On the 30th Anniversery of the Mobile Computer

Osborne 1

In case you didn’t know, this week marks the 30th anniversary of portable computing. Yes, mobile computers are actually younger than many of us – and they all came from a strange machine, described by Time magazine as “a cross between a World War II field radio and a shrunken instrument panel of a DC-3”.

Even though the first prototypes arrived earlier, for example the portable Xerox NoteTaker, it is universally agreed that Osborne 1, released in April 1981, was the first of its kind to be mass produced, and to gather any sort of media attention. This bulky plastic briefcase started so many important trends it’s hard to overlook the influence it had on modern portables, be it laptops, netbooks or tablets...

Of course, times have changed.  Now the smart phone has more speed, power and memory than a room full of these. And it's cheaper to boot. 

My first computer was an Apple II+, purchased for the express purpose of writing my dissertation, published in 1983. It cost 3 times more, in uninflated dollars than the Windows 7 machine I'm using today.  I had a physicist rent it from me to do calculations with over a weekend at one point.  It could word process, work up data using Visicalc, and could be programmed in Basic or machine code.  I wrote a Basic graphics program, and did the figures for my dissertation using it, and programmed a chemical equilibrium program (Microquil) on it.  The changes in the computer industry over the past 30 years have been amazing, when you slow down long enough to think about it.