Evolution of the laptop
Machines were once pricey with small screens and tiny — if any — hard drives
From ‘ luggable’ to MacBook light in three decades.
T“The range of travelling computers — that is, the world of PCS lighter than 15 pounds that run on batteries and fit easily on your lap — is growing so rapidly that it sometimes seems like you can’t tell the players without a program.” — March, 1990, T. R. Reid and Brit Hume, Washington Post Writers Group
he year was 1990, and less than a decade after the introduction of the first laptop computers, reviewers were delighted by a growing selection of state- of- the- art machines boasting floppy disk drives, greyscale screens and hard drives that — by today’s standards — wouldn’t hold a fraction of the photos you’re probably carrying around on your smartphone.
But still they were an advancement over the first commercially successful portable. The Osborne 1 weighed almost 11 kilograms and came with ads boasting it could fit under an airline seat .
And for all that size, its screen was a tiny 12.7 centimetres that would only show 52 characters on each line of text unless you scrolled back and forth, in which case you could read 128 characters — slightly less than a tweet today. It only worked if you plugged it in, although you could find an after- market battery that would power the computer for an hour.
The first laptop didn’t have graphics, but that didn’t stop game makers. The 1982 game Deadline was a text adventure that had extra printed content because the 80 available kilobytes of disk space wasn’t enough. If you want to know what 80 KB looks like, check the mail in your inbox. A Nintendo news release accompanied by a PDF of the release accounts for 99 KB in my mail.
State- of- the- art for today’s laptop buyer — Apple’s new MacBook Pro with Retina Display has a screen resolution that has three million more pixels than your HDTV and probably well over five million more than the 640- by- 400 pixel active matrix screen of Apple’s first portable. You could almost fly across Canada without running out of battery power with the new MacBook Pro. At 1.8 centimetres in height, it’s thinner than some inflight magazines.
That’s compared to the early days when so- called portables were so hefty that tech radio personality Steve Dotto didn’t raise eyebrows when he stepped on to a plane carrying his Macintosh SE20, an Apple desktop that had the screen and the computer combined.
Apple released its first portable in 1989. It was more aptly described as a ‘ luggable,’ at seven- plus kg with an equally heavyweight price of $ 6,500. However, it was the first Macintosh that could be operated without being plugged in, thanks to its lead- acid batteries.
Towen Chrea, merchandise manager of laptops for Future Shop in Burnaby has seen them change from corporate- only machines to a family staple. He started selling computers in 2001, a couple of years after Apple introduced its iconic bright blue clamshell ibook. Apple discontinued the multicoloured computers after a couple of years but consumers were hooked. It started a trend that would see laptops overtake desktops in popularity.