History of the laptop essays

History of the laptop essays Todays portable laptop computers have come along way since the Big oversized machines of the early eighties. The laptop has become very popular over the years and may soon be used more often than desktop computers. The idea of the laptop came was thought up by a man named Alan Kay. Alan Kay imagined a laptop sized portable computer which he called the Dynabook which would have wireless network capabilities, excellent color graphics and tremendous computing power. Alan convinced the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to fund a laboratory to put his idea into action. Eventually, he put together the best hardware prototype of the Dynabook that he could with the available technology present. He called the prototype, "The Alto", which had bitmapped display, mouse and network connectivity and could be considered the prototype for the modern miny computer. He also had plans to design software to make it all usable. He choose choose school children as his test audience in which he did a series of experiments then followed up by analysing people actually using the system. His result was Smalltalk which was used with the new Xerox Star computer which unfortunately for him, turned out to be a failure. Some consider the IBM 5100 to be the first portable computer. The 5100 weighed 50lbs and was available in 12 models which varied in memory from 16kb to 64kb. Prices for these machines went up to almost $20,000, but only 6 months after introduction the IBM 5100 went out of production. The first real laptop computer was designed in 1979 by William Moggridge of Grid Systems Corp. These 340K memory machines recently fetched in $800.00 at auction. In 1981 Adam Osborne released the first commercially successful portable computer onto the market in which he called the Osborne 1. This machine was equiped with it's own software and operating system, had a keyboard, two floppy drives and a very smal l screen, barely 5 inches in width. ...