1 1970s & 1980s

1970s:

Alan Kay, a researcher at the now famous Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) has a vision for a portable computer. He called it the Dynabook, but it never got past sketches and a cardboard model. At the time, Xerox was unwilling to commission funding for his idea and it remained undeveloped until the late 1970’s.

1981:

The Osborne Computer Corporation releases the world’s first consumer laptop: The Osborne 1. While revolutionary, its main limitation was a small 5” screen (only displaying 52 characters per line of text). It sold for \$1,795; it also came with about \$1,500 of free software:

CP/M System, CP/M Utility, SuperCalc spreadsheet application, WordStar word processing application with MailMerge, Microsoft MBASIC programming language and Digital Research CBASIC programming language.

Manufacturers make the switch from Plasma screens to LCD to save battery. This is considered one of the most important evolutions for the laptop.

1982:

Epson starts selling its HX-20, a portable computer with a small 120 x 32 resolution monochrome LCD screen. This was powered by rechargeable batteries, had a full-sized keyboard and a built-in dot matrix printer. Some consider this the true first laptop because the Osborne 1 ran out of battery too quickly to be considered useful for mobile computing.

1983: The Kyocera Kyotronic appears on the scene, and is considered by some the most used and useful of the early laptops. It had a larger eight line, 40-character-wide LCD screen, featured several basic built-in applications and ran on AA batteries. This model sold extremely well and was used widely by every occupation.

The Commodore SX-64 becomes known as the first to produce a portable color screen. A very small quantity of this model was produced and never had success, probably because of higher selling prices. It is thought that these were mainly used by Commodore insiders.

1984: The first touchscreen is developed on the Gavilan SC, which is the first to be marketed with the term ‘laptop’.

Mid 1980’s: Color STN (Super Twisted Nematic) and DSTN (Dual Scan Super Twist Nematic) screens bring color to mainstream laptop development.

1989:

The Apple Macintosh portable is one of the first to feature an active matrix 640 x 400 screen, which eradicated the blurring that most other portable computer screens were known to have. This is Apple’s first contribution to the mobile computing movement.

GriDPad is released, commonly thought of as the first tablet computing device. The operating system was MS-DOS.

2 1990s

1990: Intel announces its 20MHz 386SL processor, and was the first CPU to be designed specifically with mobile computing in mind, featuring power management features and sleep modes to conserve battery life. AMD, Intel’s big rival in the processor market at the time, didn’t seem bothered (although they didn’t produce a mobile-specific processor until 1999). Despite the continuing availability of mobile-specific equivalents from Intel, many manufacturers still opted to squeeze the cheaper, non-mobile products from AMD into their laptops.

1992: Windows 3.1.1 is released and becomes the standard operating system for laptops. Previously, laptops had relied on custom BIOSs and drivers to extend the battery life of their machines. With the introduction of the Windows 3.1.1 operating system, rudimentary power management was built into the operating system for the very first time, making working on the move more practical.

1993: The PDA (personal digital assistant) is introduced to the United States by Apple. Their model, the Newton MessagePad had a 20 MHz ARM 610 processor, 4 MB of ROM, and 640k of SRAM. It was the first attempt to recognize natural handwriting and use a basic form of artificial intelligence in a small digital device.

The IBM Simon is released, and considered the first smartphone. It acted as a mobile phone, PDA, and fax machine all in one. It offered a touch screen, which is the precursor to the Apple iPhone which would come 14 years later. It sold for \$899.

1994: IBM’s Thinkpad 755 introduces the CD-ROM drive.

1996: U.S. Robotics introduces the PalmPilot 1000, priced at \$299, with 128k of memory and a monochrome, touch-screen display. Since this release, Palm PDAs have dominated the handheld market.

1997: Toshiba makes the Libretto. It was about the size of a VHS tape, had a virtually unusable keyboard, but it was a full-blown notebook in miniature, complete with hard drive, TFT screen and the ability to run Windows 95.

British company called Psion makes the Series 5 organiser, a handheld device that boasted a well-engineered keyboard.

Late 1990s: Laptops continue to become streamlined, and address issues of battery life, screen clarity, memory, processor speed, and weight. They gradually become thinner and more streamlined, growing cheaper in the process, selling for about \$1,500.