Have you ever seen a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III computer? Aesthetically, it's everything I dreamt a computer should look like. This is an all-in-one system; monitor, disk drive and keyboard built-in. These days when we hear a description like that we think laptop or ultra-portable device like a Microsoft Surface Pro. Back in 1980, that was not the case.
The base model went for about $700, but it didn't include a disk drive.
The Model III was a lot like the Model I with the biggest difference being the shielding for the RF emissions (the Model I didn't have this). They were mostly compatible with each other and both had BASIC in ROM. The Model III could display 16 lines of 64 characters on it's 12 inch monochrome monitor. It had a parallel port for Radio Shack printers. The base model only came with 8 kilobytes, but it was able to be expanded to 48 kilobytes. A lot of computers of the time were going with 64K built-in.
I remember seeing these at some schools and from what I read, that's because they were popular for education. The biggest reason being that they were hard to steal and being an all-in-one, parts of it couldn't go missing.
