History of the laptop
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
In 1981 Adam Osborne released the first commercially successful portable computer onto the market in which he called the Osborne 1. The Apple IIc was a notebook sized computer displayed at the home and educational markets, and was very successful for about five years before IBM introduced its IBM PC Convertible in april 1986. It was primarily used on it's own operating system. Four years later Radio Shack released their TRS-80 in march 1983, it was not PC compatible but still attracted a large interest from computer users. The invention of the first Apple computer was called the Apple IIc model. These 340K memory machines recently fetched in $800. Inside was an 8 bit processor and 8-32mb of ram. test audience in which he did a series of experiments then followed up by analysing people actually using the system. Some consider the IBM 5100 to be the first portable computer. The PC Convertible was a success, and this model began the laptop era. The Gavilan computer weighed in at 9 lb (4 kg) alone or 14 lb (6. 5-inch floppy drives, an LCD, parallel and serial printer ports and a space for an internal modem. His result was Smalltalk which was used with the new Xerox Star computer which unfortunately for him, turned out to be a failure.
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