History

As the personal computer became feasible in the early 1970s, the idea of a portable personal computer followed; in particular, a "personal, portable information manipulator" was envisioned by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968[7] and described in his 1972 paper as the "Dynabook"[8].

The I.B.M. SCAMP project (Special Computer APL Machine Portable), was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the PALM processor (Put All Logic In Microcode).

The I.B.M. 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype.

As the 8-bit C.P.U. became more widely accepted, the number of portables increased rapidly. Based on the Zilog Z80, The Osborne 1 weighed 23.5 pounds (10.7 kg). It had no battery, a tiny 5" CRT screen and dual 5¼" single-density floppy drives. In the same year the first laptop-sized portable computer, the Epson HX-20, was announced[9]. The Epson had a LCD screen, a rechargeable battery and a calculator-size printer in a 1.6 kg (4 pounds) enclosure.

The first laptop using the clamshell design, utilized today by almost all laptops, appeared in 1982. The $8150 GRiD Compass 1100 was purchased by NASA and the military among others. The Gavilan SC, released in 1983, was the first notebook marketed using the term "laptop".

From 1983 onwards:

* Several new input methods were introduced: the touchpad (Gavilan SC, 1983), the pointing stick (IBM ThinkPad 700, 1992) and handwriting recognition (Linus Write-Top[10], 1987).
* CPUs became designed specifically for laptops (Intel i386SL, 1990), targeting low power consumption, and were augmented with dynamic power management features (Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow!).
* Displays reached VGA resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT 286) and 256-color screens by 1993 (PowerBook 165c), progressing quickly to millions of colors and high resolutions.
* High-capacity hard drives and optical storage (CD-ROM followed by DVD) became available in laptops soon after their introduction to the desktops.

Early laptops often had proprietary and incompatible architectures, operating systems and bundled applications.