Comments on: Laptop (R)Evolution: Where size does matter… A whole lot!

By: Joshi

Joshi — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:56:00 +0000

wooth! I remember a time where i worked on tha fabulous IBM Portable PC 5155.
Nice post, very nice. where do you have the information about the new Vaio from?

Best Regards from Austria

By: bob

bob — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:03:20 +0000

i actually remember USING the one in pic #4 (IBM Portable PC 5155)
was my dad’s

By: db

db — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:20:11 +0000

what about the HP 110 series? a very short review is here:
http://oldcomputers.net/hp110.html

i got one used and it was nice. the lead-acid battery lasted forever when new and the dam thing still worked when i ebayed it about 4 years ago. it communicated through HPIL, which although a proprietary HP serial system, was common in that it was used by the Hp 41, 71, 75, and 110 systems and there are HPILHPIB and HPILRS232 converters.

By: tory

tory — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:57:33 +0000

Those laptops, though huge, work for a long time. I’m my parents oldest kid and they still have a laptop that they bought when I was a baby. We only use it for the kids as their “first computer” when they are really little, and for cd computer games. amazingly enough, It has survived six different young kids using it and still works just fine, as opposed to theese newer laptops that break after a few years

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:21:59 +0000

Wanna learn some history? Talk to some old people!

The above posts are right – the Kaypro II is universally regarded as the first *usable* portable and there’s no way any “evolution of portable computing” article is complete without it. Seriously, that’s like leaving the Model T out of a history of the car article.

Also, in 1989 the Mac was no newcomer. (The first Mac in 1984 was called ‘luggable’ and was half the size of IBM’s allegedly portable 5155)

The Mac Portable was insignificant. Apple’s big laptop advance was the Powerbook 100 series – in 1991 it looked like the laptops we use today – it weighed well under 3 kilos, had the keyboard and track device in the right places, clamshell case, removable battery and the whole deal! OK, it had a trackball, a 16 MHz processor and early ones had a B+W display, but its basic design is the first example of the one we use now.

By: Tim Poston

Tim Poston — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:49:28 +0000

Darwinian evolution among animals is not always “from the tiny to the large,” though the very first — and still the vast majority — were tiny.
Very often the early forms in a new niche are big, like dragonflies with 30″ wingspans: they got small later when other ways of flying competed better at the big sizes. Birds cannot be as small as today’s dragonflies, so the sub-niche ‘flying+small’ is good for insects. Dragonflies can be as big as pigeons, but lose out to them.
Laptops have selection pressure for portability.
Supercomputers don’t.

By: DrCracee

DrCracee — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:53:50 +0000

I agree with JRatz. The Kaypro definitely belongs in the mix. An oscilloscope that could think.

But good on ya for including the TRS 80’s or, as we called them when they would randomly erase everything in their memory, the Trash 80’s.

By: JRatz

JRatz — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:37:01 +0000

Odd how someone mentioned a Mr.Kay who worked and did a paper at IBM, yet nowhere did I see my old pride and joy of CP/M the “KAYPRO II”.
A few tweaks and it became one awesome machine.
9” green CRT, but the whole suite of software was truly integrated and did indeed work.
Ahhh the memories.
I think i just dated myself.

ATB
Jack

By: Reviews New Gadget

Reviews New Gadget — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:11:13 +0000

i like the Viao Transparan, how much that price

By: Myself248

Myself248 — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:57:23 +0000

Hilarious to see one of my photos used here, as I’ve owned also a Model 100 clone, and a Minisport. I should point out that the Minisport (and all the other laptops of the time) had a monochrome display panel, driven by a “CGA” display adapter. Connection of an external CRT would yield color images, but all the user got on the LCD was shades of blue. Zenith got 7 or 8 distinguishable shades out of that display, but you wouldn’t want to try to read a graph with more than 2 or 3 “colored” lines.

LCDs of the era were very slow, and until active-matrix TFT was developed, mouse cursors vanished when moving. GRiD got it right with the red gas-plasma displays, which featured stunning contrast ratios and response times. Compaq used some on their portables too, and then they disappeared.

The next thing? Well, let’s look at where we are now. Netbooks have as much processing power and storage as mainstream laptops did just a year or three ago. Where they fail is screen real estate. Cellphones are a few more years behind in CPU and memory, but tiny screens remain the problem. Sony leads the way in packing more pixels per inch and making it look good, but even the current state of affairs is pushing the visual acuity of all but the youngest users.

The way out of this morass is to either change the way information is presented so that screen size isn’t so important (unlikely), or to pack more display into a smaller size, like some of the dual-head laptop prototypes we’ve been seeing. I wouldn’t be surprised if ultra-dense-pixel-pitch displays start coming with glasses, so things like the Vaio UX and OQO can continue along their evolutionary paths without leaving the majority of their users behind.

Or we could, you know, just carry normal-sized machines and live with it. Which is what I suspect will happen for the reasonably foreseeable future, at least until a good wireless head-mounted display (bluetooth 3.0 might enable this?) makes screens as we know them obsolete. I’ll be digesting my meal pills while jetpacking to work and dictating into my full natural-language speech recognition system by then, though.