Portable Computing Then and Now

s5eceb — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:02:11 +0000

Released in April 1981 by the Osborne Computer Corporation, the Osborne 1 is considered to be the first true portable computer – it closes-up for protection, and has a carrying handle. It even has an optional battery pack, so it doesn’t have to plugged into the 110VAC outlet for power.
While quite revolutionary, the Osborne does have its limitations. For example, the screen is only 5″ (diagonal) in size, and can’t display more than 52 characters per line of text. To compensate, you can actually scroll the screen display back and forth with the cursor keys to show lines of text up to 128 characters wide
The two pockets beneath the floppy drives work great for floppy disk storage, although the Osborne modem also fits perfectly in the the left pocket and plugs into the front-mounted “modem” port.

Osborne 1
Introduced: April 1981
Price: US $1,795
Weight: 24.5 pounds
CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 4.0 MHz
RAM: 64K RAM
Display: built-in 5″ monitor
53 X 24 text
Ports: parallel / IEEE-488
modem / serial port
Storage: dual 5-1/4 inch, 91K drives
OS: CP/M

Fast forward 25 years and , we ultra-portable VAIO UX Premium Micro PC. The Premium Micro will run Vista and sport a 1.3GHz Intel Core Solo U1500 processor, a 4.5-inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, 1GB of RAM, a 32GB solid state disk, a Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11g, USB 2.0, Firewire, and Memory Stick Duo memory card slots, and it’s also going to have integrated Wireless WAN with EDGE connectivity. All this for around $2000.

Of course we have many other similar products from Apple,Samsung and others but the point is that in last 25 years we have achieved incredible computing power in our portable laptops.

- Rahul B Tharakan, S5 ECE

MBC – AZTECS

s5eceb — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:24:57 +0000

AZTECS – Association of Electronics and Communication Engineers

MBC Rasta » ECE

Portable Computing Then and Now

MBC – AZTECS