April 2, 1986: A ‘Laptop’ Computer | Hacker News Reader

April 2, 1986: A ‘Laptop’ Computer

blogs.wsj.com

29 pointsanigbrowl44 comments

In reviewing Apple's contributions to computing, people tend to overlook the PowerBook, presumably because the first models were released during Jobs's absence. But it really was revolutionary, and turned the hulking ergonomic nightmares of the 80s into pretty much the form we have today. As a bonus, Apple also pioneered the use of the trackpad a few years later.

During the iPhone presentation, Jobs actually mentions the importance of the PowerBook in Apple's history. I always got a kick out of Jobs praising stuff from the Sculley era like the PowerBook and QuickTime, as it signaled that he recognized that Apple was bigger than him, and because Apple simply doesn't get enough credit for some of the stuff they did the "dark days".

Apple's portable computer at the time was the //c, a really well designed computer. of course, you had to bring your own monitor. but still, that was a nice machine.

There was an accessory for the //c called the "Apple Flat Panel Display", which was an LCD monitor you could attach and make the machine almost portable.

Completely useless trivia: Roy Scheider is shown using one of these (on a beach, no less!) in 1984's _2010_.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086837/trivia?item=tr0748438

wow, that takes me back.

I never knew! cool.

Yea, thinking about it, the now famous Mac Plus was released just after Steve Jobs was ousted.

And on Copland, what is funny is that Copland tried to move the Mac Toolbox into kernel mode even though Copland never intended to preemptively multitask GUI apps (that was to wait until Gershwin). I read they once was able to run the "Blue Box" on Copland's NuKernel which would have been a good starting point.

The first laptop proper is probably the GRiD Compass 1101 ( http://oldcomputers.net/grid1101.html )

Psion introduced trackpads in the late 80s and they didn't make it to PowerBooks until the mid 90s. The capacitive trackpad was invented by Cirque and it was Cirque's Glidepoint that Apple used originally.

I wish to 3d print the GRiD case, find a monochrome orange/black LCD, fit some arm board into it and marry it. Maybe bunny huang open mobo ..

ps: There was one listed on a local 'craigslist' for a few bucks, I missed it by a few days, it was deeply saddening.

"fit some arm board into it"

How about making it a dock for your phone? It would be really cool to have a hardware keyboard, bigger display, extended battery and external storage that you could simply plug into the phone's USB port. If you make one for a Galaxy S4, I'll certainly buy one!

In case this isn't well bred sarcasm, there are smartphone docking 'laptops' already. Maybe not universal. And I didn't think about that because my 'feature phone' could probably not drive even a 1024x768 LCD.

It wasn't sarcasm and I'm aware of at least a few of these docking stations. But how cool and retro would a grid look-alike be?

Oh ok it's a tribute to the GRiD aesthetics revived in a dock.

The grid even had its own version of dropbox.

Uhhhh... I still have my first laptop around, a Zenith ZFL-181 (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/8094/Zenith-ZFL-181-9...) from 1987. Apart from having the best keyboard on any laptop I ever used - including the Thinkpads which followed after - it can not be called a 'hulking ergonomic nightmare'. It was rather neat, with those flip-up drives (no harddisk for you young whipper-snappers) and ran like tarred lightning after I swapped the 8088 for a V20. Of course it ran MS-DOS, only handled 720KB DD floppies and had a weird blue-white 640x400 screen, but it was a laptop by all means.

Apple launched the first (68000-powered) Powerbook in 1991 - 4 years later. It was a fine machine, but by no means as revolutionary as you make it out to be.

How soon everyone forgets... The TRS-80 Model 100

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

I haven't forgotten. Of course, when I got mine it was already at least 10 years old. It started my entire programming trajectory.

We still use one for autonomous vehicle monitoring (it talks to a packet radio) because it's easy to read in the sun, and quick to type commands on.

Did a patent war breakout when competitors "stole" the idea? (Genuinely curious, not rhetorical)

For those wanting to know more, it's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible

>> Pressing the power button on the computer did not turn it off, but put the machine into a "suspend" mode. <<

Wow, another piece of technology which is older than I thought.

At the time of magnetic memories the RAM content always survived the powering off. Nobody was able to carry such computers though.

Portable computers weren't new at this point. In fact, there already had been several laptops on the market before this, including the GRiD Compass. Portability wasn't new either, as Compaq and Corona Data Systems also made "luggable" computers which had built in tiny CRT tubes.

I remember coveting the portable Commodore 64, hehe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64

1986 wasn't even that long ago, it baffles me how far tech has advanced since then.

Yeah, but don't you get the feeling it has somehow slowed down in recent history ? I haven't felt the need to change my laptop in like... 3 years or something, while this would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago.

This is probably partially because of the limitations that CPUs ran into with the heat wall in the past decade.

I've just upgraded my early 2011 MB Pro with 16GB of RAM and SSD. Wow, was that refreshing.

Yeah, the SSD is what made a bit difference recently, but it does not change anything to the fact that CPU have more less stalled for laptops.

Disk, not CPU, has been the performance barrier for much of computing. Largely because of latency (from seek), which as yesterday's HN article noted, is something you're stuck with.

You can increase your CPU capacity through palatalization (up to Amdahl's limit), but disk sucks no matter what. Yes, with multiple channels you get better overall throughput, but if you need two blocks that aren't contiguous but are on the same media, you've just bought an eternity in compute time.

SSD cracks that barrier, and does it pretty spectactularly, so yes, it's been a pretty big breakthrough.

The next phase may well be localization of a lot of services which are now centrally web-hosted. While in aggregate, people need a lot of compute power, individually, it's not much, and tools such as the FreedomBox offer the opportunity to put that close to you, while distributing data for both data integrity and thwarting surveillance (it's tough to run centralized surveillance over a decentralized architecture).

Round-trip time for SAAS is itself significant, as is browser load. Cracking both these nuts for the ultimate in edge-provisioned networks (the wall wart 6 feet from where you sit), and a movement away from browser-based apps to a lighter-weight frameworks which is based on network transport but doesn't impose a full browser overhead.

CPUs became 'fast enough' at the end of the noughties. It's not that tech has slowed down so much as there's not really so much of a pinch felt these days from bottlenecks.

As a comparison, my win98 box took 4.5 minutes to boot up, and frequently crashed hard. These days computers take 10-30 seconds to cold boot, and hard crashes are extremely rare - you don't encounter them in the normal course of operations. A faster boot back then had considerably tangible results. These days it's barely noticeable.

To give you a sense of perspective: Jet engines were finicky advanced technology in 1945. 28 years later, the Apollo program was over.

Seeing this microfiche image capture made me curious. Why are the historical archives of these old papers not online in fully indexed, easily searchable form? Even a pay-for service (excepting the public domain stuff) I could accept, but I see that apparently ProQuest has the rights to provide that service, and it's behind a paywall that's not even possible to directly subscribe to without going through their sales team--presumably it's for institutional use only.

Depressing how much of the world's content is locked away from the Internet while we drown in cat videos and clickbait "news" sites.

Heh. I had one of those at work. Delightful, in that it was as compact & portable as it was (competing with "sewing machine" designs more "luggable" than portable). Weighted something like 15 pounds. One humorous design factor was how peripherals, printer in particular, just snapped on to the back of the unit - making for an oddly long device for the enthusiastic user.

And 28 years later, here I sit typing this on a MacBook Air...

A MacBook Air that probably cost less than the 1995$ price of the "base PC."

And a MacBook Air still costs significantly more than a regular "no-name" laptop PC, anyway.

It depends on what class of devices you put it in. At an entry price of $1000 I find them quite competitive, compared to other ultra portables with desktop OSes. That's less than a Surface Pro 2 with cover. Of course, as usual with Apple devices, buying models with higher specs is where they get you.

And less than most worthwhile PC laptops...

Here we go again... sorry but you don't need a Retina screen and tin foil thin notebook to get shit done. If you really do, you have big first world problems... :P

No you don't. But I paid 1500 for a ThinkPad T530.

That'll never catch on.

I had a Commodore 64-SX that fell off an office when they upgraded to 286s... Good times. There was an easy way to get composite out from it, but I never managed to.

There's an incredible number of javascript trackers and garbage on that page, to the extent that I'd support banning the site... surprising.

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