I know it's popular to attribute an invention to whoever makes the most money from an idea, but the actual inventor of the laptop computer was an industrial designer named Bill Moggridge. The Grid Compass, released in 1982, was the first laptop, and is credited as such in the Smithsonian collection. The display was color, sort of, yellow characters on a black background, and a $8150 price tag which would be about $19,000 2012 dollars. Given the state of the art at that time, with most "portable" computers about the weight of a sewing machine, the price was not an obstacle for business people and technocrats, one flew into space in 1985 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Wow, typing that makes me realize just how OLD the shuttle was.
Moggridge went on to write several very good books on industrial design, among them Designing Media, which was just published in 2010.
So thank you Bill Moggridge, and thank you Grid, for not patenting and trademarking the idea, so that we didn't have to carry sewing machines for the 17 years. In a broken patent system where the most obvious old ideas are patentable doing nothing was the right thing for the consumer for sure.
Constant value calculation from Measuring Worth.
I think the first shuttle had two or three General Automation minicomputers doing the same thing with some comparator finding the consensus and deciding if any of them needed to be rebooted or disabled.
ReplyDeleteYes, they "voted" on the right answer. Resource hungry error correction hardware.
DeleteAnd about the patents, maybe this needs to be fact-checked:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Compass
Along with the Gavilan SC and Sharp PC-5000 released the following year, the GRiD Compass established much of the basic design of subsequent laptop computers, although the laptop concept itself owed much to the Dynabook project developed at Xerox PARC from the late 1960s. The Compass company subsequently earned significant returns on its patent rights as its innovations became commonplace.
I guess they patented the "Clamshell" portable case.
ReplyDeletehttp://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,571,456.PN.&OS=PN/4,571,456&RS=PN/4,571,456
I don't know what may have been done by other manufacturers to sidestep that patent. Maybe the license fee was palatable.