the laptop computer (2)

the laptop computer (2)

History

As the personal computer began to become feasible in the early 1970s, the idea of a portable

personal computer followed; in particular, a "personal, portable information manipulator" was

envisioned by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968[6] and described in his 1972 paper as the

"Dynabook"[7].

The first commercially available portable computer appeared 9 years later, in 1981. The

Osborne 1 weighed 23.5 pounds (10.7 kg). It had no battery, a tiny 5" CRT screen and dual 5¼"

single-density floppy drives. In the same year the first laptop-sized portable computer, the

Epson HX-20, was announced[8]. The Epson had a LCD screen, a rechargeable battery and a

calculator-size printer in a 1.6 kg (4 pounds) enclosure.

The first notebook using the clamshell design (which is utilized today by almost all laptops)

appeared in 1982: the $8150 GRiD Compass 1100 was purchased by NASA and the military

among others. The Gavilan SC, released in 1983, was the first notebook that was marketed using

the term "laptop".

From 1983 onwards:

Several new input methods were introduced: the touchpad (Gavilan SC, 1983), the pointing stick

(IBM ThinkPad 700, 1992) and handwriting recognition (Linus Write-Top[9], 1987).

CPUs became designed specifically for laptops (Intel i386SL, 1990), targeting low power

consumption, and were augmented with dynamic power management features (Intel SpeedStep

and AMD PowerNow!).

Displays reached VGA resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT 286) and 256-color screens by 1993

(PowerBook 165c), progressing quickly to millions of colors and high resolutions.

High-capacity hard drives and optical storage (CD-ROM followed by DVD) became available in

laptops soon after their introduction to the desktops.

Early laptops often had proprietary and incompatible architectures, operating systems and

bundled applications.

article source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laptop