HHC-4

.jpg Image of the HHC-4 (32K, courtesy Bo Zimmerman)

Monochrome .gif Image of the HHC-4 (106K, original picture courtesy David Vohs)
Monochrome .jpg Image of the HHC-4 (38K, original picture courtesy David Vohs -- identical image)

aka Hand-Held Computer
Introduced January 1983
Hardware Derived from the Toshiba Pasopia Mini IHC-8000. 24 columns x 1 row LCD display (not dot-addressible); 4K RAM (max 16K); 20K ROM; 64-key Chiclet keyboard with numeric keypad; custom "two-chip" Toshiba split CPU.
Graphics and Sound Text only. A vapourware expander peripheral allowed connection to a monitor with unknown capabilities.
Eventual Fate Scrapped prototype.

Comments
Ha! I beat Jim Brain's Canonical List to this little number. >:-) Thanks to David Vohs for originally reporting this unit.

The HHC-4 is a Commodore rebadge of the Toshiba Pasopia Mini IHC-8000, Toshiba's only handheld computer and first true portable, initially released in 1982 (thanks Scott Jones for spotting this unit originally). Commodore obtained a license and rebadged it for CES 1983 with its own version of the IHC-500 docking station, which provided serial, parallel and video expansion connectors, plus a thermal printer and cassette interface. It has exactly the same specifications as the IHC-8000 (4K RAM, 20K ROM) and uses the same peripherals, including a 12K RAM card to expand it to 16K.

The IHC-8000 provided a relatively weak BASIC, even for pocket computers, and it had nothing in common with BASIC 2.0. The internal architecture wasn't even 6502-based and was likely Toshiba-custom. Although the product was extant and shipping, previews of the HHC-4 were dismissive, Transactor in particular calling out the slow BASIC and poor scrolling as an unfinished "half product." It was expected that the internals of the machine would have to be completely overhauled, both software and potentially hardware, and the expected price point (somewhere between $100 and $200) would likely not have recouped the investment. For Toshiba's part, while the Pasopia Mini and dock were actually available for sale in Japan, they didn't sell well there either, and Toshiba ended up cancelling it around a year later.

A much better choice for the HHC-4 might have been Matsushita's Panasonic HHC, which was even 6502-based, available also as the Quasar HHC. (There is a previous Quasar HHC that predates even these, which uses a vacuum display and is a totally dissimilar architecture.) The HHC series was originally developed by French-American technology concern Friends Amis around 1981, who produced a small portable computer system around the 6502 for Matsushita to sell for mobile productivity applications. In its envisioned form, it would use 'ROM capsules' (ROM chips in a special carrier) as cartridge-like modules for various applications; many HHCs, including mine, were created for the insurance industry and came with a rate computation system burned into one of these 'capsules' pre-installed. After Friends Amis successfully designed the HHC series, Panasonic's parent company, Matsushita, which manufactures both Quasar and Panasonic brands, bought them out and the HHC family became a modest success after its launch in 1982, selling over 70,000 units in its lifetime. Like the HHC-4, the HHC series could take a surprisingly agile if diminutive printer/cassette interface, external screen access via composite or television RF (the HHC series supported 32x16 character graphics and two semigraphics modes), and external RS-232 serial. Additional devices and RAM expansion could be connected using an I/O adapter and a special frame to build a very sophisticated briefcase system. Why Commodore licensed the weaker IHC-8000 instead remains a mystery.