This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the Epson  PX 8 / HC-88 / Geneva computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message! For other purposes like sales messages, hardware & software questions or information requests, please use our main forum.

Back about the time these were coming off sale, I found a shop in London that was remaindering them very cheaply. I bought one and took it into the Government Department for which I then worked. Jealous eyes, then a very senior person had a word with the Clerk of Stationery, and a cab was dispatched to clear out the shop. They lasted in intensive Government use for quite a number of years, only finally being overtaken by much more modern laptops. They were light and the battery would last all day. And there was a very portable printer $ battery again$ that went with them.
The later snag was that they were CPM, whereas the desktop machinery was MSDOS by then, so transferring texts across was a bit of a fag $though it could be done$.
I later used mine to calculate race results at a dinghy sailing club, though it was a bit slow for real-time work of that kind.

The Epson PX-8 was actually quite impressive. Besides running for up to three hours on it's batteries (with the battery backpack), it could also play and record minicassettes, in data or voice mode.

The cartridges were actually more akin to ROM chips. You had to open the bottom of the case, and swap them out. It also featured a RAM drive with it's RAM, and you could access the data minicassette like a regular disk (albeit slower) through the on-board CP/M.

All in all, pretty nice machines, and light too. I still own mine, and it runs beautifully save for the dead batteries.

Hi Geoquip, did you list that PX-8 and PF-10, I didn''t see them?

We are about to put a fully boxed Epson PX-8 with maual and reference book, PF-10 disk drive and English Wordstar software onto ebay.co.uk if anyone is interested?

Some years back, I bought one of these machines on ebay. Since it came without a manual I sent an email to Epson asking for information. Some days later I received a bunch of copied papers in the post. Somebody at Epson had hard copied the complete manual for me. That's some service for a machine that had been out of production for 20 years.
The keyboard was btw the best of any machine I've ever worked with. What a shame that the wordprocessor ROM was missing in my PX 8...

Hello

Communication between PX8 and a simple laptop (1990) by RS232 with program filink and filecom is ok.
Comminication between a modern computer Pent. or 486 with the same equipment en cables do not succeed.

What can be wrong??
I use a nulmodem cable
Can somebody give me any advise.

Jos

I purchased one of these (very cheap I might add) in London, England. It had a French Keyboard (HZERTY) and French Wordstar. I change the keyboard code in the BIOS back to English (QWERTY) and then the keycaps were wrong. I obtained an owner's manual for an English machine. There was a photograph of the keyboard and I blew it up on a xerox machine. I cut out all the pictures of the individual keys and then glued them onto the keyboard and sealed them with clear fingernail polish. It works (and looks) good to this day. The best thing about this machine is that it is "instant on." The CP/M and the Wordstar are in ROM chips so it boot as fast as a calculator. The worst thing about it is that it is slow as a mollasses. I think the clockspeed is 2 or something. Now we have clock speeds of 3400.