The History of Laptop Computers

Have you guys seen the film Office Space. If you have, you might remember the Bob's in that movie. Those were a pair of consultants who came into the company in the film in a tech in order to figure out which employees could be downsized. In other words, who's gonna get fired? Well, I used to say that I essentially worked for the Bob's, but that's probably being a little unfair.

But hey, that's that's neither here nor there, right So anyway, more importantly for this episode, back then, I worked on designing, formatting, editing, proofing, and producing various documents. I had a pretty fancy title, but I was really more or less a copy editor. Not that copy editors aren't fancy, they're incredibly important. But the title they that I was given at that you know, consulting firm made it sound like I was a manager or something. But to do my work, I was assigned

a big, old desktop computer. It was a decent machine for the time being, but it was also stationary. Right. You weren't supposed to pick the thing up and take it with you at the end of the day, so

I never had to bring work home with me. Now, it's not that laptop computers were rare even back in the ancient days when I first started working, but the average office tended to rely more on desktop computers than laptops at that point, with only really important folks like senior consultants at my company having laptops, and that was so that they could bring their work with them wherever they went. Flash forward to a decade ago or so, I was working at how Stuff Works dot com, and boy,

howdy do I miss those guys. Not only is that where this podcast got its start, it's also where I got my first work laptop. Now that one I could bring home with me. Right, I could bring the laptop with me if I needed to, made it much easier to work on any particularly tricky articles that I was writing at the time. But on the flip side, you could argue that I was suddenly able to put in way more hours in a salaried job that I would have if the computers were still metaphorically locked two desks

in an office. But whether you view it as a pause of or a negative, the laptop at that point had become standard office gear, largely replacing the towers and base units of desktops of the past, and that brings us to today's topic. I wanted to talk about the origin and evolution of laptop computers. Now, clearly we won't

be talking about every variation. That would be insane. The series would end up being one episodes long, and while I enjoyed walking down the path of PlayStation for four episodes, that was already pushing it. So this is more of an overview of how laptops first came into being, when they first started getting popular, and then we're going to talk in a second episode about some pretty dramatic shifts

and form factor and use cases over the years. So this episode is going to really be about how we kind of arrived at the standard form factor of what we consider a laptop to be and and how that was established. And in our next episode we'll look at how various companies have innovated around that basic concept and the effort to kind of differentiate themselves and also add

new features and capabilities. So to talk about laptops, we also have to pull back a bit and talk about the shift towards personal computers, because the two are very closely related. The first purely electronic computer for general purpose computing, as opposed to a machine that could really only do one type of processing was the appropriately named Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or an EAC computer, so famous that Michael Simbello recorded a song about it for the movie

Flash Dance. Hang on a second, I'm getting a note here. Um huh, Well, according to this note that I just handed to myself, the whole song thing is a lie. But for those of you out there who are as old as I am, you get the joke right. Anyway. ENIAC was not the first computer, mind you, but it was the first electronic one, or largely agreed to be the first electronic computer. There's even some disagreement on that matter, but there were older computers. Those were electro mechanical machines.

But Eniac was in itself a huge machine, pretty much taking up all of the wall space of a basement that measured fifty ft by thirty feet or fifteen meters by nine meters. Eniac had nearly twenty thousand vacuum tubes as part of its wiring. Because this was a time before the transistor, it was not, by any definition at all,

a portable machine. Now we got better at building computers, and components like the transistor would help immensely, and over time we were able to miniaturize the various elements debate computers work. We created circuit boards, and then we eventually moved on to relatively tiny processors. Things that used to take up several square feet of space or sometimes cubic feet of space now could be fit on a few chips on a circuit board, but even so that took

a while. The Eniac project began during World War two. Three decades later, the computers were smaller, but still frequently the size of a desk or workstation, or sometimes a couple of them. There was no such thing as a personal computer. Yet the machines were too large and way too expensive for that, and the applications were mostly restricted to scientific research and business applications like accounting analysis, that

kind of thing. In fact, there were two general classifications of computers by the nineteen seventies, though people weren't necessarily talking about them in these terms. At that time. You had main frame computers. These were larger, centralized computers, typically housed in their own rooms within a business or research facility, and typically they were looked after by very highly trained technicians,

so there was a barrier between user and machine. They were intended for multiple users, generally, and either those users were accessing the main frame from dumb terminals meaning a keyboard in some form of output that themselves had no computing power. They just connected back to this central computer, or you were sharing time on the same physical device, typically through using those highly paid technicians. These main frames

were really expensive. I mean, it wasn't unheard of for a mainframe computer to set a company back a million bucks, and that is a princely some The other category would be mini computers. These were smaller, but not necessarily tiny. Uh. Defining the boundary between a main frame and a mini computer is somewhat subjective. They also were typically multiple user computers. They weren't necessarily meant to be a single individuals computer,

but they were smaller than their main frame counterparts. They were also less expensive. You could swoop up one of these babies for a cool hundred grand or so. See either they're practically giving them away. By the mid nineteen seventies, miniaturization had reached a point where a computer could fit on a desktop rather than taking up the space of an entire desk, or two desks or a dozen desks. This would start to get us into the era of

micro computers. Micro Computers is kind of another term for personal computer in a sense the meaning is slightly different, but effectively personal computers are micro computers. They're a subset, you could argue. So these were still machine beings found largely in research centers and big corporations, not in the home at this time, so computer manufacturers were building machines

with that in mind. They weren't building for the home user, but that would slowly change thanks to some computer enthusiasts who saw an opportunity in vour. A company called micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or MYTHS changed the game forever in computers. This company was founded by a group of hobbyists in the late nineteen sixties. These were electronics enthusiasts and professionals, and their whole business was selling kits to

other hobbyists. And originally those kids were for stuff like home radio transmitters and model rocket systems, thus the telemetry. But in nineteen seventy four they put together a kit that would let hobbyists build their very own programmable computer. You wouldn't think of it as a computer by modern standards, but it was the computer, and they named it the

Altaire eight hundred. They sold these kits for just four hundred forty dollars, and they got a lot of publicity from a cover page story in the magazine Popular Electronics. By the way, if you were to adjust for inflation, that fourty kit would set you back about two thousand, one hundred dollars in today's money. And keep in mind it was a kit. You would still have to actually

build the thing yourself. Now, the l tear didn't exactly become the must have gadget of nine, but it did help usher in the personal computer era the micro computer era. It allowed people like the Two Steve's those being jobs in Wozniak to get their own computer business going. In case you aren't aware, that was a little company called Apple. Meanwhile, over at IBM, the focus was still primarily on corporate customers.

That was a big part of IBM's business. In fact, that was IBM's business, was selling products to other big companies. It would be a couple of years before IBM would try its hand designing a personal computer for a more mainstream customer base, like and an actual consumer level computer as opposed to a commercial computer. But it is at IBM where our story about laptops really gets its start. IBM had identified a market for computers that was underserved,

and not again the average consumer. Instead, we're talking about professionals who weren't necessarily connected to a big corporation or research facility that has access to like a mainframe machine or typical mini computer. So these were statisticians and engineers and analysts and other people who would routinely work with

big numbers and complicated calculations. They could really use something with the capabilities of a computer, a programmable machine, but they weren't working at places where those sort of resources were readily available. So IBM set out to make a machine that the company could market to those professionals. To do so, IBM created a portable computer called the IBM. This was an early example of an IBM mini computer. Now, this wasn't a laptop computer by today's standards, certainly, but

it was a portable computer. In fact, it's pretty much acknowledged as the world's first portable computer. However, when it comes to the word portable, your mileage may vary. See, the IBM was no lightweight device. In fact, it tipped the scales at a hefty fifty five pounds. That's just under twenty five and yeah, that's heavy. You would not want this on your lap for very long at all, or you lose all feeling in your legs. But compared to an IBM computer of the same capabilities from just

a few years earlier, it was positively smelt. An IBM computer from the late sixties that would have the same processing capabilities as the nineteen IBM would have been the size of two full desks and it would have weighed half a ton, So this was definitely an achievement. The IBM was an all in one computer. It included a display that was built into the body of the computer itself, so the case had everything. The case had the display, it had the keyboard. Calling it a display, however, is

a pretty grand thing because it wasn't exactly large. In fact, the screen size was just five inches or twelve point seven centimeters on the diagonal, so you wouldn't be playing Doo Maternal on one of these things. In fact, they could not show graphics like that. The screen could display standard characters, but it wasn't designed for more advanced graphics.

The width of the display allowed for just sixty four characters per line, with sixteen lines maximum on a screen, so it had a height of sixteen characters and a width of sixty four characters, so it was definitely limited. The body of the computer also had a keyboard complete with a number pad built into it, so this was

again a solid piece, one piece computer. And you if you imagine an old computer case, you know the kind that would sit horizontally on a desk, Just imagine poking out the front is a keyboard and then you have, uh, you know, the rest of the cases behind where the keyboard is, and it goes up a bit on the upper left side above the keyboard that's where the little display is. You can do a Google image search for the IBM to get a look at this thing. For storage,

the IBM had a tape drive. This was one of several forms of data storage in the computer era. With tapes, computers would store information onto reels of magnetic tape. The specific version of the IBM fifty one hundred was the d C three hundred cartridge drive. Those cartridges held three hundred feet or about nine of tape. Then the tape itself measured a quarter inch wide or point six centimeters. It can hold up to two hundred four bytes of

data per cartridge. All right, let's do a quick refresher on bites too. A bit is a single unit of machine information, and it can be either a zero or one. You can think of it like uh light switch. It's either flipped off or on. A collection of eight bits is a bite. This is something IBM had a really big hand in establishing. But that's a matter for another podcast. A kilobyte is one thousand bytes, though in terms of memory, particularly in this era, we're really talking about one thousand,

twenty four bytes. To explain, why would have me go off on yet another tangent. So we're just going to ignore that for now, But just know that these cartridges could hold up to two d four thousand bytes of data. That's not that much. Even though two four thousand sounds like a lot, it's not much at all, especially when you consider that was on three hundred feet of tape.

In addition to that cartridge port, the IBM also had a printer i O port io means input output, So you physically connect the printer to this beheamoth of a portable computer with a cable. I'll have a little bit more to say about the IBM in a second, and don't worry, I'm not gonna give every laptop the full treatment like this. This is just to establish some baselines. But before we get into that, let's take a quick break. What was powering the IBM under the hood, right, What

was actually acting as the processor? Well, back in those days, we weren't necessarily talking about CPUs the way we do to day. In fact, it doesn't have a CPU the way we would think of at all for modern computers. If you were to open up an old IBM, you'd find a circuit board kind of mounted upside down. You'd actually have to turn it over, and you would find fifteen microchips mounted on that circuit board, and collectively those

chips acted as the computer's processor. So as such, it's a little tricky to talk about the IBMFE using modern computing terms. It doesn't really fit. Plus, IBM offered up a few variations of this particular computer, but the least expensive model of the IBM had a clock speed of one point nine Mega hurts. And just in case that doesn't mean anything to you if you didn't listen to the PlayStation episodes, I'm going to explain that really quickly.

A processor's clock speed tells you how many steps of instructions the processor can complete in a second. Uh These steps are called cycles in processor speak, and a hurt is one cycle per second. A Mega hurts is a million cycles per second. So essentially this means the IBM could perform one point nine million steps of instructions per second.

And just a reminder, instructions can be really simple or they can be really complicated, So a simple instruction might have only a couple of steps, Complicated instructions could have lots and lots of steps. And all these terms still hold true. Today, if you have a machine with a three point for giga hurts processor, that processor is capable of completing three point four billion steps of instructions every second. And don't worry, software developers have created programs that have

way more complicated steps to them. So while we've seen processor speeds skyrocket over the years, the demands of software have also increased. And that's part of why you might get the feeling that a new computer isn't that much faster than older computers. It's not the fault of the machine necessarily, but rather that software that you're running is more demanding than the software you were using on older computers.

In fact, several prominent people in tech have made observations that indicate software complexity pretty much negate the benefits of Moore's law. That's the general observation that computing processing capabilities typically double every eighteen to twenty four months. Alright, So the IBM a one point nine megahertz processor or the equivalent thereof the basic model also had sixteen kilobytes of memory, and the cheapest model IBM offered was for the ap

L programming language. So what does a p L stand for? Get Ready, a p L stands for a programming language. So your standard sixteen kilobyte ap L version of the IBM fifty one hundred would set you back a cool eight thousand, nine hundred seventy five bucks in nineteen. If we adjust for inflation, that would be right around forty three thousand dollars today. Now that is a princely sum for a portable computer. And keep in mind that's the

cheapest model. Let's say your your daddy Warbucks, right, you got all the money in the world, you want the best. So the most expensive version of the IBM had sixty four kilobytes of memory, which is, by the way, is nothing compared to today's computers, and it could support both a p L and basic programming languages. That one would cost nineteen thousand, nine hundred seventy five dollars back in nine so in today's money that would be about nineties

six thousand bucks. So yeah, these things were major investments. But as I mentioned earlier, while the IBM was portable, it wouldn't fit our definition of laptop. It was more of an all in one computer that you could set up on a desk, then after you were done, you could power it down and then you could take it somewhere else if you really needed to. UM I wouldn't recommend it too much. Like I said, still pretty heavy.

While the IBM would not qualify as a laptop or as a personal computer, the concept of a portable computer was intriguing and in another big company, a guy named Alan Kay had been refining a concept he had been pulling over for years. The other company in this case was Xerox, and Alan Kay would do a lot of his thinking over at Xerox, and then later Xerox established a research center, the Park Research Center, which is redundant if you know what Park stands for. But truth be known,

k had been thinking about this for several years. He had really started thinking about in the late sixties, and he wanted to create a type of computer that could be used by anyone. In fact, he really wanted to develop a computer that kids could use. His dream was to make a computer that was portable, It was easy to use. It would have essentially eternal battery life, although that would require obviously recharging a battery over and over again.

It would have a low requirements for processing. It would have connectativity abilities, It would have a stylus where you could have some sort of stylus input. He had a lot of ideas about what would make this ideal computer, and he had a lot of different form factors that he played around with in this concept, which I should stress was strictly a concept. It was not a practical device. He he wasn't making a prototype because the actual ability

to deliver upon his vision was not there. Like he was thinking about an ideal, but there was no way of making it happen. He thought about perhaps having a slate like tablet form factor. You know, something that's a solid piece where you would have a screen mounted above a keyboard. They're all on the same plane. So think of it like if you had a tablet computer like an iPad, but on the bottom half was a physical keyboard.

That was kind of the form factor he was thinking about. Uh. He did think about other ones too, but that was one that was frequently cited, and it would have a graphic user interface or g u I Gooey that's similar to Windows or Apple's OS today. In fact, Steve Jobs got a look at Xerox Gooey a few years before Apple would go on to introduce the Mac computer, and

it's graphic user interface. I'm just saying, you know, anyway, researchers at Xerox would end up building a computer system called the Alto, and the Alto was not a portable computer, but it did incorporate many of K's ideas into that design. So while K was imagining this technology in the late nineteen sixties, like I said, it just wasn't realistic to build at that time, his work did guide others Xerox to create a portable computer called the note Taker that

was in nineteen eight. This, like the IBM, was a pretty hefty machine. The case did have a keyboard that could fold down from the case, but think of it like a briefcase, right, and it's not a briefcase that opens all the way up. Or think of it like a standard computer tower on its side, and the front can fold down to reveal a keyboard. It's still not a clamshell design. We're not there yet. But we did have the folding unit that had the keyboard in it.

Closing it would allow you to carry the note Taker like it was a suitcase, which is really more what appropriate than saying briefcase because this thing was pretty big. Again, not really a laptop. Xerox also did not produce this as a consumer computer. The note Ta care was an internal project. Reportedly, they only ever produced about ten prototypes of this. This, by the way, is a common thread

in xerox is computer history. Engineers at the company would pioneer these incredible designs and they would find their way into internal Xerox architecture, like Xerox machines, but Xerox wasn't using those as products. They were using them internally at the company to develop other Xerox products. Then those same design elements would later find their way into the products

of other companies. So a lot of the stuff that we think of as being standard in personal computers comes to us thanks to Xerox, but not through direct Xerox products. It's pretty weird. So the company just didn't do very much to capitalize on these developments in direct market products itself.

One company that came out of all this and would end up taking the note taker design and pulling it forward was called Osbourne Computer Corporation, and it would make a consumer computer called the Osbourne One, and that was heavily influenced by the Xerox NoteTaker design. In fact, if you compare them side by side, you can definitely see the the similarities. So the Osbourne one was a commercial consumer computer, really more of still of a business computer,

but it was a commercial success. It cost nearly two thousand dollars when it debuted in nine and some sites referred to it as the first true laptop. Now I take issue with that. Uh, this thing weighed nearly twenty five pounds or around eleven kilograms, and while the keyboard could fold down from the case, it still wasn't in that clamshell design that we tend to associate with the

word laptop. Now, our next stop on the timeline of laptops takes us to a British industrial designer named Bill Mogridge. And Madge got an invite from an x Xerox park researcher named John Ellerby to join him and several others in forming a new computer company called Grid Big G, Big R, Little I, Big D. They formed the company

in nineteen seventy nine and they got to work. Margridge was asked specifically to contribute to a project that aimed to create a portable computer that could fit inside a suitcase. So Margridge gets to work and it was his design that would lead to the clamshell form factor that we now associate with the word laptop computer. As far as I'm able to determine, his design was the first of this style, and the computer, which was called the Grid Compass eleven oh one, would hit the market in nineteen

eighty two, one year after the Osborne one. The Compass eleven oh one had a screen that could display twenty four lines of text, each line eight characters long. It had an Intel eight eight six CPU running at eight mega hurts. It featured two hundred fifty six kilobytes of RAM. It did not have a hard drive. Uh, it did have threes of bubble memory. And that gives me a chance to explain what the heck that is, because back in the seventies and eighties, engineers looked at bubble memory

as a possible alternative to platter based hard drives. So let's say that you've got a strip of material and that material has the ability to be magnetized. Now imagine that you apply very precise magnetic fields and you create just a little area of magnetization on that strip. So

teeny tiny magnetization area. Those are the bubbles, And now let's just say that we associate a bubble of magnetization with the value of one in a binary system, and if you have a section that doesn't have magnetization to it, that's a zero. So now you can just do a series of magnetized and non magnetized sections of this material

to create a record of binary information. So you could do bubble, bubble, bubble, non bubble, non bubble, non bubble, that would be one zero zero zero, But really, I guess I should add one more bubble, non bubble, one zero. That way we have a full bite. Anyway, these areas could then be moved or manipulated by an electromagnetic field. You could actually move this series of bubbles and non bubbles to go past a magnetic reader, and the magnetic

reader would register whenever a bubble goes by. So the magnetic reader registers the two states bubble and non bubble, thus recording whether it's a one or a zero. And the really cool thing about this is that while you're using the electromagnetic field, while you're using these bubbles that are these little magnetized areas on a strip, there's not actually any moving parts here. You're not moving the strip past the magnetic reader. That would be more like magnetic tape.

With magnetic tape, you do a very similar thing. You use a magnetic field to create magnetized areas on the tape, and non magnetized areas can represent zeros. But you have to move the tape past a reader head, right, So that's why you have cassettes or reel to reel, you have motors that have to turn those elements and pull the tape across the reader head so that you can read those zeros or ones. In this approach, you didn't

have to do that. Use the electro magnetic field and these little bubbles of magnetic spaces would move past a stationary magnetic reader, So it's almost like it's virtual if you think of it that way. But again, no moving parts makes it really simple and also makes it much less likely to break down own mechanically because nothing's moving. However, one downside to this is that you were storing information in a serialized format, meaning that let's say you you

filled up the bubble memory storage. You've completely filled up those kill bytes of memory inside this machine, and you're looking for a specific chunk of information that you've saved in that memory, the system would actually have to search the length of the information to find the chunk you're interested in. You would have to start at the beginning, kind of like think of a board game that is

a single pathway from beginning to end. Like you know, I don't know candy Land, and you know you you're information is three quarters the way down the board. Well, you'd have to go through the whole board before you got there, and that's where things would slow down. And so that slowed down was one of the reasons why bubble memory didn't really take off. It was also really expensive and difficult to manufacture. So those components together are

why we don't really talk about bubble memory anymore. But at the time people were hopeful that it could be a viable alternative to platter based hard drives. Now, in addition to bubble memory, you could connect external floppy drives to the grid Compass eleven O one and you could store data that way. You could just save it to a disk and then you'd have to insert the disc whenever you want to pull them that information back out.

The grid computer was not cheat when it launched, it at a price tag of eight thousand one fifty dollars, so today that would be like twenty two thousand bucks. So Grid was really aiming at high level executives. We're talking like CEOs of big companies, and also they were hoping to get some military contracts. The US Space program would end up using some grid Compass computers and sent them up with astronauts to help with in orbit experiments.

So you can just put some of those up on uh a spacecraft, fire that off into orbit, and then they were using those while orbiting the Earth. Rumor has it that the US Nuclear football a GA, the computer that holds the nuclear codes necessary to authorize a nuclear strike, once made their home on a compass even one oh and uh and that name the eleven o one. It makes you ask, what happened to the eleven hundred? Well, there never was one except in promotional material. There never

was a physical eleven hundred products you could buy. Now, if I were making an argument for the first laptop, the Grid Compass eleven oh one would be my candidate. That's the one I would argue is truly the first laptop computer as we think of them today. It was way too expensive for the vast majority of people to purchase, and it was still pretty hefty. It was at nearly eleven pounds or more than five kilograms, But that clamshell

form factor is the key component for me. Margaret's really hit up on something truly useful, saving space by having the keyboard screen face one another when you close the computer. Other companies would later follow that lead. Now, another computer that vised for the title of first true laptop is the EPSOM h X twenty, which looks kind of like an old word processor, which word processor is sort of a typewriter with a little bit more capability. The computer

has a flatform factor. It's a thick one, but it's flat, meaning that the keyboard in the screen are on the same plane as one another. You've got a keyboard and then the screen is mounted slightly above where the keyboard is on this flat piece of hardware. They are both part of a solid case. The screen is small, it's capable of showing just four lines of text that are only twenty characters per a line, and it had built in data storage, rechargeable battery, and for a first for

all portable computers, it had a built in printer. That printer could print out documents that had twenty four characters per line, as speed of forty two lines in a minute, So it's not like you would use this to print out your screenplay. I mean, do you remember back when Twitter would limit us to a hundred forty characters per tweet. Well, this printer could only print twenty four characters per line,

so it's like printing on receipt paper. Then again, considering how long some receipts are, you know, I'm looking at you, CVS, I guess maybe you could print a whole screenplay that way. But anyway, like the Grid Compass, the EPs and h X twenty would launch in late two, but unlike the Compass, it was much cheaper. It was seven dollars at the time. That's around twenty one dollars in today's cash. Still expensive,

but no longer in the astronomical range. And to be fair, this computer was not meant for the average home user either. Oh and the epsom also had an l c D display. That's a liquid crystal display, y'all, And that means we're going to talk about how l c D s work. But I have a feeling you might need to catch a breather before we do that, so we will jump on that after this quick break, I promise you guys a description about l c ds liquid crystal displays, and

here we go. But to understand how they work and why it's important, one thing we need to talk about is polarization, specifically in terms of light. All right, So we know that light behaves both as a wave and a particle, right, So for this explanation, we're really going to focus on the wave part. So imagine a wave and you're probably imagining a curved line that moves up and down right, creating hills and troughs like a sign wave, And that's totally fine. That's that's totally cool. But light

waves can be oriented in any number of directions. So let's say that you're standing perpendicular to a light wave and you can actually see that light wave like we're in this weird reality where you can do that from your perspective. That wave might be moving up and down with respect to your point of view, or it might be moving side to side so that the wave peaks point away from you and the wave troughs point towards you. So you've got parts of the wave that are further

from you. In parts of the wave that are closer to you, or it could be any other orientation between those two. Now, let's say that you've created a filter, and this filter has horizontal slits, and they're really really narrow slits, so that light waves that aren't in the same alignment as those horizontal slits can't pass through the filter. They bounce off. So we're talking about the ability for light that's vibrating a specific way to pass through a

specific type of hole. If the light is oriented a different way, if the waves are going up and down instead of left and right, it bounces off. So only light waves that have the same orientation as the slits and the filter can pass through the filter. This is how polarized lenses work. Now, let's say you've got two of these filters and they're both having these horizontal slits. You put one behind the other. Light with the horizontal polarization would still be able to pass through both of

those filters. But let's say say we take that second filter and we turn it nine d degrees. So now instead of having horizontal slits, we have vertical slits. Filter one is horizontal filter to is vertical. Well, that means that the light that gets through filter one will not be able to get through filter two because the polarization the angle is different. So if you have a couple of pairs of polarized sunglasses, you can actually see this

for yourself. You can put one pair in front of the other, and then you can slowly rotate one set, and eventually you should see things get really dark until you reach a point where light just isn't passing through at all. It just it turns black. I get this same effect when I wear my polarized sunglasses and I'm

looking at my computer display at work. The polarized filter on my display screen is actually at a ninety degree angle from the polarized lenses that are in my sunglasses, so it means I have to tilt my head if I want to read the display, or you know, I would have to take my sunglasses off. But then I'm not as cool, and I'm way more cool as a guy who's wearing sunglasses inside in an office who's tilting his head way off to the side in order to

look at his computer monitor. There's been talk anyway back to l c DS liquid crystals, which refers to certain materials that flow as a liquid would, but have a molecular crystalline structure can twist light under certain conditions. So, in other words, certain materials, certain liquid crystals, can reorient light wavelength vibrations. Let's get back to our two polarization filters that have that ninety degree offset. So we've got

the horizontal and the vertical slits in these filters. If you have an appropriate liquid crystal solution between those two filters, you could use those liquid crystals to twist the light coming from one side so it aligns with that second filter passing through. So the light might be horizontally aligned as as it's going through filter number one, it hits the liquid crystals. The liquid crystals actually twist the polarization

of that light, so now it's vertically aligned. It's not horizontally aligned anymore, which means it can actually pass through filter number two and you get light coming through. So it just you know, like the force, it all depends upon a certain point of view. So yeah, every pixel on an l c D display has this arrangement of filters and liquid crystals. Applying an electro magnetic field to the crystal sandwich between these two filters will untwist the

liquid crystal. That means that the light coming from behind the screen will not realign as it passes through, and it will hit that second filter and it won't come through the second filter. This is why we sometimes call l c D displays backlit displays, because there's a light that's always coming through from behind the display. It's just it's being blocked by that second filter unless the liquid crystals are twisting in such a way to allow light

to come through. Now, on a related note, this is why plasma television enthusiasts preferred plasma to l c D t vs because the plasma displays didn't have this backlight. L c D s did, and because they had that backlight, I mean, if you were watching a scene in a film that was really really dark, then it would be affected by this. Instead of getting like a really dark black, you might get kind of a charcoal gray, so you would have a worse contrast ratio between the brightest white

colors and the darkest black colors on screen. That's why plasma enthusiasts loved their approach because it didn't require a backlight. Anyway, let's get back to this, LCD screens would become way more common in displays over the years, replacing stuff like old cathode ray tube computer monitors and eventually becoming a really important component in laptops. And I guess it's also a good good time to address the name laptop in general.

So these days we tend to use the word laptop to refer to that clamshell design computer that you can fold shut and carry around with you. But originally the term laptop was more generally applied to any portable computer that wasn't too heavy to actually have sitting on your laps. So you had desktop computers, you had portable computers, and then you had a subset of portable computers that weren't so heavy to cause you pain if you were to

have them on your lap, and those were hptops. And yeah, those definitions are really fuzzy, So in a way, it's kind of like the old puzzler, what's the difference between a boat and a ship, or what's the difference between a hill and a mountain. It wouldn't really be until the nineties that the term laptop would really not just refer to weight and size, but a general form factor. And it took a while for that clamshell design pioneered

by the grid Compass one to become the standard. There were several laptop computers there were more of a slate or tablet style form factor in which the screen and the keyboard were on the same plane in a fixed case, so there were no folding components. The Cryotronic eighty five also known as the TRS eighty model one hundred, that was it was offered by Texas Instruments here in the

United States. It was that kind of computer. It was all in one solid case with the keyboard and the screen mounted on the same plane so you're looking down at both. Other computers were essentially cases that had a display incorporated into the processor tower, sometimes with a detachable keyboard. The Commodore s X sixty four was one of those. It had a handle that you could carry around and

the keyboard was separate. You would plug it into this machine, and the handle could also act as sort of a stand so that you could look at the display that was on the end of this computer case. Again, look these up in Google images if if it's not making sense to you, because these are old, clunky computers that

used to be the real cool stuff. One big reason it took so long for a standard form to emerge is that the demand for laptop computers was really low, like personal computers in general were a rarity in most households in the United States, in only eight point two percent of households in the US had a personal computer at all, according to Statista dot com. In fact, it would take more than a decade before half of all households in the US had at least one computer. That

would be two thousand when that happened here. So the market for computers in general was still rather small, and that meant companies that were making computers were kind of picking their battles. So for many computer companies, the margins weren't great, meaning the amount of money it costs to build computers and the amount of money you would get for selling computers wasn't a huge difference, So you weren't making an enormous amount of profit per sale unless you

were a company like IBM or Apple. Both of those could make more specialized hardware, and they could also command much higher prices. Speaking of IBM, the company introduced the IBM PC Convertible in nine six, which, as the name suggests, was a computer intended to serve both as a desktop and a portable device, thus convertible in desktop form. You would slide the case of the PC convertible under a stand had a computer monitor on it, and the monitor

would plug into a port on the case. But if you needed to, you could disconnect the case from this monitor and you could grab a smaller flip up monitor to attach to this case and then flip it down so that you could carry it off, and then on the road you could flip up this detachable l c D screen and do some work. It was not as tall as the standard monitor, so the flip up screen had kind of a wide screen look to it. It also wasn't as high resolution as the desktop monitor was,

but it did allow for portable computing. This debut in nineteen eight six for under two thousand dollars and it weighed twelve pounds or five and a half kilograms. The detachable screen is a neat idea, and it gave you two different display options for the base computer, but it still was a pretty bulky machine. It wasn't super convenient

to carry around. In seven, the United States Air Force put in a really big order for portable computers and they chose the company Zenith Data Systems for this contract. Zenith Data Systems had previously done a lot of big orders for various militaries and other big organizations, and this one was another tall order. It was ninety thousand laptop computers for one hundred four point five million dollars, and it was a project that was going to span three years.

The specific model the Air Force wanted was the Z one eight, which followed the clamshell design that was established by the grid Compass. This was also a really thick computer, definitely bulky by today's standards, but the fold down display makes it instantly relatable to today's laptops, and that big order really helped cement that form factor further, leading to

more companies following that design approach. Some other early folding laptops included the portable Vectra cs from Hewitt Packard, which was one of the first laptops to offer three and a half inch disk drives. Uh. There was also the s l T two eight six, which was the first battery powered laptop with v g A graphics. V g A stands for Videographics Array. It's a set of standards

for computer graphics. First introduced in the late eighties. It was an improvement over older standards like c G A and e G A, but that would require its own episode. And then there was the Macintosh Portable, Apple's first attempt at creating a laptop mac That one was a pretty much a flop in the marketplace. Of course, it cost more than seven thousand dollars at the time, which was

part of the problem. And this computer came out well after Apple management had exiled Steve Jobs from the company. I've done full episodes about that. I won't go into it here, but it would take some time for Apple to formulate a winning laptop strategy. Now I'm gonna end with the Macintosh Portable, but I will give a little more detail about that one before we wrap this up, because I don't want to just dog on that computer. It was actually a really decent machine for the time.

That seven grand price tag wasn't just for prestige. The processor ran at sixteen mega hurts. The standard amount memory for the computer was one megabyte, which was a respectable amount at that time. You could actually upgrade it up to nine megabytes. The screen on the computer had a resolution of six forty by four pixels and it had what was called an active matrix display. What that effectively met was the display could update much faster than others

on the market, which reduced blur. That screen was also one of the components that significantly added to the cost of the computer. The first portable mac came in at a hefty sixteen pounds or about seven point three kilograms, and by that time that was definitely on the heavy side for laptop computers. But why was it so heavy? What was making it way so much? Well, a good portion of that weight was due to the battery. Apple chose a lead acid style battery to power the portable Macintosh.

That's the same kind of battery that you find in cars, car batteries or lead acid batteries, and you would get between six and twelve hours of work one charge of that big battery. So the fact that it was bulky, heavy and expensive meant that not a whole lot of people opted for the Macintosh portable. Now, in our next episode, as I said before, we're gonna look at how things really coalesced to create a laptop market. Then we'll explore

the different subcategories that followed, like netbooks. Remember netbooks If you guys have suggestions for future topics for me to cover here on tech Stuff, whether it is a specific technology, a product, a company, maybe just a trend in tech, let me know. Reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both is tech stuff HSW 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. Eight