Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Laptops: A Buyer's Guide

By Craig Stephenson

Laptops have replaced the briefcase as today's portable office. In every city in nearly every country laptops are as common among businesspersons as yellow legal pads and pens were twenty years ago. In fact, with the Internet and size capacities of today's laptop, it is possible for anyone to do business anywhere in the world regardless of whether they have an office or not.

With the advent of home computer systems being marketed to many, the late 1970s saw the emergence of smaller designs in computer hardware. Laptops, themselves, were a byproduct of the push for smaller more portable computers. The technology, though, wasn't quite what it is today and as a result many of the older laptops were nothing more than a bulky, heavyweight, portable desktop computer. CRT displays, large circuit boards and weighty, short-life battery packs were the standard in almost all cases.

Most experts in the history of computers give credit to William Moggridge as the designer of the first laptops. His company, Grid Systems, produced a portable computer for NASA to use with its fledgling space shuttle program called the Grid Compass. Compared to other computer models, the Grid Compass was light and featured 340K of bubble memory. This ancestor of modern laptops was put into production in 1979.

An argument for the first laptop could be made for the Gavilan portable computer. Laptops, of course, are built to fit on the lap of the person using it and the Manny Fernandez's Gavilan computer did just that. This computer was specifically offered to executives in 1983 as an alternative to the bulkier, non-portable systems that most were using in their offices at that time.

One portable computer model, invented in 1981, contends for the role of first laptop. The Osborne 1, a 24-pound computer featuring a five-inch screen, two 5.25-inch floppy drives and a modem port, sold for $1795. While the Osborne 1 looks more like a medium-sized airline carry-on bag, it does qualify as a laptop due to the fact that it is portable and features a fold-in keyboard.

Laptops today are compact in size and stuffed with high-end functionality not even seen in some desktops from a few years ago. Prices of these laptops are low enough that almost anyone can afford them. Inside the casing of modern laptops rests high-storage solid state drives, lightning-fast processors and more RAM than most desktop systems had even five years previous. The most impressive characteristics, though, are the size and weight of today's laptops. Most weigh in between three and ten pounds and feature bright LCD or plasma screens that can produce millions of colors.

Today's laptops owe their heritage to those larger, heavier beasts that were available decades ago. Their beauty, size and power would be non-existent and we would still be sitting chained to our desktops. Without those first endeavors into the world of portability, today's laptops would not exist. - 22787

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