I wanted an Otrona so.o.o.o bad... until I saw the HP lunchbox. Had a (7"?) plasma display glued to the side, and the keyboard clipped on to cover it up a la the front of the Osborne, etc. Love at first byte. But I could never collect the scratch, or convince my employer it was cost-effective...

And I remember extending the BIOS of the Big Board to use the Shugart 10MB Winchesters. You had to be creative; leaving a big enough buffer really sucked the usable memory out of the magnificent 64K. And cursing Zilog for not putting autoincrement opcodes on the index instructions, even harder for their failure to implement LD A, (IX+B) e.g.

::chuckle:: You know, the computer business has always been weird, and here's another way: in just about every other field, there's some analog of the kids' disdain for adults in Johnny and the Bomb: "I remember when you could get that for sixpence, and have change..."