, but development was pushed all the way back to July 1977, and it was probably never released. The drive would have been a Shugart model. Included operating systems and programs for the computer were

Tiny BASIC Tiny BASIC is a family of dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer KBs of memory. Tiny BASIC was designed by Dennis Allison and the People's Computer Company (PCC) in response to the open letter published by Bi ...

and TECO.

Legacy

'' magazine called the computer "an excellent teaching system for software concepts in secondary schools and colleges, and looks like an excellent system for personal use". Indeed, the computer was used in at least one elementary school. T. D. Towers, in his ''International Microprocessor Selector'' book, classified the Baby! 1 as a microprocessor trainer platform and as a software development system. In 1985 ''Byte'' called the Baby! 1 the first portable microcomputer. Although they acknowledged the

IBM 5100 The IBM 5100 Portable Computer is one of the first portable computers, introduced in September 1975, six years before the IBM Personal Computer, and eight before the first successful IBM compatible portable computer, the Compaq Portable. It wa ...

from 1975 before it, they referred to the latter as the "first briefcase-sized computer". Former ''Byte'' journalist Michael Nadeau said that it had more in common with the

s of the 1980s such as the

, than early laptops like the

. Regardless, he called the Baby! 1 "unusually small and light" for the time and deemed it a "significant system" that "push dthe size envelope".

Citations

References

* * * * * * * * {{refend Computer-related introductions in 1976 Early laptops Early microcomputers 65xx-based computers