The Laptop, Circa 1968

Technologizer ^ | 7/04/2009 | Harry McCracken

[sionnsar]

In 2009, portability is the default state of affairs with computers, since laptops outsell desktop PCs. But in the 1960s, the typical computer was a room-filling mainframe; minicomputers, which were merely the size of a refrigerator, were the small computers of the day.

Which didn’t mean that folks weren’t craving the concept of mobile computing even back then. I was just rummaging through Google’s invaluable archive of several decades of Computerworld, and came across a short item from March 1968 on carrying cases for the typewriter-like Teletype terminals that were then used to interface with mainframes and minis. Anderson Jacobson sold the cases both separately and as a package with a Teletype pre-installed. (Sadly, the Computerworld story doesn’t say how much you had to pay for one of these portable Teletype systems. Maybe if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford one.)

One model of Teletype weighed a trim 75 pounds in its case; another, was an even more featherweight 65 pounds. The cases offered optional wheels in case you wanted to roll your Teletype along. The gent in the photo below didn’t need the wheels–I wonder if he tried to store his Teletype below the seat in front of him when he traveled by airplane?

Of course, putting a Teletype in a case didn’t really give you access to a mainframe’s mighty computing power anywhere; the Teletype had to be plugged in and connected via a dial-up modem (with an acoustic coupler that attached to your telephone’s handset). What it did was help you move a big, bulky piece of equipment from place to place with a little less difficulty. But the yen to go mobile was there. Wonder how the guy in the photo would have reacted if you’d shown him even the most mundane notebook from 2009?

[dfwgator]

1968 was also the year of what is simply known as “The Demo”:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097

[Blue Highway]

What command DID you use? After all those years, how about finally revealing the secret?

[Blue Highway]

I went into Computerland in November, 1982 specifically to purchase an Apple computer. It was $2400, had no software or disk drive and the screen was only 40 characters.

Then, he said, we have something they're calling the Volkswagen of computers, the Osborne I. It had a software bundle including word processing (WordStar), spreadsheet (SuperCalc) and, this month only, a certificate for a free copy of dBASEII. In addition it had two disk drives, a display that would scroll to 80 characters and was portable -- the first of its kind! And, best of all, just $1795 drive out.

And to think Apple even back thern was way over priced. No big surprise there.

[Kirkwood]

“What command DID you use? After all those years, how about finally revealing the secret?”

I have no idea. That was like a couple of lifetimes ago. LOL

[saundby]

We had these at one place I worked. It’s just an ASR-33 that doesn’t have a pedestal and comes with a carrying case. We were still using the ASR-33s into the early 90’s.

Much nicer is the TI Silent 700 terminal. It came out in ‘71.
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/X1612.99

I still have mine. It has the lower case option, local memory, and the parallel interface. Woo-hoo! About 12 lbs. Much better than an ASR-33 in a tuba case. ;)

I don’t have my original Kaypro II any more (traded it for a bench power supply, bench VOM and a handheld DVM), but I still have a souped-up Kaypro IV and Kaypro 10. The IV is really sweet: amber screen with manual adjustments, upgraded ROM, 256K RAM, 40MB hard drive, three internal half-height floppies—each one reads a different format—and an external 8” floppy connector.

[leadpencil1]

That add pre-dates me a bit but it reminds me of my days at the dawn of the PC revolution. I was selling PCs out of a store front in West Hartford CT in the early 80’s. When I started, we sold California Computer Systems and Zeniths and then added Kaypros and Osbornes all running CPM...basically they were Wordstar machines (remember CTRL K?). We also sold Apple PC’s and Corvus hard drives.

Other random things I remember from then:

Videx Video cards (extend the screen from 40 to 80 colums)
Intro of the IBM PC, AT, XT, PCjr,
SSDD, DSDD floppies
They ‘grey” market
Intro of the Apple II, The Apple III, Lisa and the Mac
Visi Calc, Visi Dex, Visi File etc...
Multiplan
Drinking beer, eating pizza and stuffing memory chips into quadram memory cards till 3 am
40% - 50% margin on hardware