Section: Macintosh / Apple Hardware, Discontinued Products, PowerBook, Features, Opinions and Editorials
This week marks the 30th anniversary of portable personal computing. On April 3, 1981 Adam Osborne's Osborne Computer Corporation unveiled the world's first commercially successful portable (so to speak, the thing weighed nearly 23.5 pounds) PC—the Osborne 1—in (where else?) San Francisco.The Osbourne 1 had a 5-inch black&white CRT display, two single-sided, single-density 5.25" floppy disc drives, a fold-up ABS plastic case, a carry handle, and a 69-key keyboard built into the lid. It sold for $1,795—interestingly in the same ballpark as the price of new MacBook Pros today. It came with a raft of bundled software including MicroPro's WordStar word processor, Microsoft Basic interpreter, Ashton-Tate's dBase II database, sales ledger apps from PeachTree, and Sorcim's SuperCalc spreadsheet. It ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system powered by a 4MHz Zilog Z80 processor and 64KB of RAM, which was a respectable amount at the time—the same RAM spec. as Apple's original compact Mac had three years later.
The machine's design was frank homage to the prototype Xerox NoteTaker that had been developed by Alan Kay at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in 1976 (the same outfit from which Steve Jobs borrowed the concept of a mouse-driven graphical user interface). At its peak of popularity, the Osborne one sold at a volume of around 10,000 per month, but only for a brief period. The Osborne Computer Corporation filed for bankruptcy in September 1983.
According to Wikipedia, the first portable computer to use the now ubiquitous "flip" laptop form factor appeared in the early 1980s—the Dulmont Magnum that was released in Australia in 1981-82, but not marketed internationally until 1984-85 being possibly the first example.
While Apple is sometimes credited with having built the first really modern laptops with the introduction of their PowerBook line of portables, those came on the scene relatively late in 1991, although they arguably did incorporate and do much to standardize pretty much the appearance and layout of laptop computers to this day.
Sometimes you just get it right from the outset, and today's MacBook computers can trace a direct line of heritage and their general form factor back to those 1991 PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 machines. An apt automotive analogy would be Ford's Mustang, which was so brilliantly conceived and styled at its introduction in May, 1964, that the current 2011 Mustang could not be mistaken for anything else but the original paradigm-setting pony car by those of us who remember the original from 47 years ago.
There are more parallels. Like the 2011 Mustang, the 2011 MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs are arguably the best of the breed Apple has yet produced, even though they strongly resemble those PowerBooks of 20 years ago in appearance and layout. And like that original 1964 1/2 Mustang, whose looks were a lot more spectacular than its engineering and performance, being basically just a rather mediocre Ford Falcon compact sedan with a sporty body skin grafted on, the performance of the early PowerBooks pales by comparison with today's Core "i" and Core 2 Duo powered MacBooks.
The original Mustangs came with the Falcon's anaemic 170 CID/101 HP inline six cylinder engine, with a 260 CID V8 optional—a far cry from today's Mustang with its base 227 CID/305 HP V6 powerplant and optional 302.15 CID/412 HP dual overhead cam V8, or 444 HP in the Boss 302 model.
Likewise, the original PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 were powered by Motorola 68000 and 68030 processors at clock speeds of 16 MHz or 25 MHz, a maximum 8MB or RAM, and black&white or grayscale displays only, compared with today's Core 2 Duo MacBook Airs and Core "i" MacBook Pros clocked at 1.4 GHz and up, supporting up to 87 GB of RAM, and with high-resolution color TFT displays.
Nevertheless, in either case, PowerBook or Mustang, a "just right" vibe obtained at the very start, and still does 20 and 47 years later respectively.
Full Story » | Written by Charles Moore for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »
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