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The Laptop Celebrates Its 40th Year
Wired has an interview with Alan Kay on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the idea of the laptop computer. Kay's vision, which he dubbed the "Dynabook," was for a 2-pound, 1-Mpixel color computing device. "... the Dynabook was never built. But it greatly inspired the devices we now call laptops, although it's taken four decades to slim the tech down to the point where usable computers actually weigh as little as two pounds. To honor his achievements, Mountain View's Computer History Museum on Wednesday will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the legendary Dynabook. [Quoting Kay:] 'The Amazon Kindle is kind of a subset of a Dynabook — too much of a subset. The screen is too small, it is not very capable of dynamics, the keyboard is poor, etc. But it does have several limited service ideas that are good. The next version of a Kindle could be really exciting.'"
It was never built?? Not 40 then...
However, a hacked iPhone or Android Gi sound like a near-perfect computation device that's highly accessible. Just wish I could get a bluetooth keyboard for my iPhone :-)
And no mention of tablets (or multi-touch, either). I think those will change the way people interact with computers (when the two are put together).
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Sorry folks, the "idea" of a laptop is nowhere near a laptop. Otherwise, break out the cake and candles again, happy birthday flying car!!
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
...to make trial runs at size and weight metrics. I loved reading that part. It makes you wonder...who is doing the equivalent right now? I'll bet somebody over at the DoD is estimating how many nanobots they can cram inside a nostril or something, using a funnel and a salt shaker perhaps.
Also, if it really was the 40th year, I'd say it was a pretty fantastic year for laptops, with netbooks and the Macbook Air and all those new ideas coming into popularity.
In other news, Helicopter Celebrates its 500th Year! Bring out the cake, and thanks for giving us the helicopter Leonardo, what would we do without it for the last five centuries!
This is not the anniversary of the laptop, it's the anniversary of the first known time someone made a drawing of something that roughly looks like a laptop (more like a tablet) on paper.
Good job with the title yet again slashdot editors.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The inventors of the laptops, mouses, mp3 players and stylish design!
Kneel before Zo.... Apple!
I'm not sure, but a Kaypro has to be lighter than my dell widescreen laptop.
The 'idea' of a laptop is not the same as an actual laptop that people can buy and use. The first laptop that people could really buy and use was the TRS-80 Model 100 introduced in 1983 which makes the laptop 25 years old.
In the mid-to-late 80s, a "laptop" was the size of a substantial suitcase and weighed ~20 pounds. Examples were the Osborne and Compaq "luggables". Which name I like because it brings forth the proper picture of a big piece of luggage. That was 20 years ago, nowhere near 40.
The screen was a 5" square, monochrome CRT. The very idea of battery power was nothing but a joke. Clock speed for the newer machines was 7+ MHz. Hard drives (10MB!!) were offered as an option starting around 1990 or so, and added even more to the heft (and the price!). Alternatively you could have one or two 5.25" floppy drives.
The reality is not as pretty a picture, is it?
Utter Crud. In 1968 the Jetsons had laptops (back of cereal boxes) and that is about as close to it as it got. Maybe Kay was watching TV at the time.....
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I use laptops for work, and I'm still stuck with 1024x768 - lame PC worldview. The only time in the last decade and a half that my organization decided to get better-than-lowest-common-denominator screens was when they decided that 640x480 with 24-bit color was *much* cooler than 800x600 with 8-bit color. My wife just bought herself a new laptop, and it's something like 1024x768 or 1024x800, but that's because she wanted the under 3 pound model with the ~10-inch screen.
Desktops? My Sun-3 back in the 1980s had 1152x900, just marginally over a megapixel. My home desktop uses 1024x768 on the motherboard graphics, so I'll probably need to buy a graphics card when I get around to buying a flat-panel monitor. (And the Sun-2 in my attic was also only 1024x768 :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Many laptops are so depressed at reaching 40yrs old the are setting themselves on fire! Its so sad and unnecessary.
Talk to your laptop today
Its not the years, its the mileage
You little whipper snappers have it easy.
When I was a little boy.......and dinosaurs roamed the earth....laptops were made of stone. We called them abacuses back then...and it was so heavy you had to train for months before you could put one on your lap...then they got weak and started coming up with lap reinforcing tables....Luxury!!!
GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The movie "2001" had "laptops" that seemed to work. But they were actually built into the tables they sat on and had film projected onto their screens from the rear. And the original Star Trek had a portable slate-like device.
Kay described the Dynabook in the classic PARC publication "Personal Dynamic Media", which was around 1972-1973. There's a picture of a woman stretched out on the grass typing on a laptop-like device. It's a cardboard mockup, but the form factor was about that of a heavy laptop of the late 1990s. Kay called the Xerox Alto the "Interim Dynabook"; it did what the Dynabook was supposed to do, but took about 12U of rack space and a big CRT to do it.
This makes me feel very old. I got a tour of PARC in 1975, met Kay, and saw the first Alto (they were making their own CRTs and were having trouble getting a uniform phosphor coating on the tube), the first networked laser printer, the first Ethernet (described as "an Alohanet with a captive ether"), and the first Smalltalk. It's interesting what Kay thought computers were going to be for. He though that graphical discrite-event simulation was going to be a big deal. He had a demo of a hospital simulation, where patients entered, went through Admitting, Waiting Room, Treatment, Ward, Cashier, Discharge, etc., and you could click on the patient icons (I remember "I a victim of Bowlerthumb") as a message.
None of us thought that the uses of computers would become so banal.
My uncle, a crackerjack computer salesman in Silicon Valley, with his suit, slicked-back hair, big tie and a piece of luggage under his arm showing us 'the future'. It was an Osborne I think. We looked on in awe as he removed the keyboard and we saw the 3 inch monochrome screen. He typed in a couple things and text scrolled by. My uncle was a GOD AMONG MEN. He told us how businesses would one day equip every employee with one of these to do spreadsheets and such while on the road.
My mom said "who wants to bring spreadsheets with them?" (She still carried big boxes of punch-cards home sometimes and would give me a few extras to play with. Not from the box though--she made it clear that I couldn't mess with those at all or the whole thing would be ruined.)
My uncle went on to build a small company that supplied parts to manufacturers in the Valley. Until people figured out that you could make them cheaper in Asia. Or just order a shipping container full of parts.
Nowadays he specializes in obsolete programming for some company. It seems all his business plans were rooted in early 80s tech. At least he found a niche.
My laptop history:
1) At the age of 11, fervently desiring a WinBook that was shown in all those awesome computer ads in PC Magazine. It had interchangeable CD-drive bays and a floppy drive built in (very, very important). I continued to be frustrated with my parents' 486-33 instead.
2) Graduating high school, received gift of IBM ThinkPad R31 - PIII 1.13GHz. Lasted 6 years, then power supply died last year. It was a workhorse.
3) Hand-me-down 17" 9-pound Dell Centrino 1.4 GHz with 2GB RAM. It was a clunky brick.
4) Last week, bought new-version MacBook Pro 15". 2.4GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, etc. etc. Rumors of shiny screens killing babies are greatly exaggerated. Finally consolidating 3 computers into one, getting rid of the rest. This is the ideal computer at this time, from a guaranteed non-fanboy, having only owned this computer for a week. It's just quality.
The laptop is finally doing everything! Go miniaturization.
"!"
Here's looking forward to your second centennial!
The Osborne I in 1981, was the first portable, arguably a "laptop". However, I remember both the Osborne and the TRS80-100. Neither of which I would have wanted in my lap for more than, oh ..., 10 minutes. I consider the NEC Ultralite, about 1989, to be the first "true" laptop. All the other predecessors were simply portables. Although the TRS80-100 could arguably be called a laptop, due to a slightly better design than the osborne. So, I can't say you're right or wrong. It's really more a bit of how you want to define laptop and personal opinion.
However, I want to know where I can buy what the author of this article is smoking. It's some bad -a** sh**! Forty years! ROFLMAO. Hell, I grew up in Poughkeepsie (ie IBM home town), and the high school got it's first desktop from IBM about the time I entered HS, and that wasn't any 40 years ago! I didn't know trolls were allowed to write articles! Wow. Maybe I'm dreaming that I'm awake, or maybe I'm awake dreaming I'm asleep dreaming, I'm awake, or ...
The first laptop I ever remember was a cute little portable computer made by Epson America in the early 80s called the HX-20.
It had a four line LCD display, a full keyboard, it ran a tiny basic, and supported a microcasette data drive and micro printer as plug-in expansions. There were also tools for simple word processing, games, and assembly language programming. It could use it's LCD for surprisingly interesting graphics, and it had external ports for centronics parallel and RS-232 serial interfaces.
It's claim to fame, was that it was the machine used by Cal Tech students to hijack the score board at the Rose Bowl one year. An act that went down in Cal Tech mischief infamy for all time.
There may have been earlier laptop computers around, but I don't remember any...
For real "laptops" the Grid Compass(but not battery powered) and the DG One (which is recognizably modern looking). Great shaving mirror. The 80x25 LCD display was made up of four panels because they couldn't make a single panel large enough...
I had the pleasure of playing with both of these and many other weird pre-pc clone boxs back in the early 80's (porting UCSD p-system).
Andy Andy
The First Laptop computer was the GRiD Compass ( 1982), Mt. View, CA.
There are two that come to mind that had a similar form factor to a modern laptop and that had more or less the capabilities of a full PC (as opposed to a calculator). You could count the TRS-80 model 100 if you accepted a text only display and no floppy disk (1983). If you wanted an IBM PC compatible with CGA graphics and floppy, the Data General-One is pretty obviously the same style as most modern laptops. Pictures here (1984).
So, it's been since 1983 or 1984 depending upon what you call a laptop computer.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, /. story about forgotten lore -
over many a quaint and curious
While I nodded, nearly napping, then my keys awoke with tapping,
As of one gently typing, typing on my laptop keyboard.
"'T is some poster," I muttered, "speculating about his child he does not have. The one, who was Neverborn."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Laptops are available in all size, weight and purpose, but they all have one common origin: Alan Kay's Dynabook. A former Xerox PARC computer scientist, drew up the idea of a portable computer in 1968, when computers still weighed over 100 pounds. a former Xerox PARC computer scientist, drew up the idea of a portable computer in 1968, when computers still weighed over 100 pounds and ate punch cards. His definition of the perfect, portable computer was a very thin, highly dynamic device that weighed no more than two pounds. All information related to computer and laptops for buying and selling on www.made-from-india.com
So we're trying to pin down the creation of the laptop on some guy's doodles from the 60s. He didn't even get to 'officially' propose the idea to Xerox until the 70s, and even then it wasn't reasonably possible with the available technology. There's a reason why the first 'real' laptops didn't appear until the 80s. Come on, surely having a computer that's small enough to carry around yet still contains all the functionality of a full sized computer is far from a unique idea. It's just a vision for the future. Like the human transportation tubes in Futurama. Who knows, in 40 years time...
I live only for the present moment, there is no other moment.
I'm FOURTY!!!!!
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2000 years?
I hereby invent what will be known as the "virtual workstation"
This is a computer that will exist only in augmented reality. It can take on any form and can be floated or summoned to any point in augmented reality space that you wish. It can be used just like a real laptop or desktop except it doesn't physically exist, so you don't need to lug any objects around, just put on your AR glasses and go. Some may be installed on your AR window device while others will merely be instances of web applications or remote desktop applications with their GUIs floating in AR space.
There, I just invented that. Now in 40 years you shall make a Slashdot article celebrating my great accomplishment as the father of this awesome technology that has changed to way we compute.
And I'm already writing up a patent application so don't try any funny stuff. You know they'll grant it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Alan designed SmallTalk to run on the Dynabook and other PARC computers. It was the second Object Oriented language after the Norwegian Simula. In some sense SmallTalk is still ahead of current OO languages which mostly descend from UNIX-C (C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, Motif, Groovy, Ruby, etc) [OK there are better boutique alternatives like Eiffel]. What we call the operating system, then a subset called the machine environment, was implemented in SmallTalk, so you have uniform UI and programming behavior from top to bottom in the Dynabook. This wasnt really attempted in the commercial world until Steve Job's NeXTStep OS. Also SmallTalk was interpreted with dynamic method binding, i.e you didnt have to know everthing about a class in advance of using it. People still argue about this versus strong typing decades later.
I worked at RS at the time of the model 100 and nothing else I can remember was closer to the weight and general dimensions of a modern laptop as the model 100. There were definitely more powerful "portables" at the time that were arguably more *functionally* equivalent to a modern laptop; but they existed in a weight/form-factor that doesn't have a counterpart today.
Sounds a bit like an ancestor to the Atari Portfolio.
I still have mine, with a bunch of accessories, and it's still fun to play with.
I may have to share this planet with animals, but I'm doing my damn best to eat every last one of them.
You're half right. It's been so long. I was thinking of the 4p (the luggable). Not the tiny 100 with 8 rows of 40 characters (hardly a laptop, and more of an oversized pim). I had to go out and find a picture. I do remember them, though. But with everything else to remember - I may not recall things precisely always. One of the downsides of typing at 2am, when I should be sleeping.