With the launch this week of the new Kindle tablet as a potential rival to Apple’s iPad II, it’s worth reflecting
that portable computing has travelled some distance in the last thirty years. In April 1981 the Osborne 1 personal (and portable) computer boasted a 5” screen. Unfortunately, this was surrounded by a couple of feet
of chassis, although Byte magazine’s reviewer at the time was “..impressed by it’s compactness; it will fit under an airplane seat.”.
The unit came with twin floppy drives, no doubt partly dictating the dimensions of the design. It had no
internal hard disk storage.
A year later and a new company, Compaq Computer Corporation, was founded. Their first product was allegedly sketched out on a placemat in a Houston Pie shop and would become the first portable PC.
Later that year, from a company that we now associate with printers, the Epson HX-20 was launched. It only had a 4 line display, but being no larger than an A4 sheet of paper and capable of running on batteries it is widely regarded as the first commercial laptop or handheld computer.
Much as we are seeing a race to market of tablet machines today, 1983 saw the development and launch of a
number of portable computers, from Tandy, Commodore and others.
A large US Air Force contract in 1987 led to a rush to develop new laptops. Zenith Data Systems eventually won the order and supplied over 200,000 units, but the tendering process had brought hardware from IBM, Toshiba and NEC to the market.
The first battery powered portable Mac appeared in 1989, with the rather obviously titled ‘Macintosh
Portable’. It was almost 4” thick and with it’s lead-acid batteries, almost 16 pounds in weight. The unit was
really a ’luggable’ rather than a portable, but it was soon followed by the first Apple Powerbook (1991) which was the first unit to have a palm rest and a trackball.
From there on the development of the laptop progressed with faster processors, the change to colour screens
and improved batteries. Wifi, generally regarded as an essential component to laptop use, didn’t appear until
August 1999. The term Wi-Fi was suggested by a marketing firm called Interbrand Corporation that had been hired to come up with a name that was "a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'".
Whilst the 90’s saw the laptop market mature, the benefit of hindsight lets us spot the development of the tablet market during this time. In 1993 Apple launched the much ridiculed Newton. A stylus controlled PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) that never really succeeded and was dropped five years later. In 1998 Fujitsu brought out the first colour touchscreen and in 2001 the Compaq Tablet PC helped popularise the
term ‘tablet’.
Many of the tablet machines that were produced in the years following the Compaq launch used a rotating/folding screen and a stylus. This allowed the unit to be used as a standard laptop when a proper keyboard was needed, but also as a stylus driven tablet with the screen facing outwards. With the current interest in tablets we’re starting to see the need for a proper keyboard repeated and devices such as Acer’s Transformer with it’s detachable keyboard play to this old requirement. What sort of portable devices will dominate in the coming few years is still unclear, but portable computing is nothing new and a great deal of change has happened already.
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