In Pictures: Pocket marvels - 40 years of handheld computers

From the first pocket scientific calculator through '80s organisers to today's tablets, check out 15 ingenious devices that have driven the handheld computing revolution.

1980: Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Pocket Computer

In a pre-BlackBerry moment of genius, Tandy added a QWERTY keyboard to a calculator, allowed for bolt-on storage, and provided a fully programmable computer that could be held in a hand and stored in a pocket -- albeit a large hand and a large pocket. And in a pre-Windows moment of genius, the company immediately dated the device by naming it for the year it was introduced.

The $250 TRS-80 Pocket Computer (PC1) featured a 24-character LCD display, built-in BASIC programming, and ports for dot-matrix printing onto a reel of receipt tape and saving your BASIC programs and data to external storage (your cassette recorder).

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