Good Value Laptops

The history of the laptop is somewhat confusing. But what we do know is, it was invented in the late 1970s – early 1980s. There seems to be some debate as to who exactly invented the first one. NASA used a laptop on the space shuttle program in the early 1980s. It was designed by Grid Systems and was named the “Grid Compass”, but this so-called laptop didn’t run on batteries and didn’t boast a built-in floppy drive.

In 1981 Osborne Computers (a book company which sold books to McGraw-Hill) - and in particular, Adam Osborne - invented the Osborne 1 which is also claimed to be the first laptop.

And that’s not the end of it – the Gavilan computer was introduced in May 1983 as the first laptop, costing around $4000 and weighing in at 9lbs. This had a 3.5-inch floppy drive, a mouse-pad (the first of its kind) and an internal modem. It also had a 5MHz Intel processor and 32K of RAM!! Compare that to the laptops of today with speeds over 2GHz (that’s over 400 times faster) and RAM over 2GB.

The world’s first hand-held computer to hit the market is widely accepted as the Epson-HX20. It was available for purchase in July 1982 and had only 16KB of RAM. On the positive side - it weighed a miniscule 3.5lbs!!