Speaker 1: Welcome to text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And when I first
Speaker 1: started out in the work world, sit down, we're going
Speaker 1: to have a story time, it was a little bit
Speaker 1: of a different landscape. Now. First of all, I was
Speaker 1: not a podcaster. That was not my original profession. My
Speaker 1: first steady job was working for a human resources consulting firm.
Speaker 1: Have you guys seen the film Office Space. If you have,
Speaker 1: you might remember the Bob's in that movie. Those were
Speaker 1: a pair of consultants who came into the company in
Speaker 1: the film in a tech in order to figure out
Speaker 1: which employees could be downsized. In other words, who's gonna
Speaker 1: get fired? Well, I used to say that I essentially
Speaker 1: worked for the Bob's, but that's probably being a little unfair.
Speaker 1: But hey, that's that's neither here nor there, right So anyway,
Speaker 1: more importantly for this episode, back then, I worked on designing, formatting, editing, proofing,
Speaker 1: and producing various documents. I had a pretty fancy title,
Speaker 1: but I was really more or less a copy editor.
Speaker 1: Not that copy editors aren't fancy, they're incredibly important. But
Speaker 1: the title they that I was given at that you know,
Speaker 1: consulting firm made it sound like I was a manager
Speaker 1: or something. But to do my work, I was assigned
Speaker 1: a big, old desktop computer. It was a decent machine
Speaker 1: for the time being, but it was also stationary. Right.
Speaker 1: You weren't supposed to pick the thing up and take
Speaker 1: it with you at the end of the day, so
Speaker 1: I never had to bring work home with me. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not that laptop computers were rare even back in
Speaker 1: the ancient days when I first started working, but the
Speaker 1: average office tended to rely more on desktop computers than
Speaker 1: laptops at that point, with only really important folks like
Speaker 1: senior consultants at my company having laptops, and that was
Speaker 1: so that they could bring their work with them wherever
Speaker 1: they went. Flash forward to a decade ago or so,
Speaker 1: I was working at how Stuff Works dot com, and boy,
Speaker 1: howdy do I miss those guys. Not only is that
Speaker 1: where this podcast got its start, it's also where I
Speaker 1: got my first work laptop. Now that one I could
Speaker 1: bring home with me. Right, I could bring the laptop
Speaker 1: with me if I needed to, made it much easier
Speaker 1: to work on any particularly tricky articles that I was
Speaker 1: writing at the time. But on the flip side, you
Speaker 1: could argue that I was suddenly able to put in
Speaker 1: way more hours in a salaried job that I would
Speaker 1: have if the computers were still metaphorically locked two desks
Speaker 1: in an office. But whether you view it as a
Speaker 1: pause of or a negative, the laptop at that point
Speaker 1: had become standard office gear, largely replacing the towers and
Speaker 1: base units of desktops of the past, and that brings
Speaker 1: us to today's topic. I wanted to talk about the
Speaker 1: origin and evolution of laptop computers. Now, clearly we won't
Speaker 1: be talking about every variation. That would be insane. The
Speaker 1: series would end up being one episodes long, and while
Speaker 1: I enjoyed walking down the path of PlayStation for four episodes,
Speaker 1: that was already pushing it. So this is more of
Speaker 1: an overview of how laptops first came into being, when
Speaker 1: they first started getting popular, and then we're going to
Speaker 1: talk in a second episode about some pretty dramatic shifts
Speaker 1: and form factor and use cases over the years. So
Speaker 1: this episode is going to really be about how we
Speaker 1: kind of arrived at the standard form factor of what
Speaker 1: we consider a laptop to be and and how that
Speaker 1: was established. And in our next episode we'll look at
Speaker 1: how various companies have innovated around that basic concept and
Speaker 1: the effort to kind of differentiate themselves and also add
Speaker 1: new features and capabilities. So to talk about laptops, we
Speaker 1: also have to pull back a bit and talk about
Speaker 1: the shift towards personal computers, because the two are very
Speaker 1: closely related. The first purely electronic computer for general purpose computing,
Speaker 1: as opposed to a machine that could really only do
Speaker 1: one type of processing was the appropriately named Electronic Numerical
Speaker 1: Integrator and Computer or an EAC computer, so famous that
Speaker 1: Michael Simbello recorded a song about it for the movie
Speaker 1: Flash Dance. Hang on a second, I'm getting a note here.
Speaker 1: Um huh, Well, according to this note that I just
Speaker 1: handed to myself, the whole song thing is a lie.
Speaker 1: But for those of you out there who are as
Speaker 1: old as I am, you get the joke right. Anyway.
Speaker 1: ENIAC was not the first computer, mind you, but it
Speaker 1: was the first electronic one, or largely agreed to be
Speaker 1: the first electronic computer. There's even some disagreement on that matter,
Speaker 1: but there were older computers. Those were electro mechanical machines.
Speaker 1: But Eniac was in itself a huge machine, pretty much
Speaker 1: taking up all of the wall space of a basement
Speaker 1: that measured fifty ft by thirty feet or fifteen meters
Speaker 1: by nine meters. Eniac had nearly twenty thousand vacuum tubes
Speaker 1: as part of its wiring. Because this was a time
Speaker 1: before the transistor, it was not, by any definition at all,
Speaker 1: a portable machine. Now we got better at building computers,
Speaker 1: and components like the transistor would help immensely, and over
Speaker 1: time we were able to miniaturize the various elements debate
Speaker 1: computers work. We created circuit boards, and then we eventually
Speaker 1: moved on to relatively tiny processors. Things that used to
Speaker 1: take up several square feet of space or sometimes cubic
Speaker 1: feet of space now could be fit on a few
Speaker 1: chips on a circuit board, but even so that took
Speaker 1: a while. The Eniac project began during World War two.
Speaker 1: Three decades later, the computers were smaller, but still frequently
Speaker 1: the size of a desk or workstation, or sometimes a
Speaker 1: couple of them. There was no such thing as a
Speaker 1: personal computer. Yet the machines were too large and way
Speaker 1: too expensive for that, and the applications were mostly restricted
Speaker 1: to scientific research and business applications like accounting analysis, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. In fact, there were two general classifications
Speaker 1: of computers by the nineteen seventies, though people weren't necessarily
Speaker 1: talking about them in these terms. At that time. You
Speaker 1: had main frame computers. These were larger, centralized computers, typically
Speaker 1: housed in their own rooms within a business or research facility,
Speaker 1: and typically they were looked after by very highly trained technicians,
Speaker 1: so there was a barrier between user and machine. They
Speaker 1: were intended for multiple users, generally, and either those users
Speaker 1: were accessing the main frame from dumb terminals meaning a
Speaker 1: keyboard in some form of output that themselves had no
Speaker 1: computing power. They just connected back to this central computer,
Speaker 1: or you were sharing time on the same physical device,
Speaker 1: typically through using those highly paid technicians. These main frames
Speaker 1: were really expensive. I mean, it wasn't unheard of for
Speaker 1: a mainframe computer to set a company back a million bucks,
Speaker 1: and that is a princely some The other category would
Speaker 1: be mini computers. These were smaller, but not necessarily tiny. Uh.
Speaker 1: Defining the boundary between a main frame and a mini
Speaker 1: computer is somewhat subjective. They also were typically multiple user computers.
Speaker 1: They weren't necessarily meant to be a single individuals computer,
Speaker 1: but they were smaller than their main frame counterparts. They
Speaker 1: were also less expensive. You could swoop up one of
Speaker 1: these babies for a cool hundred grand or so. See
Speaker 1: either they're practically giving them away. By the mid nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: miniaturization had reached a point where a computer could fit
Speaker 1: on a desktop rather than taking up the space of
Speaker 1: an entire desk, or two desks or a dozen desks.
Speaker 1: This would start to get us into the era of
Speaker 1: micro computers. Micro Computers is kind of another term for
Speaker 1: personal computer in a sense the meaning is slightly different,
Speaker 1: but effectively personal computers are micro computers. They're a subset,
Speaker 1: you could argue. So these were still machine beings found
Speaker 1: largely in research centers and big corporations, not in the
Speaker 1: home at this time, so computer manufacturers were building machines
Speaker 1: with that in mind. They weren't building for the home user,
Speaker 1: but that would slowly change thanks to some computer enthusiasts
Speaker 1: who saw an opportunity in vour. A company called micro
Speaker 1: Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or MYTHS changed the game forever
Speaker 1: in computers. This company was founded by a group of
Speaker 1: hobbyists in the late nineteen sixties. These were electronics enthusiasts
Speaker 1: and professionals, and their whole business was selling kits to
Speaker 1: other hobbyists. And originally those kids were for stuff like
Speaker 1: home radio transmitters and model rocket systems, thus the telemetry.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen seventy four they put together a kit
Speaker 1: that would let hobbyists build their very own programmable computer.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't think of it as a computer by modern standards,
Speaker 1: but it was the computer, and they named it the
Speaker 1: Altaire eight hundred. They sold these kits for just four
Speaker 1: hundred forty dollars, and they got a lot of publicity
Speaker 1: from a cover page story in the magazine Popular Electronics.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you were to adjust for inflation,
Speaker 1: that fourty kit would set you back about two thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars in today's money. And keep in mind
Speaker 1: it was a kit. You would still have to actually
Speaker 1: build the thing yourself. Now, the l tear didn't exactly
Speaker 1: become the must have gadget of nine, but it did
Speaker 1: help usher in the personal computer era the micro computer era.
Speaker 1: It allowed people like the Two Steve's those being jobs
Speaker 1: in Wozniak to get their own computer business going. In
Speaker 1: case you aren't aware, that was a little company called Apple. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: over at IBM, the focus was still primarily on corporate customers.
Speaker 1: That was a big part of IBM's business. In fact,
Speaker 1: that was IBM's business, was selling products to other big companies.
Speaker 1: It would be a couple of years before IBM would
Speaker 1: try its hand designing a personal computer for a more
Speaker 1: mainstream customer base, like and an actual consumer level computer
Speaker 1: as opposed to a commercial computer. But it is at
Speaker 1: IBM where our story about laptops really gets its start.
Speaker 1: IBM had identified a market for computers that was underserved,
Speaker 1: and not again the average consumer. Instead, we're talking about
Speaker 1: professionals who weren't necessarily connected to a big corporation or
Speaker 1: research facility that has access to like a mainframe machine
Speaker 1: or typical mini computer. So these were statisticians and engineers
Speaker 1: and analysts and other people who would routinely work with
Speaker 1: big numbers and complicated calculations. They could really use something
Speaker 1: with the capabilities of a computer, a programmable machine, but
Speaker 1: they weren't working at places where those sort of resources
Speaker 1: were readily available. So IBM set out to make a
Speaker 1: machine that the company could market to those professionals. To
Speaker 1: do so, IBM created a portable computer called the IBM.
Speaker 1: This was an early example of an IBM mini computer. Now,
Speaker 1: this wasn't a laptop computer by today's standards, certainly, but
Speaker 1: it was a portable computer. In fact, it's pretty much
Speaker 1: acknowledged as the world's first portable computer. However, when it
Speaker 1: comes to the word portable, your mileage may vary. See,
Speaker 1: the IBM was no lightweight device. In fact, it tipped
Speaker 1: the scales at a hefty fifty five pounds. That's just
Speaker 1: under twenty five and yeah, that's heavy. You would not
Speaker 1: want this on your lap for very long at all,
Speaker 1: or you lose all feeling in your legs. But compared
Speaker 1: to an IBM computer of the same capabilities from just
Speaker 1: a few years earlier, it was positively smelt. An IBM
Speaker 1: computer from the late sixties that would have the same
Speaker 1: processing capabilities as the nineteen IBM would have been the
Speaker 1: size of two full desks and it would have weighed
Speaker 1: half a ton, So this was definitely an achievement. The
Speaker 1: IBM was an all in one computer. It included a
Speaker 1: display that was built into the body of the computer itself,
Speaker 1: so the case had everything. The case had the display,
Speaker 1: it had the keyboard. Calling it a display, however, is
Speaker 1: a pretty grand thing because it wasn't exactly large. In fact,
Speaker 1: the screen size was just five inches or twelve point
Speaker 1: seven centimeters on the diagonal, so you wouldn't be playing
Speaker 1: Doo Maternal on one of these things. In fact, they
Speaker 1: could not show graphics like that. The screen could display
Speaker 1: standard characters, but it wasn't designed for more advanced graphics.
Speaker 1: The width of the display allowed for just sixty four
Speaker 1: characters per line, with sixteen lines maximum on a screen,
Speaker 1: so it had a height of sixteen characters and a
Speaker 1: width of sixty four characters, so it was definitely limited.
Speaker 1: The body of the computer also had a keyboard complete
Speaker 1: with a number pad built into it, so this was
Speaker 1: again a solid piece, one piece computer. And you if
Speaker 1: you imagine an old computer case, you know the kind
Speaker 1: that would sit horizontally on a desk, Just imagine poking
Speaker 1: out the front is a keyboard and then you have, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the rest of the cases behind where the
Speaker 1: keyboard is, and it goes up a bit on the
Speaker 1: upper left side above the keyboard that's where the little
Speaker 1: display is. You can do a Google image search for
Speaker 1: the IBM to get a look at this thing. For storage,
Speaker 1: the IBM had a tape drive. This was one of
Speaker 1: several forms of data storage in the computer era. With tapes,
Speaker 1: computers would store information onto reels of magnetic tape. The
Speaker 1: specific version of the IBM fifty one hundred was the
Speaker 1: d C three hundred cartridge drive. Those cartridges held three
Speaker 1: hundred feet or about nine of tape. Then the tape
Speaker 1: itself measured a quarter inch wide or point six centimeters.
Speaker 1: It can hold up to two hundred four bytes of
Speaker 1: data per cartridge. All right, let's do a quick refresher
Speaker 1: on bites too. A bit is a single unit of
Speaker 1: machine information, and it can be either a zero or one.
Speaker 1: You can think of it like uh light switch. It's
Speaker 1: either flipped off or on. A collection of eight bits
Speaker 1: is a bite. This is something IBM had a really
Speaker 1: big hand in establishing. But that's a matter for another podcast.
Speaker 1: A kilobyte is one thousand bytes, though in terms of memory,
Speaker 1: particularly in this era, we're really talking about one thousand,
Speaker 1: twenty four bytes. To explain, why would have me go
Speaker 1: off on yet another tangent. So we're just going to
Speaker 1: ignore that for now, But just know that these cartridges
Speaker 1: could hold up to two d four thousand bytes of data.
Speaker 1: That's not that much. Even though two four thousand sounds
Speaker 1: like a lot, it's not much at all, especially when
Speaker 1: you consider that was on three hundred feet of tape.
Speaker 1: In addition to that cartridge port, the IBM also had
Speaker 1: a printer i O port io means input output, So
Speaker 1: you physically connect the printer to this beheamoth of a
Speaker 1: portable computer with a cable. I'll have a little bit
Speaker 1: more to say about the IBM in a second, and
Speaker 1: don't worry, I'm not gonna give every laptop the full
Speaker 1: treatment like this. This is just to establish some baselines.
Speaker 1: But before we get into that, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: What was powering the IBM under the hood, right, What
Speaker 1: was actually acting as the processor? Well, back in those days,
Speaker 1: we weren't necessarily talking about CPUs the way we do
Speaker 1: to day. In fact, it doesn't have a CPU the
Speaker 1: way we would think of at all for modern computers.
Speaker 1: If you were to open up an old IBM, you'd
Speaker 1: find a circuit board kind of mounted upside down. You'd
Speaker 1: actually have to turn it over, and you would find
Speaker 1: fifteen microchips mounted on that circuit board, and collectively those
Speaker 1: chips acted as the computer's processor. So as such, it's
Speaker 1: a little tricky to talk about the IBMFE using modern
Speaker 1: computing terms. It doesn't really fit. Plus, IBM offered up
Speaker 1: a few variations of this particular computer, but the least
Speaker 1: expensive model of the IBM had a clock speed of
Speaker 1: one point nine Mega hurts. And just in case that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean anything to you if you didn't listen to
Speaker 1: the PlayStation episodes, I'm going to explain that really quickly.
Speaker 1: A processor's clock speed tells you how many steps of
Speaker 1: instructions the processor can complete in a second. Uh These
Speaker 1: steps are called cycles in processor speak, and a hurt
Speaker 1: is one cycle per second. A Mega hurts is a
Speaker 1: million cycles per second. So essentially this means the IBM
Speaker 1: could perform one point nine million steps of instructions per second.
Speaker 1: And just a reminder, instructions can be really simple or
Speaker 1: they can be really complicated, So a simple instruction might
Speaker 1: have only a couple of steps, Complicated instructions could have
Speaker 1: lots and lots of steps. And all these terms still
Speaker 1: hold true. Today, if you have a machine with a
Speaker 1: three point for giga hurts processor, that processor is capable
Speaker 1: of completing three point four billion steps of instructions every second.
Speaker 1: And don't worry, software developers have created programs that have
Speaker 1: way more complicated steps to them. So while we've seen
Speaker 1: processor speeds skyrocket over the years, the demands of software
Speaker 1: have also increased. And that's part of why you might
Speaker 1: get the feeling that a new computer isn't that much
Speaker 1: faster than older computers. It's not the fault of the
Speaker 1: machine necessarily, but rather that software that you're running is
Speaker 1: more demanding than the software you were using on older computers.
Speaker 1: In fact, several prominent people in tech have made observations
Speaker 1: that indicate software complexity pretty much negate the benefits of
Speaker 1: Moore's law. That's the general observation that computing processing capabilities
Speaker 1: typically double every eighteen to twenty four months. Alright, So
Speaker 1: the IBM a one point nine megahertz processor or the
Speaker 1: equivalent thereof the basic model also had sixteen kilobytes of memory,
Speaker 1: and the cheapest model IBM offered was for the ap
Speaker 1: L programming language. So what does a p L stand for?
Speaker 1: Get Ready, a p L stands for a programming language.
Speaker 1: So your standard sixteen kilobyte ap L version of the
Speaker 1: IBM fifty one hundred would set you back a cool
Speaker 1: eight thousand, nine hundred seventy five bucks in nineteen. If
Speaker 1: we adjust for inflation, that would be right around forty
Speaker 1: three thousand dollars today. Now that is a princely sum
Speaker 1: for a portable computer. And keep in mind that's the
Speaker 1: cheapest model. Let's say your your daddy Warbucks, right, you
Speaker 1: got all the money in the world, you want the best.
Speaker 1: So the most expensive version of the IBM had sixty
Speaker 1: four kilobytes of memory, which is, by the way, is
Speaker 1: nothing compared to today's computers, and it could support both
Speaker 1: a p L and basic programming languages. That one would
Speaker 1: cost nineteen thousand, nine hundred seventy five dollars back in
Speaker 1: nine so in today's money that would be about nineties
Speaker 1: six thousand bucks. So yeah, these things were major investments.
Speaker 1: But as I mentioned earlier, while the IBM was portable,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't fit our definition of laptop. It was more
Speaker 1: of an all in one computer that you could set
Speaker 1: up on a desk, then after you were done, you
Speaker 1: could power it down and then you could take it
Speaker 1: somewhere else if you really needed to. UM I wouldn't
Speaker 1: recommend it too much. Like I said, still pretty heavy.
Speaker 1: While the IBM would not qualify as a laptop or
Speaker 1: as a personal computer, the concept of a portable computer
Speaker 1: was intriguing and in another big company, a guy named
Speaker 1: Alan Kay had been refining a concept he had been
Speaker 1: pulling over for years. The other company in this case
Speaker 1: was Xerox, and Alan Kay would do a lot of
Speaker 1: his thinking over at Xerox, and then later Xerox established
Speaker 1: a research center, the Park Research Center, which is redundant
Speaker 1: if you know what Park stands for. But truth be known,
Speaker 1: k had been thinking about this for several years. He
Speaker 1: had really started thinking about in the late sixties, and
Speaker 1: he wanted to create a type of computer that could
Speaker 1: be used by anyone. In fact, he really wanted to
Speaker 1: develop a computer that kids could use. His dream was
Speaker 1: to make a computer that was portable, It was easy
Speaker 1: to use. It would have essentially eternal battery life, although
Speaker 1: that would require obviously recharging a battery over and over again.
Speaker 1: It would have a low requirements for processing. It would
Speaker 1: have connectativity abilities, It would have a stylus where you
Speaker 1: could have some sort of stylus input. He had a
Speaker 1: lot of ideas about what would make this ideal computer,
Speaker 1: and he had a lot of different form factors that
Speaker 1: he played around with in this concept, which I should
Speaker 1: stress was strictly a concept. It was not a practical device.
Speaker 1: He he wasn't making a prototype because the actual ability
Speaker 1: to deliver upon his vision was not there. Like he
Speaker 1: was thinking about an ideal, but there was no way
Speaker 1: of making it happen. He thought about perhaps having a
Speaker 1: slate like tablet form factor. You know, something that's a
Speaker 1: solid piece where you would have a screen mounted above
Speaker 1: a keyboard. They're all on the same plane. So think
Speaker 1: of it like if you had a tablet computer like
Speaker 1: an iPad, but on the bottom half was a physical keyboard.
Speaker 1: That was kind of the form factor he was thinking about. Uh.
Speaker 1: He did think about other ones too, but that was
Speaker 1: one that was frequently cited, and it would have a
Speaker 1: graphic user interface or g u I Gooey that's similar
Speaker 1: to Windows or Apple's OS today. In fact, Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: got a look at Xerox Gooey a few years before
Speaker 1: Apple would go on to introduce the Mac computer, and
Speaker 1: it's graphic user interface. I'm just saying, you know, anyway,
Speaker 1: researchers at Xerox would end up building a computer system
Speaker 1: called the Alto, and the Alto was not a portable computer,
Speaker 1: but it did incorporate many of K's ideas into that design.
Speaker 1: So while K was imagining this technology in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, like I said, it just wasn't realistic to
Speaker 1: build at that time, his work did guide others Xerox
Speaker 1: to create a portable computer called the note Taker that
Speaker 1: was in nineteen eight. This, like the IBM, was a
Speaker 1: pretty hefty machine. The case did have a keyboard that
Speaker 1: could fold down from the case, but think of it
Speaker 1: like a briefcase, right, and it's not a briefcase that
Speaker 1: opens all the way up. Or think of it like
Speaker 1: a standard computer tower on its side, and the front
Speaker 1: can fold down to reveal a keyboard. It's still not
Speaker 1: a clamshell design. We're not there yet. But we did
Speaker 1: have the folding unit that had the keyboard in it.
Speaker 1: Closing it would allow you to carry the note Taker
Speaker 1: like it was a suitcase, which is really more what
Speaker 1: appropriate than saying briefcase because this thing was pretty big. Again,
Speaker 1: not really a laptop. Xerox also did not produce this
Speaker 1: as a consumer computer. The note Ta care was an
Speaker 1: internal project. Reportedly, they only ever produced about ten prototypes
Speaker 1: of this. This, by the way, is a common thread
Speaker 1: in xerox is computer history. Engineers at the company would
Speaker 1: pioneer these incredible designs and they would find their way
Speaker 1: into internal Xerox architecture, like Xerox machines, but Xerox wasn't
Speaker 1: using those as products. They were using them internally at
Speaker 1: the company to develop other Xerox products. Then those same
Speaker 1: design elements would later find their way into the products
Speaker 1: of other companies. So a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 1: we think of as being standard in personal computers comes
Speaker 1: to us thanks to Xerox, but not through direct Xerox products.
Speaker 1: It's pretty weird. So the company just didn't do very
Speaker 1: much to capitalize on these developments in direct market products itself.
Speaker 1: One company that came out of all this and would
Speaker 1: end up taking the note taker design and pulling it
Speaker 1: forward was called Osbourne Computer Corporation, and it would make
Speaker 1: a consumer computer called the Osbourne One, and that was
Speaker 1: heavily influenced by the Xerox NoteTaker design. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you compare them side by side, you can definitely see
Speaker 1: the the similarities. So the Osbourne one was a commercial
Speaker 1: consumer computer, really more of still of a business computer,
Speaker 1: but it was a commercial success. It cost nearly two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars when it debuted in nine and some sites
Speaker 1: referred to it as the first true laptop. Now I
Speaker 1: take issue with that. Uh, this thing weighed nearly twenty
Speaker 1: five pounds or around eleven kilograms, and while the keyboard
Speaker 1: could fold down from the case, it still wasn't in
Speaker 1: that clamshell design that we tend to associate with the
Speaker 1: word laptop. Now, our next stop on the timeline of
Speaker 1: laptops takes us to a British industrial designer named Bill Mogridge.
Speaker 1: And Madge got an invite from an x Xerox park
Speaker 1: researcher named John Ellerby to join him and several others
Speaker 1: in forming a new computer company called Grid Big G,
Speaker 1: Big R, Little I, Big D. They formed the company
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine and they got to work. Margridge
Speaker 1: was asked specifically to contribute to a project that aimed
Speaker 1: to create a portable computer that could fit inside a suitcase.
Speaker 1: So Margridge gets to work and it was his design
Speaker 1: that would lead to the clamshell form factor that we
Speaker 1: now associate with the word laptop computer. As far as
Speaker 1: I'm able to determine, his design was the first of
Speaker 1: this style, and the computer, which was called the Grid
Speaker 1: Compass eleven oh one, would hit the market in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, one year after the Osborne one. The Compass
Speaker 1: eleven oh one had a screen that could display twenty
Speaker 1: four lines of text, each line eight characters long. It
Speaker 1: had an Intel eight eight six CPU running at eight
Speaker 1: mega hurts. It featured two hundred fifty six kilobytes of RAM.
Speaker 1: It did not have a hard drive. Uh, it did
Speaker 1: have threes of bubble memory. And that gives me a
Speaker 1: chance to explain what the heck that is, because back
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties, engineers looked at bubble memory
Speaker 1: as a possible alternative to platter based hard drives. So
Speaker 1: let's say that you've got a strip of material and
Speaker 1: that material has the ability to be magnetized. Now imagine
Speaker 1: that you apply very precise magnetic fields and you create
Speaker 1: just a little area of magnetization on that strip. So
Speaker 1: teeny tiny magnetization area. Those are the bubbles, And now
Speaker 1: let's just say that we associate a bubble of magnetization
Speaker 1: with the value of one in a binary system, and
Speaker 1: if you have a section that doesn't have magnetization to it,
Speaker 1: that's a zero. So now you can just do a
Speaker 1: series of magnetized and non magnetized sections of this material
Speaker 1: to create a record of binary information. So you could
Speaker 1: do bubble, bubble, bubble, non bubble, non bubble, non bubble,
Speaker 1: that would be one zero zero zero, But really, I
Speaker 1: guess I should add one more bubble, non bubble, one zero.
Speaker 1: That way we have a full bite. Anyway, these areas
Speaker 1: could then be moved or manipulated by an electromagnetic field.
Speaker 1: You could actually move this series of bubbles and non
Speaker 1: bubbles to go past a magnetic reader, and the magnetic
Speaker 1: reader would register whenever a bubble goes by. So the
Speaker 1: magnetic reader registers the two states bubble and non bubble,
Speaker 1: thus recording whether it's a one or a zero. And
Speaker 1: the really cool thing about this is that while you're
Speaker 1: using the electromagnetic field, while you're using these bubbles that
Speaker 1: are these little magnetized areas on a strip, there's not
Speaker 1: actually any moving parts here. You're not moving the strip
Speaker 1: past the magnetic reader. That would be more like magnetic tape.
Speaker 1: With magnetic tape, you do a very similar thing. You
Speaker 1: use a magnetic field to create magnetized areas on the tape,
Speaker 1: and non magnetized areas can represent zeros. But you have
Speaker 1: to move the tape past a reader head, right, So
Speaker 1: that's why you have cassettes or reel to reel, you
Speaker 1: have motors that have to turn those elements and pull
Speaker 1: the tape across the reader head so that you can
Speaker 1: read those zeros or ones. In this approach, you didn't
Speaker 1: have to do that. Use the electro magnetic field and
Speaker 1: these little bubbles of magnetic spaces would move past a
Speaker 1: stationary magnetic reader, So it's almost like it's virtual if
Speaker 1: you think of it that way. But again, no moving
Speaker 1: parts makes it really simple and also makes it much
Speaker 1: less likely to break down own mechanically because nothing's moving. However,
Speaker 1: one downside to this is that you were storing information
Speaker 1: in a serialized format, meaning that let's say you you
Speaker 1: filled up the bubble memory storage. You've completely filled up
Speaker 1: those kill bytes of memory inside this machine, and you're
Speaker 1: looking for a specific chunk of information that you've saved
Speaker 1: in that memory, the system would actually have to search
Speaker 1: the length of the information to find the chunk you're
Speaker 1: interested in. You would have to start at the beginning,
Speaker 1: kind of like think of a board game that is
Speaker 1: a single pathway from beginning to end. Like you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know candy Land, and you know you you're
Speaker 1: information is three quarters the way down the board. Well,
Speaker 1: you'd have to go through the whole board before you
Speaker 1: got there, and that's where things would slow down. And
Speaker 1: so that slowed down was one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: bubble memory didn't really take off. It was also really
Speaker 1: expensive and difficult to manufacture. So those components together are
Speaker 1: why we don't really talk about bubble memory anymore. But
Speaker 1: at the time people were hopeful that it could be
Speaker 1: a viable alternative to platter based hard drives. Now, in
Speaker 1: addition to bubble memory, you could connect external floppy drives
Speaker 1: to the grid Compass eleven O one and you could
Speaker 1: store data that way. You could just save it to
Speaker 1: a disk and then you'd have to insert the disc
Speaker 1: whenever you want to pull them that information back out.
Speaker 1: The grid computer was not cheat when it launched, it
Speaker 1: at a price tag of eight thousand one fifty dollars,
Speaker 1: so today that would be like twenty two thousand bucks.
Speaker 1: So Grid was really aiming at high level executives. We're
Speaker 1: talking like CEOs of big companies, and also they were
Speaker 1: hoping to get some military contracts. The US Space program
Speaker 1: would end up using some grid Compass computers and sent
Speaker 1: them up with astronauts to help with in orbit experiments.
Speaker 1: So you can just put some of those up on
Speaker 1: uh a spacecraft, fire that off into orbit, and then
Speaker 1: they were using those while orbiting the Earth. Rumor has
Speaker 1: it that the US Nuclear football a GA, the computer
Speaker 1: that holds the nuclear codes necessary to authorize a nuclear strike,
Speaker 1: once made their home on a compass even one oh
Speaker 1: and uh and that name the eleven o one. It
Speaker 1: makes you ask, what happened to the eleven hundred? Well,
Speaker 1: there never was one except in promotional material. There never
Speaker 1: was a physical eleven hundred products you could buy. Now,
Speaker 1: if I were making an argument for the first laptop,
Speaker 1: the Grid Compass eleven oh one would be my candidate.
Speaker 1: That's the one I would argue is truly the first
Speaker 1: laptop computer as we think of them today. It was
Speaker 1: way too expensive for the vast majority of people to purchase,
Speaker 1: and it was still pretty hefty. It was at nearly
Speaker 1: eleven pounds or more than five kilograms, But that clamshell
Speaker 1: form factor is the key component for me. Margaret's really
Speaker 1: hit up on something truly useful, saving space by having
Speaker 1: the keyboard screen face one another when you close the computer.
Speaker 1: Other companies would later follow that lead. Now, another computer
Speaker 1: that vised for the title of first true laptop is
Speaker 1: the EPSOM h X twenty, which looks kind of like
Speaker 1: an old word processor, which word processor is sort of
Speaker 1: a typewriter with a little bit more capability. The computer
Speaker 1: has a flatform factor. It's a thick one, but it's flat,
Speaker 1: meaning that the keyboard in the screen are on the
Speaker 1: same plane as one another. You've got a keyboard and
Speaker 1: then the screen is mounted slightly above where the keyboard
Speaker 1: is on this flat piece of hardware. They are both
Speaker 1: part of a solid case. The screen is small, it's
Speaker 1: capable of showing just four lines of text that are
Speaker 1: only twenty characters per a line, and it had built
Speaker 1: in data storage, rechargeable battery, and for a first for
Speaker 1: all portable computers, it had a built in printer. That
Speaker 1: printer could print out documents that had twenty four characters
Speaker 1: per line, as speed of forty two lines in a minute,
Speaker 1: So it's not like you would use this to print
Speaker 1: out your screenplay. I mean, do you remember back when
Speaker 1: Twitter would limit us to a hundred forty characters per tweet. Well,
Speaker 1: this printer could only print twenty four characters per line,
Speaker 1: so it's like printing on receipt paper. Then again, considering
Speaker 1: how long some receipts are, you know, I'm looking at you, CVS,
Speaker 1: I guess maybe you could print a whole screenplay that way.
Speaker 1: But anyway, like the Grid Compass, the EPs and h
Speaker 1: X twenty would launch in late two, but unlike the Compass,
Speaker 1: it was much cheaper. It was seven dollars at the time.
Speaker 1: That's around twenty one dollars in today's cash. Still expensive,
Speaker 1: but no longer in the astronomical range. And to be fair,
Speaker 1: this computer was not meant for the average home user either.
Speaker 1: Oh and the epsom also had an l c D display.
Speaker 1: That's a liquid crystal display, y'all, And that means we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about how l c D s work.
Speaker 1: But I have a feeling you might need to catch
Speaker 1: a breather before we do that, so we will jump
Speaker 1: on that after this quick break, I promise you guys
Speaker 1: a description about l c ds liquid crystal displays, and
Speaker 1: here we go. But to understand how they work and
Speaker 1: why it's important, one thing we need to talk about
Speaker 1: is polarization, specifically in terms of light. All right, So
Speaker 1: we know that light behaves both as a wave and
Speaker 1: a particle, right, So for this explanation, we're really going
Speaker 1: to focus on the wave part. So imagine a wave
Speaker 1: and you're probably imagining a curved line that moves up
Speaker 1: and down right, creating hills and troughs like a sign wave,
Speaker 1: And that's totally fine. That's that's totally cool. But light
Speaker 1: waves can be oriented in any number of directions. So
Speaker 1: let's say that you're standing perpendicular to a light wave
Speaker 1: and you can actually see that light wave like we're
Speaker 1: in this weird reality where you can do that from
Speaker 1: your perspective. That wave might be moving up and down
Speaker 1: with respect to your point of view, or it might
Speaker 1: be moving side to side so that the wave peaks
Speaker 1: point away from you and the wave troughs point towards you.
Speaker 1: So you've got parts of the wave that are further
Speaker 1: from you. In parts of the wave that are closer
Speaker 1: to you, or it could be any other orientation between
Speaker 1: those two. Now, let's say that you've created a filter,
Speaker 1: and this filter has horizontal slits, and they're really really
Speaker 1: narrow slits, so that light waves that aren't in the
Speaker 1: same alignment as those horizontal slits can't pass through the filter.
Speaker 1: They bounce off. So we're talking about the ability for
Speaker 1: light that's vibrating a specific way to pass through a
Speaker 1: specific type of hole. If the light is oriented a
Speaker 1: different way, if the waves are going up and down
Speaker 1: instead of left and right, it bounces off. So only
Speaker 1: light waves that have the same orientation as the slits
Speaker 1: and the filter can pass through the filter. This is
Speaker 1: how polarized lenses work. Now, let's say you've got two
Speaker 1: of these filters and they're both having these horizontal slits.
Speaker 1: You put one behind the other. Light with the horizontal
Speaker 1: polarization would still be able to pass through both of
Speaker 1: those filters. But let's say say we take that second
Speaker 1: filter and we turn it nine d degrees. So now
Speaker 1: instead of having horizontal slits, we have vertical slits. Filter
Speaker 1: one is horizontal filter to is vertical. Well, that means
Speaker 1: that the light that gets through filter one will not
Speaker 1: be able to get through filter two because the polarization
Speaker 1: the angle is different. So if you have a couple
Speaker 1: of pairs of polarized sunglasses, you can actually see this
Speaker 1: for yourself. You can put one pair in front of
Speaker 1: the other, and then you can slowly rotate one set,
Speaker 1: and eventually you should see things get really dark until
Speaker 1: you reach a point where light just isn't passing through
Speaker 1: at all. It just it turns black. I get this
Speaker 1: same effect when I wear my polarized sunglasses and I'm
Speaker 1: looking at my computer display at work. The polarized filter
Speaker 1: on my display screen is actually at a ninety degree
Speaker 1: angle from the polarized lenses that are in my sunglasses,
Speaker 1: so it means I have to tilt my head if
Speaker 1: I want to read the display, or you know, I
Speaker 1: would have to take my sunglasses off. But then I'm
Speaker 1: not as cool, and I'm way more cool as a
Speaker 1: guy who's wearing sunglasses inside in an office who's tilting
Speaker 1: his head way off to the side in order to
Speaker 1: look at his computer monitor. There's been talk anyway back
Speaker 1: to l c DS liquid crystals, which refers to certain
Speaker 1: materials that flow as a liquid would, but have a
Speaker 1: molecular crystalline structure can twist light under certain conditions. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, certain materials, certain liquid crystals, can reorient
Speaker 1: light wavelength vibrations. Let's get back to our two polarization
Speaker 1: filters that have that ninety degree offset. So we've got
Speaker 1: the horizontal and the vertical slits in these filters. If
Speaker 1: you have an appropriate liquid crystal solution between those two filters,
Speaker 1: you could use those liquid crystals to twist the light
Speaker 1: coming from one side so it aligns with that second
Speaker 1: filter passing through. So the light might be horizontally aligned
Speaker 1: as as it's going through filter number one, it hits
Speaker 1: the liquid crystals. The liquid crystals actually twist the polarization
Speaker 1: of that light, so now it's vertically aligned. It's not
Speaker 1: horizontally aligned anymore, which means it can actually pass through
Speaker 1: filter number two and you get light coming through. So
Speaker 1: it just you know, like the force, it all depends
Speaker 1: upon a certain point of view. So yeah, every pixel
Speaker 1: on an l c D display has this arrangement of
Speaker 1: filters and liquid crystals. Applying an electro magnetic field to
Speaker 1: the crystal sandwich between these two filters will untwist the
Speaker 1: liquid crystal. That means that the light coming from behind
Speaker 1: the screen will not realign as it passes through, and
Speaker 1: it will hit that second filter and it won't come
Speaker 1: through the second filter. This is why we sometimes call
Speaker 1: l c D displays backlit displays, because there's a light
Speaker 1: that's always coming through from behind the display. It's just
Speaker 1: it's being blocked by that second filter unless the liquid
Speaker 1: crystals are twisting in such a way to allow light
Speaker 1: to come through. Now, on a related note, this is
Speaker 1: why plasma television enthusiasts preferred plasma to l c D
Speaker 1: t vs because the plasma displays didn't have this backlight.
Speaker 1: L c D s did, and because they had that backlight,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you were watching a scene in a
Speaker 1: film that was really really dark, then it would be
Speaker 1: affected by this. Instead of getting like a really dark black,
Speaker 1: you might get kind of a charcoal gray, so you
Speaker 1: would have a worse contrast ratio between the brightest white
Speaker 1: colors and the darkest black colors on screen. That's why
Speaker 1: plasma enthusiasts loved their approach because it didn't require a backlight. Anyway,
Speaker 1: let's get back to this, LCD screens would become way
Speaker 1: more common in displays over the years, replacing stuff like
Speaker 1: old cathode ray tube computer monitors and eventually becoming a
Speaker 1: really important component in laptops. And I guess it's also
Speaker 1: a good good time to address the name laptop in general.
Speaker 1: So these days we tend to use the word laptop
Speaker 1: to refer to that clamshell design computer that you can
Speaker 1: fold shut and carry around with you. But originally the
Speaker 1: term laptop was more generally applied to any portable computer
Speaker 1: that wasn't too heavy to actually have sitting on your laps.
Speaker 1: So you had desktop computers, you had portable computers, and
Speaker 1: then you had a subset of portable computers that weren't
Speaker 1: so heavy to cause you pain if you were to
Speaker 1: have them on your lap, and those were hptops. And yeah,
Speaker 1: those definitions are really fuzzy, So in a way, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the old puzzler, what's the difference between
Speaker 1: a boat and a ship, or what's the difference between
Speaker 1: a hill and a mountain. It wouldn't really be until
Speaker 1: the nineties that the term laptop would really not just
Speaker 1: refer to weight and size, but a general form factor.
Speaker 1: And it took a while for that clamshell design pioneered
Speaker 1: by the grid Compass one to become the standard. There
Speaker 1: were several laptop computers there were more of a slate
Speaker 1: or tablet style form factor in which the screen and
Speaker 1: the keyboard were on the same plane in a fixed case,
Speaker 1: so there were no folding components. The Cryotronic eighty five
Speaker 1: also known as the TRS eighty model one hundred, that
Speaker 1: was it was offered by Texas Instruments here in the
Speaker 1: United States. It was that kind of computer. It was
Speaker 1: all in one solid case with the keyboard and the
Speaker 1: screen mounted on the same plane so you're looking down
Speaker 1: at both. Other computers were essentially cases that had a
Speaker 1: display incorporated into the processor tower, sometimes with a detachable keyboard.
Speaker 1: The Commodore s X sixty four was one of those.
Speaker 1: It had a handle that you could carry around and
Speaker 1: the keyboard was separate. You would plug it into this machine,
Speaker 1: and the handle could also act as sort of a
Speaker 1: stand so that you could look at the display that
Speaker 1: was on the end of this computer case. Again, look
Speaker 1: these up in Google images if if it's not making
Speaker 1: sense to you, because these are old, clunky computers that
Speaker 1: used to be the real cool stuff. One big reason
Speaker 1: it took so long for a standard form to emerge
Speaker 1: is that the demand for laptop computers was really low,
Speaker 1: like personal computers in general were a rarity in most
Speaker 1: households in the United States, in only eight point two
Speaker 1: percent of households in the US had a personal computer
Speaker 1: at all, according to Statista dot com. In fact, it
Speaker 1: would take more than a decade before half of all
Speaker 1: households in the US had at least one computer. That
Speaker 1: would be two thousand when that happened here. So the
Speaker 1: market for computers in general was still rather small, and
Speaker 1: that meant companies that were making computers were kind of
Speaker 1: picking their battles. So for many computer companies, the margins
Speaker 1: weren't great, meaning the amount of money it costs to
Speaker 1: build computers and the amount of money you would get
Speaker 1: for selling computers wasn't a huge difference, So you weren't
Speaker 1: making an enormous amount of profit per sale unless you
Speaker 1: were a company like IBM or Apple. Both of those
Speaker 1: could make more specialized hardware, and they could also command
Speaker 1: much higher prices. Speaking of IBM, the company introduced the
Speaker 1: IBM PC Convertible in nine six, which, as the name suggests,
Speaker 1: was a computer intended to serve both as a desktop
Speaker 1: and a portable device, thus convertible in desktop form. You
Speaker 1: would slide the case of the PC convertible under a
Speaker 1: stand had a computer monitor on it, and the monitor
Speaker 1: would plug into a port on the case. But if
Speaker 1: you needed to, you could disconnect the case from this
Speaker 1: monitor and you could grab a smaller flip up monitor
Speaker 1: to attach to this case and then flip it down
Speaker 1: so that you could carry it off, and then on
Speaker 1: the road you could flip up this detachable l c
Speaker 1: D screen and do some work. It was not as
Speaker 1: tall as the standard monitor, so the flip up screen
Speaker 1: had kind of a wide screen look to it. It
Speaker 1: also wasn't as high resolution as the desktop monitor was,
Speaker 1: but it did allow for portable computing. This debut in
Speaker 1: nineteen eight six for under two thousand dollars and it
Speaker 1: weighed twelve pounds or five and a half kilograms. The
Speaker 1: detachable screen is a neat idea, and it gave you
Speaker 1: two different display options for the base computer, but it
Speaker 1: still was a pretty bulky machine. It wasn't super convenient
Speaker 1: to carry around. In seven, the United States Air Force
Speaker 1: put in a really big order for portable computers and
Speaker 1: they chose the company Zenith Data Systems for this contract.
Speaker 1: Zenith Data Systems had previously done a lot of big
Speaker 1: orders for various militaries and other big organizations, and this
Speaker 1: one was another tall order. It was ninety thousand laptop
Speaker 1: computers for one hundred four point five million dollars, and
Speaker 1: it was a project that was going to span three years.
Speaker 1: The specific model the Air Force wanted was the Z
Speaker 1: one eight, which followed the clamshell design that was established
Speaker 1: by the grid Compass. This was also a really thick computer,
Speaker 1: definitely bulky by today's standards, but the fold down display
Speaker 1: makes it instantly relatable to today's laptops, and that big
Speaker 1: order really helped cement that form factor further, leading to
Speaker 1: more companies following that design approach. Some other early folding
Speaker 1: laptops included the portable Vectra cs from Hewitt Packard, which
Speaker 1: was one of the first laptops to offer three and
Speaker 1: a half inch disk drives. Uh. There was also the
Speaker 1: s l T two eight six, which was the first
Speaker 1: battery powered laptop with v g A graphics. V g
Speaker 1: A stands for Videographics Array. It's a set of standards
Speaker 1: for computer graphics. First introduced in the late eighties. It
Speaker 1: was an improvement over older standards like c G A
Speaker 1: and e G A, but that would require its own episode.
Speaker 1: And then there was the Macintosh Portable, Apple's first attempt
Speaker 1: at creating a laptop mac That one was a pretty
Speaker 1: much a flop in the marketplace. Of course, it cost
Speaker 1: more than seven thousand dollars at the time, which was
Speaker 1: part of the problem. And this computer came out well
Speaker 1: after Apple management had exiled Steve Jobs from the company.
Speaker 1: I've done full episodes about that. I won't go into
Speaker 1: it here, but it would take some time for Apple
Speaker 1: to formulate a winning laptop strategy. Now I'm gonna end
Speaker 1: with the Macintosh Portable, but I will give a little
Speaker 1: more detail about that one before we wrap this up,
Speaker 1: because I don't want to just dog on that computer.
Speaker 1: It was actually a really decent machine for the time.
Speaker 1: That seven grand price tag wasn't just for prestige. The
Speaker 1: processor ran at sixteen mega hurts. The standard amount memory
Speaker 1: for the computer was one megabyte, which was a respectable
Speaker 1: amount at that time. You could actually upgrade it up
Speaker 1: to nine megabytes. The screen on the computer had a
Speaker 1: resolution of six forty by four pixels and it had
Speaker 1: what was called an active matrix display. What that effectively
Speaker 1: met was the display could update much faster than others
Speaker 1: on the market, which reduced blur. That screen was also
Speaker 1: one of the components that significantly added to the cost
Speaker 1: of the computer. The first portable mac came in at
Speaker 1: a hefty sixteen pounds or about seven point three kilograms,
Speaker 1: and by that time that was definitely on the heavy
Speaker 1: side for laptop computers. But why was it so heavy?
Speaker 1: What was making it way so much? Well, a good
Speaker 1: portion of that weight was due to the battery. Apple
Speaker 1: chose a lead acid style battery to power the portable Macintosh.
Speaker 1: That's the same kind of battery that you find in cars,
Speaker 1: car batteries or lead acid batteries, and you would get
Speaker 1: between six and twelve hours of work one charge of
Speaker 1: that big battery. So the fact that it was bulky,
Speaker 1: heavy and expensive meant that not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: people opted for the Macintosh portable. Now, in our next episode,
Speaker 1: as I said before, we're gonna look at how things
Speaker 1: really coalesced to create a laptop market. Then we'll explore
Speaker 1: the different subcategories that followed, like netbooks. Remember netbooks If
Speaker 1: you guys have suggestions for future topics for me to
Speaker 1: cover here on tech Stuff, whether it is a specific technology,
Speaker 1: a product, a company, maybe just a trend in tech,
Speaker 1: let me know. Reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle for both is tech stuff HSW and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. Eight