Portable media centers are presently in their infancy. Panasonic and a couple of other companies are making little tv sets with AM/FM radios attached; Sony, AIWA, Sanyo, JVC, Superscope, and others are making cassette machines with AM/FM radios attached — one Japanese firm is even making a cassettemachine-radio-clock combo — but the true total media center has yet to have its heyday.

I’ve been waiting for one for a year now. Imagine, a slim briefcase weighing only a few pounds. You open it up and there is a high impact plastic panel with controls and functions for a digital clock with alarm, a stereo cassette recorder, an all band radio, a pocket calculator, and a mini tv set that is switchable from U.S. standard 525 lines to European standard 625 lines. And it runs on batteries, anywhere in the world. The concept of putting them all together, making them operatable internationally, and sandwiching it all into a small briefcase is mine. But the electronics belong to the Japanese. In fact there is nothing futuristic about the portable media center except that nobody’s made one yet. All the technology exists to turn it out today, fight on the assembly line between the color tv’s and the video tape machines.