The Xerox company was the first one that wanted to create a computer that could be carried around anywhere, since the 70s. We refer here to Xerox Parc, from the Palo Alto Research Center company, a subdivision of the previously mentioned corporation, being the first ones who came up with the idea of Dynabook, a type of laptop that could be taken anywhere. It was also them who invented the so-called Ethernet technology, as well as the laser printing.
In 1981, the first laptop was sold, or at least launched for sale, under the name of Osborne 1, with a price of no more, no less than 2000 dollars, presenting a rather advanced configuration for those times. It even contained two floppy disk units. But the greatest disadvantage of this device was its incredibly small screen, of only 5 inch, so a lot smaller compared to today’s notebooks; nevertheless it was easily portable.
Even if the earnings for Osborne 1 have been rather large, the founding company, which went bankrupt three years later, could not recover. This happened due to the fact they had already made an announcement with all the improvements they were going to bring to the upcoming notebook and thus sales went down dramatically so they didn’t have any more resources to invest in the future model.
The first laptop of all times, even if difficult to carry and use, was the Xerox Note Taker; it had very good components for those times, in 1976 to be more precise, having a processor of 1 MHz and 128 kB RAM. But only a few devices of that model were made because the creation of a single piece was highly expensive. Current estimations vary around 50.000 dollars.
Intel is trying to update or rather create a set of complete patterns to determine the leveling of the notebook industry, mainly referring to the screen, only three size categories being accepted, namely 15.4 inch, 14.1 inch and 15 inch.
