The History of Laptops

The history of laptops started by calling a more portable computer, 'luggable computer'. At its very beginning, they had the size of a small suitcase and to carry them around wasn't as easy as it is today.

Most would agree that the first portable was the Osborne 1.

history of laptops

The Osborne 1

The history of laptops for the Osborne 1 begins in 1981 when the Osborne Computer Corporation built the first commercially successful portable microcomputer. The operating system it ran was the CP/M 2.2, had a 5 inch display screen and a single sided, single density floppy disk drive. This little beauty weighed about 10 kilos and cost $1795.

For back then, one of its strengths was that it was the first microcomputer to come with application software like: The WordStar word processor, the SuperCalc spreadsheet and the CBASIC and MBASIC programming languages. The retail value for this package alone was more than $2,000.

history of laptops

The Epson HX-20

The Epson HX-20 was released in 1981 and is considered the first true laptop, notebook computer and handheld computer. There were many benefits to owning this type of computer back then as opposed to those huge luggable ones:

It had a footprint of an A4 sized page
It weighed 1.6 kg
Featured full transit keyboard
Had rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, and the battery life was 50 hours
A built-in 120 × 32-pixel LCD
A calculator-size dot-matrix printer
The EPSON BASIC programming language,
16 Kb RAM expandable to 32 Kb and a built-in microcassette drive.

history of laptops

The Compaq Portable

The history of laptops continues with the Compaq portable. This was the first IBM clone - had the same IMB PC hardware transplanted into a luggable case and one of the progenitors of the modern laptop, although this one weighed 12 kilos and had the size of a small suitcase. It was shipped in 1983 at a price of US$3,590.

The system had:

128 kibibytes of memory (expandable to 640 KiB)
two 5.25" floppy disk drives
a built-in 9" green screen monitor
a unique CGA-compatible video card

history of laptops

The Grid Compass 1100

The history of laptops continues with the GRiD (as written by its manufacturer). From the shape (the familiar clamshell design) we can see it was arguably the first laptop computer, introduced in April 1982. It was designed by Bill Moggridge, a British designer. It weighed 5 kg, and had an Intel 8086 processor, a 320x200-pixel (CGA) electroluminescent display, 340-kilobyte magnetic bubble memory, and a 1200 bit/s modem.

Devices such as hard drives and floppy drives could be connected via the 488 I/O (also known as the GPIB or General Purpose Instrumentation Bus). This port made it possible to connect multiple devices in a daisy-chain.

The price was US$ 8-10,000

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