Thinnest Laptop: The Lightest Laptop

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

The Lightest Laptop

Before laptop/notebook computers were technically feasible, similar ideas had been proposed, most notably Alan Kay's Dynabook concept, developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. What was probably the first portable computer was the Xerox NoteTaker, again developed at Xerox PARC, in 1976. However, only 10 prototypes were built.

Although it wasn't released until 1985, well after the decline of CP/M as a major operating system, the Bondwell 2 is one of only a handful of CP/M laptops. It used a Z-80 CPU running at 4 MHz, had 64 K RAM and, unusual for a CP/M machine, a 3.5" floppy disk drive built in. It had a 80×25 character-based LCD mounted on a hinge similar to modern laptops, one of the first computers to use this form factor.