![]() In fact, it was a huge hit, in part because the price – $1,795 – was so reasonable. In 1981, though, nobody looked at it as being unwieldy. The Osborne wasn’t a clamshell: It was a sewing machine-like 24-pound behemoth with a dinky 5-inch screen, two full-sized 5 1/4″ floppy drives and a desktop-like keyboard which clipped onto the case. While the company was busy with research and development, it was beaten to market by Adam Osborne’s Osborne 1, which went on to become the first successful portable computer. Even in 1975, IBM’s first “ portable computer” weighed 55 pounds.īy 1979, which is when Grid began design work on the Compass, the notion of designing a portable computing device that was truly portable wasn’t completely nutty. Portable computers didn’t really exist in 1968, unless you want to count a case that let you transport a 75-pound Teletype machine. With the Dynabook, Kay’s mind raced far ahead of what the technology of the time was capable of creating. But when he drew it, he depicted a tablet-like device with a screen and keyboard, but no hinge. In 1968, visionary technologist Alan Kay had proposed a sleek portable computing tablet for kids, the Dynabook, in 1968. (Which it did, although it took a couple of decades before laptops outsold desktops for the first time.) The name “Compass” was downright prescient: The machine did indeed point the entire industry in the direction it would follow for the next few decades.Īlmost all portable PCs have had clamshell cases for so long that it’s tempting to assume that it was obvious from the start that it was the ideal form factor. It even went up on the Space Shuttle, a rare achievement for any commercial product.Īs far as I know, however, nobody was smart enough to declare that its basic design would come to dominate the PC business. Fortune, for instance, named it as one of the magazine’s products of the year for 1982. The Compass was innovative in multiple ways, and certainly got a fair amount of attention in its day. ![]() It was, in other words, the first computer with a clamshell case – or, to use a more common term, the first laptop. It was just the first one in a briefcase-shaped case with a screen on one half of the interior, a keyboard on the other and a hinge in the middle. It wasn’t the first computer designed to be toted. Take, for instance, Grid Systems’ Grid Compass 1101, a portable computer which was announced in April, 1982. Their influence becomes so pervasive that people think of it as unremarkable, not remarkable. Sometimes, they just go on to change the world without anyone knowing it’s going to happen or even talking about it much. Real breakthroughs aren’t always immediately identifiable as breakthroughs. And tech journalists have a history of getting irrationally exuberant over stuff that doesn’t end up amounting to much. Listening to its creators doesn’t work: Tech companies have an annoying tendency to promote everything as a brilliant breakthrough. How do you tell if a new technology product is a brilliant breakthrough?
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