IBM establishes the laptop standard and the father of cellular (PCGH-Retro April 3)

…1973: He is seen as the father of mobile communications. After developing the technology and devices with his team at Motorola in the early 1970s, he and his boss, John F. Mitchell, demonstrated the first public mobile phone call right before the scheduled press conference. He used a DynaTAC prototype to make phone calls to the AT&T network via a specially built Motorola base station (of course, there weren’t any mobile phone networks yet – how could they?). It wasn’t just any phone call though, Cooper called Dr. Engel from Bell Labs, which was also working on the mobile phone technology. His words are to be “Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a real cell phone, a real handheld cell phone.” have been.

…1986: “Portable” computers have been around for a long time – such as the Osborne 1 from 1981 with a built-in CRT monitor and weighing around 12 kilograms. Computers of this type are called “portables”, but still have to do without a battery and are therefore of little use on the go. This computer class has also been available for a while on IBM’s PC basis, first from Compaq and later from IBM itself. But it was not until April 3rd, 1986 that the PC laptop received the form it was still used to, decades later: with the IBM PC convertible. With its foldable (and still monochrome) LC display, it defined – together with the Toshiba T1100 – the design and appearance of portable computers for decades, and battery operation of a “real” PC is also possible with the convertible for the first time. An Intel 80c88 with 4.77 MHz is used as the processor, it is supported by 256 KiByte RAM and two floppy drives – but no hard disk. The revolutionary device will not be a success, the display is too small and the weight and price are too high. It will still be a few years before truly mobile computers become established; twenty years later, they finally replaced stationary desktop PCs as the best-selling type of computer.