April 3, 2011: On this day 30 years ago something occurred in the PC industry that started what I'll call a revolution: the portable PC was introduced. In 1981 journalist and book author Adam Osborne released the 24 pound
Osborne 1 computer. The machine was state of the art back then with a 5-inch CRT, disk drives that stored 102KB of data, 64KB of RAM, and a full size keyboard. It could even fit under the seat on a plane. But it was heavy and could not be used without plugging into AC socket; it did not have a battery.
An interesting piece of history is that one of the co-designers, Lee Felsenstein, theorized that the concept might have been borrowed from a couple of Apple employees who failed to sell the idea to Steve Jobs.
More information about the Osborne 1 can be found here.Happy Birthday Portable PC
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