The Osborne 1, The World’s First Laptop
By David Ponce
It’s billed as the world’s first truly portable computer. Released in 1981 by the Osborne Computer Corporation, the Osborne 1 closed-up for protection, and had a carrying handle. It even had an optional battery pack, so it didn’t have to plugged into the 110VAC outlet for power.
The screen was only 5″ (diagonal) in size, and couldn’t display more than 52 characters per line of text. To compensate, you could actually scroll the screen display back and forth with the cursor keys to show lines of text up to 128 characters wide. It sold for $1,800, weighed 24.5 pounds and came with 64k of ram.
There’s a Google cache with more information, though I’ve no idea how long it’ll be good for.
Story VIA Digg.
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