How Laptop Computers Evolved

factor that we tend to associate with the word laptop. Okay, it really actually wasn't that surprising, because when you're displayed technology of the time relies heavily on cathode ray tube or CRT monitors, you can't exactly slim that down. Now, these are the old style monitors. They're also old style CRT televisions, which are those big boxy things, the really heavy,

boxy monitors. And in fact, I'm gonna start this episode by explaining what's going on inside those old sets so that we can understand why they're so big in the first place, and why that meant that the early boordable computers were pretty hefty things. So if you listen to that last episode, you heard me talk about how computers used to take up entire rooms or sometimes entire floors of a building. These machines were massive, largely because the

components that designers used were themselves big. The parts that the computer were made of were large. There were no transistors, especially no transistors that are down to the nano scale. Back in those days. Circuits were actually made up of big wires and stuff like vacuum tubes, and those took up a lot of space. A CRT display or CRT television has something similar inside of it. The screen you look at is actually the end of that vacuum tube

like structure. In fact, I would argue that the cathode, ray tube, the vacuum tube, and even the lightbulb are all closely related. They are all components that have a filament inside them. The filament heats up when you pass electricity through it. They all have glass that surround the filament, And what we're really interested in is the energy that

that filament gives off as a result of being heated. Now, with lightbulbs, which are not a vacuum, that is one major difference between them and vacuum tubes and c RT s. But with light bulbs, the energy it gives off is drum roll, please light. The filament heats up due to that electrical resistance until it's hot enough to glow. And with cathode ray tubes, it's not light, it's electrons, so

we'll start super basic. Electrons are, of course, those negatively charged sub atomic particles, and typically we find them in an orbit around an atomic nucleus. The atomic nucleus has positively charged protons, and those attract electrons because opposite charges attract one another and like charges repel one another. Well, if you start to pour energy into an atom, then you're going to start pushing electrons further out from that nucleus.

The electrons furthest out would be the ones that would be affected. They would move into energy levels energy shells further out from the nucleus. So if you pour enough energy and you can actually pop that electron right off and you ionize the atom. In fact, that's kind of why we worry about ionizing radiation. It has this sort of energy that can do this. It can turn atoms into ions. Those would be atoms that have a net charge, whether positive or negative, due to either losing or gaining

electrons compared to the number of protons. So electric current is the flow of electrons. Well, you know, actually that's that's only partly correct, as you could have a flow of protons in something like a plasma and that would technically be an electric current too, because electric current is really concerned with the movement of electric charge, not whether or not the charge is positive or negative. But we can leave that behind because times out of a hundred

when we talk about electric current, we're talking about electrons. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the screen on a television is the end of the cathode ray tube. So a television screen is just a very very wide tube ending the other end is very narrow. Indeed, so at that opposite end, the opposite side from the screen, way back inside the television or the computer monitor is the cathode and the

electron gun. So the cathode is the negative terminal. It's the thing that emits electrons when you turn on the power. So the inside of the the CRT, the actual tube, is a vacuum. That means that the electrons that are emitted can move freely through that space. There's no air molecules that the electrons could potentially interact with. That's why you have to have a vacuum inside of a vacuum tube or a CRT is to let these electrons flow freely and not have to worry about them interacting with

something else. You have the anode or the positively charged terminal of the CRT towards the screen side, so that's what's attracting the electrons towards the screen. As the beam of electrons hit the backside of the screen, it impacts phosphor. Uh So, the inside of the screen has a phosphor coating on it. So when an electron hits phosphor, the phosphor ends up being quote unquote excited. And it's not

because you're settling down to watch Tiger King or whatever. No, the electron imparts energy to the phosphor, and the phosphor luminesses as a result, So that means it gives off light. And there's a lot more to it than what I just described, but I've done full episodes on it, and it would take a long time to go into all

the details, but here the big takeaways. Before companies had found ways to bring the manufacturing costs down for stuff like l c D displays and to get it at a level of resolution that would be suitable for a computer screen. The CRT was the go to, otherwise you would just have a prohibitively expensive computer because the l

c D manufacturing process was still relatively new. So having a giant vacuum tube also meant it was really hard to make a device that incorporated a screen and have it be portable because just the nature of the tube meant the screen had to be a pretty decent size. And what's more, because the CRT requires a vacuum, the monitors or television sets had to be extra dirty to withstand the tremendous difference in atmospheric pressure between the inside

of the CRT and the outside world. So old televisions and old computer monitors are super heavy because they had to be. Engineers had to make them out of sturdy stuff, including thick glass for those screens, and the bigger the display, the thicker the glass had to be, and glass will add a lot of weight to a device in a hurry. So while I did express some surprise that took so long for someone to come up with the clamshell design for portable computers, in reality, it's not that big of

a surprise at all. Because l C d screens. Screens that didn't require this cathode ray tube technology had not really been a viable option for very long. Now, in the last episode, I left off with the Macintosh Portable, Apple's first attempt at making a laptop, and ultimately that machine did not sell very well. It was heavy, it was bulky, it was extremely expensive. But this was also nineteen eighty nine, a time when it was still more common for the average household to not have a computer

at all. In fact, in nineteen nine, only fifteen percent of households in America owned a computer, according to Statista dot com. The vast majority of that fifteen percent likely owned a desktop, so portable computers were, in general a very tiny slice of a still relatively tiny market. The same year that Apple launched their failed first laptop, another company called n e C began a new chapter in

the laptop saga. And I'll call this chapter the notebook. Now, this is not the two thousand four drama starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. Instead, notebook is a subcategory of laptop computers. And we're kind of back to that same problem I mentioned in the last episode, you know, the one where how do we distinguish between something like the difference between a hill and a mountain. You know, you normally would say a mountain is taller and steeper than

a hill, but it really can't just be elevation. There's some things that we call hills that are taller than some other things that we call mountains, So it gets really subjective. Well, the same can be true in notebook and laptop anyway. Generally speaking, notebooks are supposed to be smaller, more portable versions of laptops, which are already supposed to be portable. They're also supposed to be less powerful, or

they tend to be less powerful. That's usually a trade off in order to lighten the load and slim down the form factor. You do that partly by not including so many features, and that in turn brings down the weight of the device. The size limit of the device gets reduced, and you also can charge less for it. It costs less to make and you can charge less when you're selling them. They tend to be positioned in the market as more of a personal computer. The full

lap top would be geared more toward business times. Now, I would argue that these distinctions are so subjective as to be almost meaningless, like one person's laptop could be another person's notebook, and vice versa, and form does not always dictate function. There are people who will use a hefty portable computer that you would never call a notebook, kind of like the one I'm on right now. This one is a beefy alien ware gaming laptop that I've

got all my notes on. It's quite heavy, and they'll use it to do light work like word processing, which I could do on any computer, especially since I'm using a web based UH service for all of my word processing. It's not even a program that's running natively on my computer. I could use anything, but I'm using this big, old

beefy monster here instead. In fact, I'm sure if my computer had a heart, that heart would be breaking right now because I'm using it to type out notes rather than blast zombies and do maternal But I digress anyway. The word book got some traction as various tech journalists started to use that term kind of in an effort to just make an easy distinction between lightweight laptops and the big ones. So notebooks are a type of laptop that tend to be lighter, thinner, smaller, and less powerful

than their larger counterparts. An ec ultra Light fit into that category nicely. While other laptops like the Macintosh Portable we're tipping the scales at sixteen pounds or about seven point three kilograms, the Ultra Light was just four point four pounds or two kilograms. When closed, the ultra Light measured one point four inches thick, that's about three point six centimeters. The CPU ran at eight point one four

mega hurts. It had six of RAM for system memory, and it also relied on a non volatile battery backed solid state memory for storage, which was kind of interesting. I mean this was before really the rise of solid state drives. You wouldn't see that come around until a little later, and they were really expensive. But this was a way of having a lightweight, uh long term memory

storage solution that didn't require moving parts. The standard Ultra Light could store one hole megabyte of data on the solid state memory, so it wasn't huge by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, back in the day, I remember when I thought a megabyte would be more than I would ever need. Oh I was so dumb, still am, but now I'm older. So while it supported a rechargeable battery, that being the n ec ultra Light, That charge would

only last a couple of hours max. So many tech reviewers wrote that it was kind of a waste of time. I mean, yeah, you could have this super light portable computer, you can easily carry it everywhere, but you'd still have to carry a cable and plug the darned thing into the outlet. You couldn't just use it on battery power for you know, a full day. So what's the point?

I find that pretty funny today, because these days I cannot take any laptop with me anywhere without the cable and expected to last more than just a few hours. It's funny to me how the world can change. Although this is also due to the fact that, as we mentioned in the last episode, even as our computers get more powerful and more efficient, software gets more complicated and requires more assets and resources, so it nullifies all those

advances effectively. Well, the Ultralight reviews were mixed. People thought the lightweight was impressive, but they found the lack of other features like a printer port that made it a problem.

How could you use it for business If you didn't have a port for a printer, you could swap out the floppy disk external drive for a an adapter to connect the printer, but it wasn't easy and at a list price of of three thousand dollars, they might have been designed to be a personal computer for leisure, but it wasn't priced like one. While this was all going on, other manufacturers were also making lightweight computers, and a lot

of them were not yet following the clamshell design. The Cambridge Z eight eight, which only weighed two pounds or point nine kilograms, was an example of this. It was not a clamshell laptop. Instead, this computer kind of looks like a calculator with delusions of grandeur. There's an LCD screen mounted above a full keyboard. The keyboard itself was a membrane keyboard, which also meant typing on a Z

eighty eight was super quiet. You could turn on a little digital click noise if it was too disturbing for you. And the computer was powered by and I am not making this up four double A batteries, and those four double A batteries could provide a charge of up to twenty hours of work time, which is a phenomenal design when it comes to power efficiency. Sure this wasn't a computer you would do stuff like play modern games on or whatever, although people did create games for this machine.

But it was an incredibly portable, lightweight computer, and if you needed more power, you could pop out and grab a four pack of double A batteries and you're good. Now. I never owned one of these myself, that I understand, there's a small but passionate group of enthusiasts who still

tinker with them, and I think that's pretty cool. Despite computers like the Z eight eight, the general design philosophy around portable computers was starting to coalesce behind the clamshell design that the old Compass Grid eleven oh one had established. And like I said in Part one, I'm not gonna

go over every laptop. That would just be ridiculous, but I do want to cover a few notable early laptops that have their place in history, and one of those would be Apple's second attempt to design a marketable portable computer. The Macintosh Portables were a bust. They just didn't sell very well, so the company went back to the drawing board.

In a few years before Steve Jobs would come back to the company, Apple introduced the power Book, which was a new clamshell style portable mac The company launched three models, all at the same time. You had the power Book one hundred, the power Book one forty, and then the one seventy. The one hundred was the baseline model. The other two had additional features. For example, the one seventy

had a much more powerful processor. The power Book one hundred weighed ten pounds less than the portable Macintosh from a few years earlier. I remember the portable Macintosh weighed in at sixteen pounds. The power Book was actually much closer to five pounds, around two point three kilograms, and had a sixteen mega Hurts processor. It came standard with two megabytes of memory. Were actually in the megabyte era

of RAM. Now we were in the kilobyte era for a very long time there, and you could supplement those two megabytes of RAM with an additional six megabytes with a special memory module. The display measured nine inches on the diagonal. That would be about twenty three centimeters, although I think pretty much everyone refers to screen size and

inches these days. It was also a monochromatic screen, so it wasn't a color display yet for portable max it had an expansion slot for a modem, which is pretty impressive for a laptop from and the standard amount of storage on one of these was a twiny megabyte hard drive. It also had max Graphic User interface or gooey, So the regular mac os the one where you would have icons representing different programs, the basic type of operating system most of us are familiar with these days. But that

meant you needed a way to navigate that interface. You know that was designed for a mouse and keyboard, but you're talking about a laptop, a portable machine. How do you incorporate a mouse in a portable machine. Apple's original solution was to include a track ball on the keyboard

part of the laptop. So there was actually a little ball that you could use and roll around to act as your mouse, and it was positioned below the space bar on the keyboard and in between where your hands would be if you have your faces sitting on the rest keys of the keyboard. That placement would become the standard spot for stuff like touch pads in the near future. We're gonna get the touch pads in just a second.

The MacBook would also set you back twenty five hundred dollars, so that's about four thousand, seven hundred fifty bucks in today's cash, so still pretty darn expensive. And this was the basic model of the MacBook. However, the smaller form factor and the advancements and processors and storage made it much more attractive than the old Macintosh portable computers, and the PowerBook line would succeed where the earlier ones failed.

By the way, in case you're curious how the one compared against the other end of Apple's launch power books, you know, the one seventy being the top end, I'll give you a very quick rundown. The one seventy had a faster processor. It ran at twenty five mega hurts, not sixteen. It also had twice as much RAM and standard at four megabytes, you could max that out at eight megabytes again with a memory module. Had a larger display.

It was still a monochromatic display, but it included the active matrix technology that Apple had introduced with those old portable Macintoshes, which introduced much less blur. It had a faster updating screen, and it came standard with a modem which you would hook up to a phone line. And this was a good old two hundred bawd modem. I'll have to go into modems in a future episode to talk about those days, because boy do I remember them

and I don't miss them. And uh, it cost about four thousand, six hundred bucks, which would be around eight seven hundred dollars in today's cash, so yawza. And the battery life on these things was good for about three hours max. How far we've come? All right, I've got more to say about laptops and their history in just

a moment, but let's take a quick break. So just before the break, I talked about how the power Book line helped get Apple into the portable computer game, but I also mentioned that there was a fairly short battery life and in general that was becoming a bottleneck for portable computers. Processor speeds were getting better, in fact, twice as better, you might say, every eighteen months or so,

thank you Gordon Moore. Display technology was also improving. But all these components needed electricity, and if you're designing a desktop computer, that's not a big deal. You create a power supply unit for the PC that's good enough to support everything, and then you plug it into a wall outlet and you've got a nice, steady supply of juice, you're good to go. It doesn't really matter if the

processor is requiring a lot more power, everything's fine. But with a laptop, particularly a laptop that is not plugged into a wall, that is reliant upon battery power, things are different. Batteries can only store a finite amount of electricity before they need to be recharged, and that can be really inconvenient if you're in the middle of working on an important document or presentation or video or whatever.

So how do you meet the challenge of delivering upon expectations where people have a bare minimum that they expect from a computer, but you also avoid either a uselessly short battery life, meaning you're always going to be plugged in, you're never gonna worry about being unplugged because it's just not, you know, a viable option, or you go the other way. You end up having a great battery it just also weighs a ton and makes your portable computer way less portable.

How do you avoid that? Well, one way is to create a more efficient means of managing power in the first place, and that's what Intel and Microsoft set out to do when the two companies partnered to create advanced power management or a p M, and a p M is an a p I, which isn't confusing at all. Right, Okay, So an a p I is an application programming interface,

and let me explain. And application programming interface is a set processes, functions, libraries, and other assets that act as a foundation for developers who want to create programs for a specific platform, like a specific operating system. So you've got a base set of functions on a computer that operate directly on the hardware itself. These are processes that might be hard coded into the physical circuits of that machine. And in the old days, that's how all programming had

to be done. You actually had to make physical changes to a machine by unplugging cables and plugging them into other sockets and things like that, in order to change the programming in order to make it do something differently, like if you wanted to add numbers and stuff subtract them. These days, we have layers of firmware and software that helped manage all these interactions between the program you're running and the underlying hardware that's supplying all the assets that

make that program possible. This way, programmers don't have to have a d understanding of the underlying hardware. They don't have to change that hardware. They just need to work within the parameters of those other layers. They just need to follow the rules. In other words, So if you'd like an analogy, or even if you don't, I'll compare it to building a house. So imagine you walk up to a building site and someone's already laid a bare

concrete foundation there, but there's nothing else there. That's it. You get there, there's a foundation, nothing else is at your disposal. It's up to you to figure out how to build a house. You have to get all the stuff yourself. You have to figure it all out, maybe through trial and error. There's no one there to help you. That would be very frustrating. Or imagine you walk up

to a building site. There's the foundation, but there's also materials for building out a frame and tools that you're going to need to put it all together, and sets of instructions on how those tools work, and maybe even some examples of various styles of houses that you could build using those materials. The second approach is way easier, and that's generally how an API works. It gives developers the setting and tools they need in order to build

the programs they want to run on any given operating system. Okay, but what is a p M in particular, then, Well, this ap I gave programmers tools that would allow them to build software that could run in a more optimized way on a battery operated computer like a laptop. The a p M gives a way for each program to communicate its individual power requirements to the main system, which can then more precisely choose which programs get the juice and which ones can kind of fade back into sleep mode.

The whole purpose is to conserve that sweet, sweet battery life, extending it on a single charge as much as you possibly can. So really, it's just kind of like an administrator or a foreman who is looking at what is required at any given moment, dedicating the resources that are needed and saving everything else in the meantime. Now I should hasten to add this really only applied to Windows

based PC's. Microsoft would support a p M until two thousand and six and the debut of Windows Vista, whereupon the company introduced an updated API called Advanced Configuration and Power Interface or a c p I. So really it was just the next generation of that kind of power management strategy. Around this same time is when we got an early, perhaps even the first laptop with a touchpad to act as a mouse, and this one came from

an Italian company called Olivetti. There was also a similar computer from Triumph Adler, German company, but that company had already been acquired by Olivetti earlier and had previously been owned by Volkswagen. Anyway, early touchpads weren't always the capacity of ones that we tend to use today. In fact, most of the time they weren't. Instead, capacity of touch screens would come later. Capacity. By the way, those are touch screens that work by detecting touch through a change

in electrical conductivity. We humans conduct electricity, so when our skin makes contact with something that has an electric field, we alter that field, and this is how smartphones and touch screens work today. They have these grids that generate an electric field, and when we touch them, then the conductivity changes, and by pinpointing where that has happened on the grid or matrix, the computer processor knows where you are touching and what you are doing. But there is

another way to do this. Actually, technically, there are a few other ways to make a touch screen, but when it comes to touch pads, there's really two big ones, so there's capacity. But then there's also resistive touch pads or touch screens. These systems required the user to apply a bit more pressure in order to bring two layers of electrically resistive material into contact with one another. When they're in a rest state, the two layers would separate

from each other. You'd have a top layer and a bottom layer in between, which you would have maybe an inert gas or just some air, and embedded in those layers are electrodes. So when you push down and you bring those two layers into contact with one another, the electrodes touch and you get a current passing through. It registers there as a touch. And there are pros and cons to both resistive and capacitive touch surfaces. Resistive touch

surfaces don't need the activating point of contact to be conductive. So, for example, let's say you have a smartphone with a resistive touch screen. You could use a stick or a a regular pen, not a light pen or capacitive touch pen, nothing like that, just a regular pen or whatever, a nail. Not that I would recommend you do that, but you

could use anything like that. In order to make contact with the screen and get stuff to happen, you just have to use enough pressure, which is why you probably wouldn't want to use nail because you'd scratch up your screen. But if you had, let's say a smartphone with a resistive touch screen, UH, you would have a couple of different layers between your eyes and the display that the actual images, so they tend to be darker than capacitive

touch screens. They also tend to suffer more from wear and tear because you're actually having to use pressure to make contact UH and to have it registered by the device. Capacitive touch screens don't require that kind of pressure. They just require a touch. But you also have to use a conductive surface to touch the screen, So if you were wearing like regular gloves, then it wouldn't work because

the gloves would insulate your fingers from the surface. Fun fact, this is why a few years ago there were stories about people in Japan using hot dogs to operate their smartphones during the winter because it was too cold to go without gloves, and hot dogs could stand in as a fingertip because they too can conduct electricity anyway, Early laptop touch pads were often resistive technologies, and you had to use a little bit of pressure in order for

them to I remember having some early laptops with touch pads, and the touch pad would give up the ghosts after

a few years just from heavy use. While the incorporation of touch pads first came from a relatively obscure company, Olivetty, but at least it was obscure here in the United States, touch pads would find their way into the designs of other laptop companies, including Apple, which would update its power book lines with new models that replaced the track ball with a touch pad, and it would become a fairly

standard component in laptop and notebook computers. Because this was also the time we were seeing a very serious shift away from text based operating systems like DOSS and moving more to graphic user interfaces like Windows and mac os, So you had to have something now. Not all laptops around this time had disc drives, but those that did typically relied on the three and a half inch disk drive.

It wasn't until when IBM, which at the time was still making consumer computer released the think Pad seven seven five C D that optical drives. In this case, a CD drive or CD ROM drive would become standard, and CD ROM disks represented a big jump in storage capability. The three and a half inch disc of could hold about twenty one megabytes of data. A refinement of a few years later would boost them up to a hundred

twenty megabytes. The information was stored magnetically on the disc, which is why you were supposed to keep floppy disks away from powerful magnets, because those magnets could realign all the magnetic particles that was on the film inside the computer disc and thus corrupt all the data that was stored on that disc. A CD ROM disc could hold much more data, as much as six d forty megabytes.

It also is optical storage, not magnetic. You could bring a powerful bangnet near a compact disc, it wouldn't affect anything, because that's not how they store information. However, the think Pad did not have a c deep burner, so you weren't storing information on CDs. You could only read information from CDs. That's where the ROM matters here. ROM stands

for read only memory. That means you can pull data from the source as much as you like, but you cannot change the data and you can't add to it. A CD at this time was essentially an unchanging record, so software developers can make more complex programs on CDs, and that would remove the need for users to keep track of five or six discs and then swapping out the discs whenever the computers said so, which was nice.

You no longer have that hassle. IBM would introduce another really interesting innovation in one that wouldn't become standard, but it was really cool. It's a great idea. So it's clear that one enormous challenge early on with portable computers was miniaturizing stuff so that could all fit into a small form factor and also so it wouldn't be too heavy. And engineers did a great job working with various components. They optimized designs that created crazy compact circuit boards that

allow for a notebook style laptop. I mean, if you were to ever open up some of these laptops, you would be amazed at how tightly packed they are. In fact, remember when I said the term notebooks came out to describe slimmer, smaller laptop computers. By the mid nineties we had a new term. These were sub notebooks, so these were even smallerer and slimmerer than those But there was a trade off, and that was that the keyboards for those devices tended to be more than a little cramped.

I'm sure a lot of you out there have worked with laptop computers that had small keyboards, so it worked. For example, I use a full sized USB keyboard that I plug into my laptops docking station so I can use that instead of the laptop's native keyboard because it just gets too uncomfortable after a couple of hours of typing. Well, IBM was looking at this problem and a brilliant designer named John Kuritas came up with a solution, and supposedly it occurred to him after he had been playing with

building blocks with his daughter. And IBM called the solution the track right, but almost everybody else called it a butterfly keyboard. It's a little tricky to describe an audio, but I'm gonna do my best. So imagine you've got a closed laptop. The screen is down and it's the size of a decent compact laptop, and then you open it up. You lift the latch and you lift the screen up and as you do, so the you see

that the keyboard begins to shift into place. It's actually two half keyboards and they're mounted on a pair of sliding basses. So as the laptop opens, the keyboard separates a bit, spreads apart, and then fits back together to become a larger keyboard. It actually is large enough to overlap on either side of the base of the laptop, meaning the base is now wider than the screen is. When you close the laptop, same sequence happens, but in reverse.

The keyboard platforms detach, they swivel a bit and fold in together to conserve space, making it more compact. And this is probably a little hard for you to imagine, so I recommend that you guys do a search for IBM Butterfly keyboard or the think Pad seven oh one C. There are videos on YouTube that show it in action, so you can actually see. In fact, there are some that explain the mechanism that was used to activate this. It was built into the hinge of the lid itself,

the display itself. The think Pad seven oh one C would be the only laptop to feature the track right, and to purchase one back in the day would set you back a cool three thousand, seven hundred dollars back that would be about the same as spending six hundred bucks on it today. Okay, so maybe I do see why it didn't catch on, although I should add the keyboard was not the only thing contributing to that price

tag on this one. The design, however, did get a lot of critical acclaim including more than twenty Design awards, even though it wouldn't find its way into future laptops, which is kind of a shame because it is really nifty, especially if you like stuff like transformers, because that's what it reminds me of. Anyway, by this time, the basic

components of your standard laptop were mostly in place. Nearly all were clamshell design, nearly all had some sort of mouse replacement like a touchpad or track pad, and nearly all had some sort of additional drive, whether it was a floppy disk drive or a CD ROM drive. And when we come back, I'll talk about some other cool innovations and first in laptop history, but first let's take

another quick break. Something that happened in the nineteen nineties that would go on to be a major influence in laptop design was the creation of the Universal Serial Bus or USB. Today, these ports are everywhere and they allow us to plug in all sorts of peripherroles or devices into a computer or hub. They've also advanced the standard quite a bit, so now we've got US B C and all this other stuff. But you get the point.

The important point I was trying to make here is that they really eliminate the need for a lot of specialized ports that computers otherwise had to have back in the day. You know, if you bought a computer in the nineties, then you had all these different specialized ports, like you had a port just for a mouse to plug in, one for the keyboard, one for a printer. You might have one for a joystick or game pad, and these started to add up, right, You had all

these different specialized ports. That meant that a computer had to have enough space for each of those. Uh, the engineers had to build in the actual circuit boards for each of those. The the the interfaces that connected the port with the computer motherboard itself. So the invention of the USB meant that you have a universal connector that would be compatible with all sorts of different devices. So manufacturers would make USB capable or USB compatible printers for example,

so you wouldn't need a printer cable. You just hook up a USB cable between the printer and the laptop, or you would use a USB mouse or USB keyboard, and you no longer had to worry about all these specialized connectors. And it really simplified the design of computers in general and laptops in particular. That in turn would also bring prices down. I mean, if you can streamline design, then you cut out a lot of the stuff that adds cost to the end product. So that was a

big deal. Even though it wasn't directly connected to laptops, the development of USB would have an enormous impact on laptop development moving forward. Beginning in the early two thousands, around two thousand three or so, companies began to offer

laptop computers with DVD drives. Now, just as the CD ROM drive had volutionized computing about a decade earlier, so too with DVD drives, not only could you PLoP a DVD film into your laptop and watch movies on the go, which was a pretty darn novel idea back in the day, you could also have software on DVDs, software for really big programs because while a c D could hold around six d forty megabytes of data, a DVD up the anti to four point seven gigabytes of information or more.

If you used multi layer encoding and used both sides of a disc, you could have up to seventeen gigabytes on a single DVD. Not that a lot of people did that, but it was a possibility. Around that same time, HP introduced the Compact TC one thousand and this one

is a bit of a hybrid computer. It had a detachable keyboard, so when you had the keyboard and the display joined together, you essentially had a notebook style laptop clamshell the sign but you could also separate the display from the keyboard, which was pretty novel back in two thousand three, and then you would have a tablet PC.

There was also an optional docking station you could purchase and that would essentially turn this into a desktop, though it was a desktop that was severely lacking in processing power and other capabilities compared to other desktops around that same time. However, it was a real innovation and when we would see used a few times further down the road as laptops would try to masquerade as tablets, or

vice versa. So it was kind of the beginning of a trend in design, but it was a trend that was very slow to pick up because also, this is two thousand three, This is well before the iPad and well before things like tablet computers had a widespread appeal. There were very niche jobs, like especially in the medical industry, that really depended upon tablet piece seas, but you know, your average person had no use for them before the

iPad came around. Still, it was pretty cool to see that as early as two thousand three there were companies that were working on that sort of design. In two thousand six, Apple made a switch from the power Book laptops, which had been using G four processors for the last several generations of the power Book, and then introduced a new line of laptops called the MacBook. Now by two thousand six, Steve Jobs have been back with the company for essentially a decade, so he was making some really

big moves. Around this time, the iPod had already really established itself as a success, and the company was on the verge of releasing the iPhone the following year. So these MacBooks had Intel microprocessors in them. Not G four processors. They also featured webcams, and as far as I can tell, there's some of the earliest laptop computers that actually incorporated a webcam into the design, into the bezel of the display. The company offered up a range of computers in different

side and capabilities and price tags. So if you wanted a basic MacBook, the no frills, entry level MacBook that costs a thousand dollars really a thousand ninety nine dollars. But if you wanted the top of the line, the seventeen inch MacBook Pro when it first launched, that would

be two thousand seven premium price tags from Apple Products. Now, over time, Apple would phase out the seventeen inch model of the MacBook, releasing the last one in two thousand twelve, and the company was really packing more power and smaller form factors, and the development of the retina display technology would change things up a lot too, so they ultimately abandoned that and that was when they were switching to

the MacBook Air strategy. I'll talk about that more in just a second, But in two thousand seven, we would see a new type of innovation in the laptop space, and this was the same year that Apple put out the iPhone and launched a tremendous trend in consumer smartphones. Now there was another trend that was starting to take with laptop computers, but this one didn't have nearly as much success as the smartphone industry, and that would be the emergence of the netbook. So yeah, we're getting back

to naming conventions. We had laptops, we had notebooks, we had sub notebooks, we had tablets, we had hybrids. Now we have netbooks. So what are those? Well, I should use the past tense for these, because no one really talks about netbooks anymore. But they're even smaller devices than sub notebooks. They're somewhere between smartphone and sub notebook. They typically lack stuff like optical drives, so you don't have like a CD driver, DV drive at all. There's in

fact no drives all. This helps cut down on bulk and cost. This is not something that's unusual these days. A lot of laptops don't have any kind of optical drive in them, but they also tend to have much less powerful processors than standard laptops. They often rely on the exact same type of microprocessors that handheld devices use like smartphones, and they offload a lot of the heavy lifting to the cloud. You're meant to use these devices to access web and net based services rather than running

programs natively on the machine. Thus you get netbooks in a way. This was a move back to the old days of dumb terminals and mainframes. So with that model, you had a centralized computer the main frame. Like if you might work for a big company financial company and they have a mainframe computer and you would interface with that by connecting through a dumb terminal. A dumb terminal

is essentially just an input and output device. Commonly you would be using keyboards and displays, and these devices have no computing power of their own. They are not computers. It's just a way for you to access the main frame. And you can actually have a lot of different people with a lot of different dumb terminals, all accessing the

main frame around the same time. Though you would often have a central computer using a system called time sharing, but that's a matter for a different episode, all right, So flash forward, we moved through an era where computing oponents get maturized, they get less expensive. This allows for the rise of the personal computer. Where people have their own computational machine at their disposal, so all the computing happens at the computer that the user is sitting at.

There not at a dumb terminal anymore. They are actually at a computer. Then we get to the point where the Internet emerges from being this obscure project that only people in academia, the military, and a few research facilities are aware of, and then no one else has heard about it, and then it becomes a public utility, or at least it should be one. And now the Internet, or rather servers that are on the Internet, can fulfill a function similar to those mainframes. It's not centralized the

way a mainframe is. But once again, the end user doesn't need a very powerful machine. They can access servers that's doing doing all the heavy lifting on the server end, sending the data through some web based or net based interface, and then you're getting the result on your device. It becomes kind of a conduit to these more powerful computers, so your computer doesn't have to be as strong, and that means you can enjoy really interesting content, especially as

long as your your machine has the capability of doing that. Right, it still has to be able to display good graphics. It still has to be able to play good sound so that you can have those rich Internet experiences that we've all come to expect, you know, like streaming Tiger King. Now, I know that's the second time I've made a Tiger King reference, and I should also add that I haven't

actually watched Tiger King. I've just absorbed all my knowledge of it from social media, because that seems to be one of two things everyone's talking about, and the other one is COVID nineteen, so I prefer referencing Tiger King at the time being. Anyway, what this would mean to the end consumers is that netbooks would be these super lightweight devices and they could be really cheap compared to

other laptops. The tradeoff was they were also underpowered compared to laptops, and they could only run a subset of the types of software that other computers could run. Netbooks became a big category over the next few years, and companies rushed to build their own versions of these lightweight, lightly powered machines. The a sous e PC seven oh one E, by the way, is three es, so I guess it's really e PC one would be a really

early example of this. In fact, a lot of people call the seven oh one the first netbook, but if I'm being honest with you, guys, the timelines for these things get really tough to untangle. Anyway, the seven oh one way just two pounds or point nine two ks, so it was feather light compared to some of the other laptops I've talked about, and it also cost three when it launched, landing it solidly in the budget category

for portable computers. Netbooks would tend to be so small that users would run up against some pretty tough obstacles, including those keyboards. Sub notebook keyboards are hard to tie upon. Netbook keyboards are painful for me. They're even more cramped than notebook or sub notebook styles, and that is a downside, But I don't think that would ultimately be what led companies to abandon the netbook form factor. Most companies did

that around the year two thousand eleven. I think the real reason most companies got all the game comes down to cash money, y'all. See budget netbooks fill a consumer need, but they're not great for profit margins. The cost of making a netbook versus the amount you get for selling the netbook is narrow enough that it was a problem

for a lot of companies. I mean, if you're a company, you have a limited number of resources at your disposal, why would you dedicate manufacturing and design resources for a product that might not even make its money back. Like the amount that you're pouring in you're not getting back in your return on investment. You could use that same amount of time and effort designing other stuff that has a better return. And so, for many reasons, but mostly money,

companies started to back off of making net books. Around two thousand eleven, we did see slightly larger laptop computers that otherwise followed the netbook philosophy. However, they still had a focus on web and net based services, but they also would include slightly higher end features like better displays, which in turn would mean the price tags would be higher. And that's sort of where we've seen the budget market settle.

They're bigger than netbooks, typically, they're not necessarily as big as full laptops. They're somewhere in that sub notebook range. Perhaps there are other examples of laptops that we could talk about, like MacBook Air Apples, extremely thin, light laptop that essentially replaced the older MacBook line. Or we can talk about the Chrome Book, which are laptops that are running Google's Chrome operating system. They rely almost exclusively on

web based services. There's Lenovo's Yoga Book C nine thirty. That's a laptop that replaces the physical keyboard with a second touch screen that's powered by e Ink, So you will have an e Ink touch screen keyboard. You're typing on a screen rather than on physical keys. And I'm not gonna lie. I actually really dig the design of the Yoga Book. I don't own one, and I don't know how comfortable it would be to use, but I

think it's a really nifty look looking device. Um Or we could go back to two thousand eleven, you can talk about the Razor Blade gaming laptop, which the company Razor referred to as the world's first true gaming laptop. Now, whether you agree with Razor or not, it is true that since then we've seen more companies build laptops with the intended purpose of serving as a gaming rig. And again, the computer I used to type up all my notes

for this episode is one of those. Is that alien Ware seventeen are four laptop and I do love it, but I would never carry it around with me because it weighs like ten pounds and it's about the size of a coffee table. Okay, it's it's not really that big, but it is large enough that I actually don't have a computer bag big enough to fit this thing in it.

But I still love this computer, don't get me wrong. Now, I'm sure we'll continue to see lots of innovations in the laptop space, whether it's incorporating eye tracking technology and webcams to give you the ability to control your computer just by moving your eyes. Lots of computers have that, Mine has that, or computers that have their own voice activated assistance, two more purpose built machines that do a

subset of things incredibly well. You know, we're watching as companies are working to differentiate their products from all of the competition, and as you can imagine, that gets pretty tough because you can only say, you know, this is like the old one, but faster, because people will start to lose interest. So I'm sure we're going to see more kind of innovative, funky, perhaps even outlandish design choices, some of which will succeed and some of which will

never see again. My hope is that the track right will come back in some way because that was just such a cool design and it's a shame that was only ever used on one computer or But that wraps up our history of laptop computers. We will move on to a different topic for our next episode, but if you guys have suggestions for future tech Stuff episodes, reach out to me on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for both is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart

Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.