Ah, the bad old days when camera strobes and fantasy weapons still needed a power cord to an external power pack...

You know I disagree gives the gear a level of worth and complexity.

Ha. Try carrying it around for a year or two, you'll change your mind.

I mean we all carry around small computers shaped like rectangles now before that beepers where the hot tech to have.

That's meaningless. I carried a pager in 1977. You're talking about tech that weighs ounces. I carried around a flash power unit (or sometimes a reel-to-reel video recorder, depending on the assignment) weighing eight to fifteen pounds.

Ennn sounds like my laptop I had in high school.

My first laptop was an HP 'transportable' type (it had a luggage handle on the top). It ran MS-DOS from one 5¼" floppy disk and used another for data. The front panel flipped out to use as a keyboard (with a coiled cord). I think it's still down cellar somewhere.

Well with risk of things going down around Taiwan you might need that old tech.

I used one of those (made by Compaq) in the early '90s at work, it was mounted on a custom cart that also contained a dot-matrix printer and a CP/M box that performed sequential testing on telephone lines in the central office, as part of an effort to sync cable records (working, vacant, defective) with reality.

I found one of these contraptions in a disused storeroom late last year when I transferred to a different office.

We may have to redefine 'antique', at least for computer equipment.

It's kind of astonishing how bad battery technology remained, for so very long. They invented the nicad near the end of the 19th century, and the nimh near the end of the 20th. And it's not like there weren't applications for something, anything better...