This is my Panasonic Senior Partner a “luggable” portable MS-DOS computer from the mid-1980s.

All buttoned up like this, you might wonder if it’s some sort of old video camera case.

When you open it up and plug in the keyboard, it becomes apparent that this is actually a very old PC…A very old PC that works.

I found this Senior Partner in the Fall of 2011 at Village Thrift and it’s probably one of my proudest thrift store finds of the last 5 or so years.  It’s become an incredibly rare experience to find 1980s PC hardware at thrift stores and it blows my mind that this one is still in working order.

As PC hardware goes, this is almost as basic as it gets.  You have an 8088, a monochrome CRT monitor (with a DB-9 connector for color RGB on the back), a serial port, a parallel and two 5.25″ disk drives.  There’s no hard drive.  There’s no built-in clock.  This machine predates mice on the PC by several years (unless you used a serial mouse).  The only “luxury” is that this machine has is 512K RAM and a built in thermal printer hidden under a flap on the top of the computer.  I suspect the computer’s name derives from the fact that with a built-in printer this machine could be considered a portable office for mid-1980s businesspeople.

But, there’s no battery.  This is not a mobile machine.  It’s a machine you lugged from place to place where you had a place to sit it down and AC power available to plug into.

The keyboard doubles a a cover to enclose the monitor and floppy drives.

When you detach the keyboard you have to pull the retractable keyboard cable out it’s hiding place below the “Panasonic Sr. Partner” label to the left of the CRT and attach it to the connector that hides under a cap on the keyboard.

There are also little lifts you can pull out from the keyboard to place it at a comfortable angle.

As the name entails this was a machine its designers intended for business users.  The monochrome CRT is extremely crisp for word processing and spreadsheets.  When (before the paper ran out) I fired up an old copy of Print Shop the thermal printer gladly printed with no additional setup.

One could imagine some business travelers in a hotel room preparing for a meeting the next day huddled around the tiny green screen furiously printing curled up thermal printed documents…Almost.

Consider the fact that this thing is 35 pounds.  Imagine lugging that around an airport.  There’s a good reason why the luggable form factor that began with the Osbourne and the Kaypro luggables and continued with the famous Compaq Portable was a technological dead end.  The Senior Partner is even larger than the Macintosh despite that machine having a larger screen not actually being intended to be luggable.

The reason for this, as I understand it is that luggables were just normal PC components with all of their heft and hungry power consumption, wedged into an unorthodox case that happened to have a handle.   The engineering advances that needed to happen to make portable computers into “laptops” happened later in the PC realm (though certainly the Grid Compass and a few others were showing the way even when the Senior Partner was on store shelves).

As an antique though, this thing is fantastic.  The Senior Partner is a self-contained retro-computing party.

Easy to setup and quick to put away when you’re done.  When it goes back on the shelf you can easily stack stuff on it’s hard shell.

And simply as an object it looks fantastic.  Sure, it does not look (or act) like the glorious 80s vision of the future embodied in the brilliant Macintosh and Macintosh SE designs.  There’s no Snow White timelessness here.  But, what the Senior Partner does look like is the offspring between a Mission Control command console and an armored personnel carrier.  You have no doubt as to which floppy drive is which because there are huge thick drive letters printed beneath the drives.  The huge embossed “Panasonic” name looks like what you see on the back of a pick up truck.  This machine looks serious in a way that I just adore.

Nothing says retro quite like a brilliant glowing green CRT screen.

When you’re sitting with a machine like this you feel a closeness to technology that is unlike using a computer today.  When you use a modern computer you are swathed in warm colors and pictures designed to make you feel comfortable.  You can quickly switch between multiple programs or browser tabs.  There are a million things saying “use me”.

On a machine like the Senior Partner you basically have one thing in front you.  You have one program with a handful of options so it demands concentration, but the high contrast of the screen makes it easier to concentrate because only the program is glowing and all else is empty darkness.  This is the cyberspace equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber.

The closest thing I can compare that feeling to is using an e-Ink Kindle.

I suspect that this machine spent a lot of it’s life “buttoned up” and that accounts for what great shape it’s in today.  Despite being almost 30 years old it seems like a missing pad on the “bottom” side that faces downward then the machine is laying handle side up and a few scuffs are the only things wrong with it.  There was little opportunity for dust to get into the keyboard and the disk drives.  I also suspect that this machine may not have gotten that much use in general considering the lack of burn-in on the monitor.

As a retro-computing machine, it is not perfect.  For one thing I have no idea how to get inside of the machine, or if that is even a good idea.  On the one hand, generally if a machine has a CRT I don’t want to get inside of it.  On the other hand, I can’t find an obvious way to replace the printer paper and I wonder if they just intended you to open the case for that.  The back of the machine has what looks to be where an indication of an internal expansion slot, which would be more evidence that you are intended to be able to safely get inside of the machine.

Having only a monochrome screen, no hard drive, only 512K RAM, and no joystick port makes this less than ideal to play many old games or some of the more prominent software I’ve collected.  As you can imagine finding software for a PC with 512K RAM, no hard drive, and only 5.25″ floppies might be an issue.

However, I’ve had some good luck in this area.

When I first bought this machine I remembered that in my parent’s attic I had saved the 5.25″ floppies from an Epson 286 we had gotten as a hand-me-down from my aunt in Cleveland in 1995.  When we had discarded the Epson I had made sure to save the 5.25″ MS-DOS boot and installation disks as well as some educational programs, including the immortal classics The Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?.

This meant that when we brought the Senior Partner home from Village Thrift I had a working DOS startup disk and a few programs so I had the bare minimum needed to see the machine working.

Several months later I found this insane lot of 5.25″ PC games on ShopGoodwill.  I think I paid $16.25 for this lot including ShopGoodwill’s usually exorbitant shipping cost.  What I received is a treasury of late 80s/early 90s PC games.

Here are just a few of the games in that box.

Many of these games require hard disk installation but several, like Ultima I (which we saw running on the Senior Partner in the Commodore 1084 post) and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are perfectly at home running on an early floppy-only PC.  It turns out that many games from the late 1980s basically assumed a PC with 384K-512K RAM so they run just fine on the Senior Partner.

Finally, last year my uncle gave me his old PC and the Commodore monitor I mentioned previously.  Along with that was his box of 5.25″ disks that went with the PC.

The best thing in the box was a disk labeled IBM DOS 3.2.

The Epson MS-DOS 3.30 disk I had been using was fine for booting the machine but because it was only indented as a minimal OS to be used to install the other disks it was missing several important utilities like CHKDSK.  With my uncle’s DOS 3.2 disk I could finally confirm how much memory the machine had.

There was also a disk labeled Lotus 1-2-3, which I had badly wanted to see running on a vintage machine.

There was a time when this screen was a common as the Google homepage to computer users.

Using this machine also taught me a lot about MS-DOS.  Today DOS is remembered as a difficult monster of an OS; cold to use and brutal to configure.  Some of that is true.  Some of that was Apple advertising crud.  But I think a lot of that image of MS-DOS came from the time after about 1988 until the release of Windows 95 (and even a little after) when so many odd tricks had to be crammed into DOS so that it could use more than 640K memory and use new hardware like sound cards that were not supported without strange autoexec.cfg and config.sys changes.  The nonsense you had to go through to use the hardware in your PC had was truly insulting.

However, in the earlier period the Senior Partner belongs to DOS seems almost tame.  You change directories.  You list the files in a directory.  You run a program.  You change drives.  You format a disk.  It almost seems quaint compared to the ordeals that people had using DOS later.  DOS was clearly meant for a machine like the Senior Partner; this was its heyday.   After that point it slowly turned into a curmudgeonly antique.

I remember reading DOS for Dummies and seeing all of these commands the author basically told you you shouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.  I wondered what had happened for these commands to have been put into the OS and never taken out in the intervening years.  These were things for configuring serial ports and display modes that made made sense on machines like the Senior Partner in the 1980s but were increasingly less relevant as time wore on.  The large group of people who first encountered PCs in the early 90s ran headfirst into this confusing period where DOS was a geological dig of successive eras stacked on top of each other.

To use a machine as old as the Senior Partner seems quaint not just because of it’s age but because it’s so old that DOS actually makes sense.