at one time a full-fledged computer that
could fit into a single room was viewed
as a pipe dream but a similar concept to
the Contemporary laptop was envisioned all the way back in
1968 by computer scientist Alan Kay when
he conceived of the din book a gadget
that bore a passing resemblance to a modern e-reader but was perhaps
surprisingly intended as an educational tool for kids now the D book was never
manufactured but portable Computing didn't take long to become a reality
arguably the first ever portable computer for the general public the IBM
5100 hit the market in
1975 and yes this is an actual photo of
the 5100 it essentially looked like an
entire old school desktop computer except with a tiny 5-in display capable
of displaying a whopping 1,24 characters wow at 53 lb or 24 kg it
wasn't exactly uh backpack friendly though to its credit it did come with a
carrying case but it was hailed as an
engineering Marvel at the time because packing all those components into one
somewhat portable box hadn't been done before before and it could be yours for
the low low price of only
$9,000 equivalent to about
$41,000 today subsequent Portables the term
laptop would be coined later continued the tiny CRT in a heavy case Trend at
its launch in 1981 the Osborne one
weighed 242 lb and cost a much more
reasonable $1,800 so then it wasn't until
1983 that we saw the first laptop that
somewhat resembled what we're used to today the
$88,000 grid Compass which featured a
flat electroluminescent display instead
of a CRT helping to reduce the weight to
less than 11 lbs at the time it's 320x
240 pixel display was praised for being
nice and sharp and it even came with 384 kiloby of
bubble memory an early form of solid state storage fun fact it's rumored that
the grid Compass served as part of the US president's nuclear football at some
point but continent destroying capabilities aside the compass had a
huge weakness in that it wasn't compatible with the widely used IBM PC
though it didn't take too long for laptop manufacturers to catch on
starting in 1985 with the kpro 2000
which came with a surprisingly handsome aluminum shell followed by the IBM PC
convertible the next year falling prices
and at least passible portability meant that laptops quickly became popular
among business users toward the late 1980s and in 1988 the world was
introduced to the NEC Ultra light weighing just over 4 lb boasting a
thickness of only 1.4 in which would
actually put it in the same ballpark as some Modern machines indeed the ultra
light is often credited with being the first laptop in the world to be called a
notebook due to its compact size however the ultra light was still
criticized for being relatively light on
features and we didn't see a major shift
in the lightweight laptop industry until Apple rolled out the original PowerBook
100 which included there System 7 graphical OS as well as a built-in track
ball another fun fact while it's nearly impossible to find track balls on
laptops today The PowerBook 100 was credited with popularizing the concept
of a built-in pointing device and apple would continue this leadership when they
introduced the first built-in touchpad on a later PowerBook in
1994 the next year 1995 saw the release
of Windows 95 which was a big deal for
laptop technology Windows 95 was able to
standardize many elements of laptop design thanks to its ability to talk to
the laptop's BIOS more directly to
handle functions like power management obviating the need for the wide variety
of bioses and drivers that were necessary on old older devices making
manufacturing simpler and increasing
interoperability another feature that's now ubiquitous on laptops built-in Wi-Fi
first appeared in 1999 on the Apple
iBook which was even more well known for its uh interesting design subsequent
laptops incrementally added features that we're used to today like HD screens
webcams solid state drives and even
desktop grade Graphics processing and
we've gotten some new form factors along the way such as the briefly popular
Netbook an underpowered Windows machine with an unusably small keyboard which
was introduced in 2007 and the huge
Blitz of two in-one touchscreen devices in 2013 when Microsoft rolled out
Windows 8 along with that horrendous Metro modern whatever you want to call
it start screen thing and thanks to
smaller more efficient processors laptops have generally become thinner
and lighter some are even in the neighborhood of 2 lb Which is less than
125 of the weight of the original IBM
5100 maybe one day your laptop won't be
much thicker than a piece of paper but then you'll run the risk of crumpling it
up if you get mad at it speaking of paper do you do your
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