Laptops



It's a little hard to determine what was the first portable or laptop computer. The first portable computers did not look like the book-sized and folding laptops that we are familiar with today. However, they were both portable and lapable, and lead to the development of notebook style laptops. Several potential firsts have been discussed below and how each qualifies. Three best Potentials are:

1. Osborne 1:

The first commercially available portable computer was the Osborne 1 in 1981. It used the CP/M operating system inspired by what was probably the first portable computer, the Xerox NoteTaker. It was large and heavy compared to today's laptops, with a tiny 5" CRT monitor.

Osborne 1


2. Compaq Portable:
The first product from Compaq, introduced in 1983, by which time the IBM Personal Computer had become the standard platform. It was not much different from Osborne, and required AC power to run. It ran MS-DOS and was the first true legal IBM clone.

3. Epson HX-20:

It was announced in 1981, although first sold widely in 1983. A simple handheld computer, it featured a full-transit 68-key keyboard, rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, a small (120×32-pixel) dot-matrix LCD display with 4 lines of text, 20 characters per line text mode. It had a 24 column dot matrix printer, a Microsoft BASIC interpreter, and 16 KB of RAM (expandable to 32 KB).

Old Age Laptops:
  • GRiD Compass
  • Dulmont Magnum/Kookaburra
  • Ampere
  • Tandy Model 100
  • Sharp and Gavilan
  • Kyotronic 85
  • Commodore SX-64
  • Kaypro 2000
  • IBM PC Convertible

The world's first mass-market laptop computers (middle age laptops):
  • Toshiba T1100, T1000, and T1200
  • Cambridge Z88
  • Compaq SLT/286


Beginning of Modern Age Laptops:
  • NEC UltraLite
  • Apple's Macintosh Portable



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2 comments:

  1. Nice page......Lukin fwd to fully devlpd one!! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. nice work....:) i got much new knowledge about history of laptop :))

    ReplyDelete