Eagle PCs and Portables

Eagle was one of the first manufacturers of IBM PC clones.  The Eagle PC was introduced in 1982.  It had enhanced 752 x 352 graphics compared to the IBM PC's 640 x 200 resolution, and it was quieter because it did not need a cooling fan.  The PC 2 followed, but the screen resolution was downgraded to match that of the IBM PC.

The layout of the Eagle PCs was the same as an IBM PC; a main box that was wider and deeper than it was high, with the drives in front.  You set the monitor on top of the box, and the keyboard in front.  (There was no mouse, and wouldn't be until PCs developed sufficient memory for CAD programs.  Even then, they wouldn't become standard parts until Microsoft copied Apple's Macintosh operating system and called it Windows.)

Eagle PCs were quieter and lighter than IBM PCs.  The monitors were lighter, too.  And the height of the main box was only half that of a contemporary IBM PC; the disk drives were next to each other, instead of being stacked on top of each other.  This would have put the disk drives behind the keyboard where they'd be hard to reach, except that Eagle raised the main box up with a built-in keyboard shelf.  The keyboard shelf raised the drives above the keyboard, and when you weren't using the keyboard, you could shove it into the shelf and have desk space in front of the machine for writing.  The Eagle Turbo came out after the PC 2.

The Eagle Spirit was the company's portable offering.  It had two half-height floppy-disk drives, or one half-height floppy-disk drive and a half-height 10-Mb hard disk.

Note that when I say "portable", I don't mean a laptop!  LCDs were hard to make and expensive back then.  The few laptops that existed had very small screens, with only a few lines in the screen instead of the standard 24 lines; or, in a few cases, there were 24 lines but they were compressed vertically to make a screen that was much shorter from top to bottom, in proportion to its width, than was usual on a CRT — 24 lines in the space of 8.

Eagle didn't try to make a laptop.  The Eagle Spirit was a portable by the original milspec definition of the phrase; it weighed less than 50 pounds, and it had a handle.  Like most portables of the time, the Spirit came in a single box with a carrying handle on the rear and a screen built into the front, next to the drives.  The keyboard locked or snapped into place when the portable was being carried, to protect the screen and the drives.  This was the standard configuration for a portable, established by Osborne and Kaypro, the first computers designed to be carried from place to place.  Some portables had their handles on the side rather than the back (TeleVideo, for instance), and some didn't use the keyboard for a lid (the portable TRS-80 had a built-in keyboard shelf like the Eagle PC, and you slid the keyboard into it before closing a separate lid), but the Eagle PC used a standard portable configuration.

Some people these days call portables "transportables" or "luggables."  This is revisionist history.  Laptops only began being called portables when they replaced portables.  A "luggable" was a machine light enough to be carried around, but not designed for it; all the CP/M Eagles were "luggables".

Spellbinder Word Processor was renamed Eaglewriter on the Eagle PCs, and the spreadsheet program was called Eaglecalc.  No actual changes were made to either program.  Lexisoft came out with Spellbinder Desktop Publisher for PCs, and it ran well on Eagle PCs.  Ltek, the company that later bought the right to both Spellbinder products when Lexisoft went out of business, demonstrated Spellbinder Desktop Publisher at a meeting of the Eagle Computer Users Group.

There are some pictures of the Eagle PC and the Eagle Spirit on the Old Computers web site, but take the text with a bowl of salt, as it talks about "AVI" instead of "AVL", thinks Spellbinder and UltraCalc were called Eaglewriter and Eaglecalc on the CP/M models, refers to "luggables" and "transportables" and "cribbed" BIOSes, and so forth.

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