The Laptop Celebrates Its 40th Year 88
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.'"
Re:Doh, Vapourware (Score:3, Interesting)
1983's TRS-80 Model 100 would like to have a word with you.
40th anniversary? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I remember (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Bzzt. Wrong answer! (Score:2, Interesting)
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 remember... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Doh, Vapourware (Score:1, Interesting)
Grid Compass was released in 1982. Its display wasn't a plasma, it was electroluminescent (whatever happened to that tech?).
Re:40th anniversary? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Alan's 1972 paper, "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages", is still very interesting today:
http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf
To be fair, he did mention that there were likely to be ads and that one of the first applications that users would write would probably be something to block them! That is about as banal as you can get.
Everyone else seems to be missing the point, here. Of course there were similar discriptions of the laptop idea in both fiction and scientific speculation. What made Alan's particular "vaporware" different is that he figured out when the technology for the hardware would be available at a reasonable cost (mid 1980s) and that the real problem would be the software - you wouldn't want to run ITS on them.
So he started actual work on the software, first on his Flex hardware and later on the Xerox Alto. This isn't the 40th anniversary of the first commercial release of the laptop (Grid, as others have pointed out) but of the start of the first laptop project. Everybody else was just talking about stuff like that.