Whatever happened to the laptop computer? (1985) | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to the laptop computer? (1985)

nytimes.com

48 pointsvdfs53 comments

For context, here is a laptop from the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100

4.77 mhx 8088, 640x200 monochrome display. MS-DOS 2.11. 4 kilograms. $1899.

That's a bit more than $4k after adjusting for inflation.

Looks like a pretty expensive toy to me. I sure wouldn't take it fishing either. What use would it even have?

Back when I worked on software validation of large clinical chemistry analyzers, I had a number of these that I could move around the lab and hook directly to the target machines. We had an array of Turbo-C programs that would inject data into the machine over the serial port and read back results.

It was a lot easier to move these machines around that it was to move PC-ATs. The battery also kept the machine running even if the power glitched (which we would test as well)

For how long did the machines typically run on a single charge?

Don't quite remember, but it was probably around two hours. There was no hard drive and no LCD backlight, so it pretty much sipped power.

You're a salesman and you lug it around to sell your spreadsheet / accounts / database software, and a bunch of computers to go with it.

> What use would it even have?

During my solo around-the-world sail (http://arachnoid.com/sailbook) (http://i.imgur.com/v6zyW.jpg), I had one of these Toshibas on board for log entries and celestial navigation sight reductions. I also used it as a data terminal for a ham packet radio link to my home address -- at least while I was on the same side of the earth as my house.

It was expensive but indispensable. One day during a storm a wave hit it and it quickly died. I replaced it as soon as I could.

From a modern perspective, it's hard to keep from laughing at how puny it was, but then, I once thought my Apple II was a computing powerhouse.

Let's apply the same rubric to smartphones and see if any of the complaints make sense:

- Price: Yep, but everything expensive can be solved by pricing. $600 over 2 years seems to be a sweet spot.

- Portability: Maybe this is why there are more smartphones than laptops in the world?

- Software: The first iPhone was a big step up. App stores were another huge inflection point. Gotta have that software!

- Displays: Remember how fast displays improved once Retina broke the ice? Definitely a differentiator for each new generation of phone (until a year or two ago, where things seemed to have cooled off.)

- Niche usage: They're right, there were a bunch of niches that took off and encouraged markets to open up that otherwise wouldn't want it. Square comes to mind; I don't think artists are particularly keen on tech for tech sake.

I find it fascinating that the problems were identified so clearly in 1985. Much of the progress needed to let laptops and smartphones take off were incremental, but at some point, quantitative changes became qualitative.

Forgot one point: battery life

The next phone manufacturer that will be able to make a smartphone / laptop that can last more than 1 working day on a single charge will rule the world of smart phones. Old cell phones could last 2, 3 even more days on a single charge. Battery life is currently the main thing lacking.

There are already plenty of phones that last more than one day. Despite your belief, people don't care about them.

Agreed, who doesn't bring there laptop/phone chargers anywhere where the intend to have even medium usage (airport, car trip, study session , etc).

One day is kind of a sweet spot. Pick it up, go do your daily business, come home and plug it in to recharge, you're good. The chargers live at home unless you'll be gone for more than a day.

More would certainly be nice but smaller/cuter/more powerful generally makes for a better reason to upgrade. Especially when you can just grab a battery you can throw in the bottom of your purse and use to recharge the phone a few times if you really need more juice.

> The next phone manufacturer that will be able to make a smartphone / laptop that can last more than 1 working day on a single charge will rule the world of smart phones.

My OnePlus One lasts 2-3 at least. I've never let it run down, but there were a few days when I had its USB cable plugged in backwards (doh!) and was wondering why it didn't charge.

Phone manufacturers typically optimize around a 1 day use case. The battery takes up a significant amount of space and adding more than a day of charge at the expense of a thicker or larger phone typically doesn't play out well in the market.

A perfect example is the correlation between screen sizes and the launch of LTE. At the time if you asked anyone they wouldn't have wanted a larger phone however carriers wanted LTE phones and the market wanted phones that lasted all day. At the time thickness was a fairly standard comparison so what happened? They sold you a bigger screen so that they could fit a larger battery without producing a thicker phone.

I had a feeling 5"+ phones sizes had to do with carriers wanting to sell you more data.

(Though I'd guessed it had to do with promoting movie streaming.)

If you are too young to remember the era, the problem was that initial laptops were very limited as compared to the desktops of the day, not just that people couldn't see what good a laptop could be.

Another fun article from the same author from 1984, "VALUE OF [Desktop] WINDOWING IS QUESTIONED."

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing...

In 1984 he was basically correct. Computers could barely handle it. On a 80x25 terminal they're not that useful, and when the Mac came out with it's tiny screen it wouldn't have been that great.

Not that it mattered. The 128k of RAM was so little it couldn't run two real applications at once, only one app and one 'desklet'(?) like the calculator.

It took a few years before it would have started to make sense.

The same applies to 3D printers today.

It is easy to mock this guy, specially the phrase of "because I can't imagine it, it won't happen" but at the time it did not exist so you had to imagine it, and most people can't imagine.

Today people are saying exactly the same thing about 3d printers. Too expensive, lack of good software, and I can't image people doing great things with this tool so it won't happen. The center of the Universe for everybody is themselves.

We volunteer to teach children 3d printers now for a couple of years. Children that learned to draw simple things two years ago, now design complex things in freecad or Openscad with no effort whatsoever. For them things like sharing a design is so natural because they leaned it as children.

When these children grow up they will collaborate making cars or planes or fuel cells like we collaborate on Linux and is going to be huge.

Well the author was correct about the average person not bringing it fishing. I guess it's still a niche thing.

Even that has been upended, right? Smartphones, GPS, fish locating tools.

This, article more than anything shows the attitude the world had about computers in general. Which is that computers are for serious business people. Which was only true because prices were so high.

Well were they wrong? What did the average person do with a 1985 computer? There was no internet and they were thousands of times less powerful.

Played games.

Yes. There were millions of home computers in 1985 and numerous BBS systems.

There were lots of "average" people with computers in 1985 -- largely to play games with, That was the time of "home computers" like the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Apple ][.

What people didn't have was laptops.

Sure we had them.

Carrying them to someone's place and spend the afternoon playing / coding. :)

The average person could run a spreadsheet. They could use a word processor. They could run a windowed operating system in color. They could learn to program. They could play games. They could paint in color on a computer. They could compose music on a computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

Having used a 1985 computer like that it's actually a bit sad that now that we have computers and phones and tablets for $50 that are a thousand times more powerful than an Amiga but are not a hundred times more useful.

I personally do find a smart phone 100 times more useful, but that depends on what you use it for. A modern smartphone contains so many different sensors, combined with high-speed mobile access to the information and processing power of the intent that it has a pretty amazing range of capabilities (even if most of those are rarely used).

I just realised that HN was the worst possible place to leave that comment. I have no doubt there were many applications for computers in 1980s, and many home users. It just seems far less useful to the average person. How many people actually use spreadsheets outside of a business context? Or write music, or program, etc.

Games and word processing seem like they would be the best application. But there were specialized consoles and word processing machines at the time that were cheaper and better for those tasks.

>Games and word processing seem like they would be the best application. But there were specialized consoles and word processing machines at the time that were cheaper and better for those tasks.

No, there weren't. Compared to Amiga and Atari, there were no competitive home game consoles around (until around 1989 or so at least).

And of course "word processing machines" were not better in any way. Professional writers (writers, journalists, people writing scientific papers, scriptwriters, etc) were buying PCs for word processing, not any dedicated "word processing machines" (which were just electric typewriters with an LCD and some crude software).

I used spreadsheet software all the time back then, and used it basically as an early InDesign. Change cell shapes (to pixel precision), add borders to parts of the cell but not others, add no borders to a group of cells to make a giant text box, etc. Main thing I designed back then was character sheets for ADnD, but I designed other things as well. And those character sheets were super elaborate for the time. I wouldn't qualify as the 'average user' though, granted.

Before the internet we spent a LOT of time on BBSs!

And we generally had (sometimes indirect) access to the internet -- Usenet, uucp, email -- through some combination of Fidonet, WWIVnet, and somebody running an open-access Unix box.

And on those BBS systems there were door games as well as discussion boards, file download areas, etc.

The internet existed then too -- it's just that the national science foundation didn't allow what they called commercial traffic on it at the time. It was a wonderful resource for people learning to write software (comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.c) or who wanted to screw off (talk.bizarre).

And around that time '85 or '86, I had a PC Pursuit account that allowed me to hop all over the country to get to BBSs in other cities that weren't on one of the store-and-forward networks.

There was plenty for the average person to do with a 1985 computer -- provided they had a modem, telix, and kermit, xmodem or zmodem -- and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset.

"...and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset."

This! If anything I think the challenge provided us with a reason to explore. Things weren't always easy and that made it fun.

> What did the average person do with a 1985 computer? There was no internet and they were thousands of times less powerful.

I don't know if this comment should make me feel really old, or if kids today are just totally clueless.

Speaking personally for me, a bit of both.

Well, around that time, I run the only BBS in my small town. House of the red light. No need to tell about the contents of it I guess :) Good old times

We obviously banged them against a second "1985 computer" to scare off other tribes.

I wrote programs to draw graphics. It was common to have a function that would plot a line between two screen co-ordinates with a certain color. I learned how to put these into loops, changing the parameters each time, and getting really fun results. The joy of these machines was ( especially the Commodore 64 and such ) you could just turn it on, it booted in a few seconds, and you could start coding right away, at the prompt. There was no overhead, you just did it.

I learned to program in BASIC on my Franklin Ace 1200 [1] (dual floppy drives FTW), which was the beginning of the road that led me to a career in software development.

[1] http://www.oldcomputers.net/ace1200.html

I guess this is also true for current VR. serious business people -> serious gamer.

I think the single most important issue with laptops in 1985 was that they were heavy.

Remember, that was the age of conspicuous consumption -- people went out of their way to show off how much money they had spent needlessly.

I had a T1100 around that time and the thing weighed like ten pounds, had horrible battery life, and a pretty crappy display.

So without access to AC power it was little more than an overpriced toy -- and with AC power, my desktop was far nicer to work on anyway.

> article more than anything shows the attitude the world had about computers in general. Which is that computers are for serious business people.

That was the attitude in 1965, but not in 1985 - the home computer market was already in full swing by then. The C64, Macintosh, PCjr, etc were all out before 1985.

"Laptops" were huge and heavy to the point of being portable desktop machines, and they all required an AC outlet to do anything more than like, an hour of work.

Even in 1985, the applications were only sort of there. You had word processing and spreadsheets and a few other office apps. After that, the only things left for consumers were programming, education and games. And in 1985, games were "over" because early hype had died down and the console market crashed. Media apps weren't there yet: the first Mac was a year old, and the Amiga appeared mid-way through the year.

A lot of what made computers part of people's lifestyle was networking, and that only hit mass adoption in the 90's.

An interesting parallel is to look at the advent of the tablet. The Tablet PC was launched in 2001, whereas the Apple iPad was released in April, 2010.

By 2003, it was easy to look at Microsoft's Tablet PC and describe it as an "abject failure" - similar to the way this article describes laptops. The reasoning was slightly different but quite similar - both the original laptops and the original Tablet PC were clunky and unsuited to the user's lifestyle.

TL;DR - User-centered design is a key to building successful products.

More context: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2471642/mobile-apps/mic...

> It would be much simpler to take home a few floppy disks tucked into an attache case.

Perhaps a less punchy version of Tanenbaum's famous "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

This article mentions the Gridcase which I thought was an amazing rugged-looking machine. Then I saw this

"GRiD Defence Systems produced the laptop computers used in the 'Aliens' film in 1986. The scenes were cut from the theatrical release but subsequently added to the DVD release." [1]

[1] http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1054&st=1

Let's not forget those pesky kids with smartphones, running all over my lawn. What's the deal with those ? I mean really, who would, this day and age, still waste the best part of their life raising these snotty monkeys that have no respect ? Having kids was a fad and it's about time everybody realize it.

Fun article, I had one of those machines big and bulky. Probably weighed in closer to about 20 pounds at the time.

"Tandy, which started it all, are still producing their laptops, albeit with the almost unreadable liquid crystal display, or L.C.D"

I remember the days when CRT ruled the world and LCD was a trneding fad.

I remember using a laptop with a color LCD around 1992. It truly was almost unreadable, like trying to read something written with a morass of fallen leaves.

Man, when active matrix came out and started replacing the old passive matrix it was night and day. Suddenly things weren't horrifically blurry anymore.

I was a fan of the plasma displays. I loved my T3100.

http://imgur.com/a/neuJk

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