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href="#i000034450000.jpg" alt="technicalstuff"/> This icon alerts you to something technical, an aside or a trivial tidbit that I simply cannot suppress the urge to share. For example: “My first laptop was a steam-powered, 8-bit 6502 that I breadboarded myself.” Feel free to skip over this book’s technical information as you please.
Where to Go from Here
You can start reading this book anywhere. Open the table of contents and pick a spot that amuses you or concerns you or piques your curiosity. Everything is explained in the text, and stuff is carefully cross-referenced so that you don’t waste your time reading repeated information.
My email address is [email protected]. Yes, that’s my real address. I reply to all email I receive, and you’ll get a quick reply if you keep your question short and specific to this book. Although I enjoy saying Hi, I cannot answer technical support questions or help you troubleshoot your laptop. Thanks for understanding.
You can also visit my web page for more information or as a diversion:
This book’s specific support page can be found at:
There you’ll find updates, as well as frequent blog posts with laptoppy information, tips, and tricks.
The publisher also maintains a support page, complete with updates and such. You can visit the publisher’s site here:
www.dummies.com/extras/laptops
An online Cheat Sheet can be found at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/laptops. There, you’ll find tips and places to write down important info about your laptop that you might need in the future should anything go wrong.
Enjoy your laptop computer. I’ll see you on the road!
Part I
This Laptop Thing
In this part …
✔ Discover how the modern laptop came to be.
✔ Learn how to buy a new laptop just right for you.
Chapter 1
The Portable Computing Quest
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding portable computing
▶ Reviewing laptop history
▶ Discovering modern laptops
▶ Getting to know the subnotebooks
▶ Recognizing the tablet PC
It was Eugene’s idea. One summer day, in his 42nd year, he noted how pleasant the weather was outside. He was inspired to attach wheels to the room-size, vacuum tube computer. Then he and the other three computer scientists, despite their utter lack of muscle tone, pushed the 17-ton beast out of the lab to work outside. It was this crazy notion that sparked the portable computer revolution.
Today the revolution continues. Computers are not only shrinking – they’re becoming more portable. Their names represent a pantheon of portable PC potential, including portables, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, Ultrabooks, convertibles, and tablets. Indeed, portable computing has a rich history, from the first dreams and desires to the multitudinous options now available.
The History of Portable Computing
You can’t make something portable by simply bolting a handle to it. Sure, it pleases the marketing folk, who are interested in things that sound good more than things that are practical. For example, you can put a handle on an anvil and call it portable, but that doesn’t make it so.
My point is that true portability implies that a gizmo has at least these three characteristics:
✔ It’s lightweight.
✔ It needs no power cord.
✔ It’s practical.
In the history of portable computing, these three things didn’t happen all at once, and definitely not in that order.
The ancient portable computer
Long before people marveled over credit-card-size calculators, merchants and goatherds used the world’s first portable calculator. Presenting the abacus, the device used for centuries to rapidly perform calculations that would otherwise induce painful headaches.
Abacus comes from the Greek word meaning "to swindle you faster." Seriously, the abacus, or counting board, is simple to master. Schoolkids today learn to use the abacus as a diversion from more important studies. In the deft hands of an expert, an abacus can perform all the same operations as a calculator – including square and cubic roots.
In his short story Into the Comet, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote of stranded astronauts using many abacuses to plot their voyage home when the spaceship’s computer wouldn’t work because the Internet was down and their version of Windows couldn’t be validated.
The desire to take a computer on the road has been around a long, long time. Back around 1970, when Bill Gates was still in school and dreaming of becoming a chiropodist, Xerox PARC developed the Dynabook concept.
Today, you’d recognize the Dynabook as an eBook reader, similar to the Amazon Kindle: The Dynabook was proposed to be the size of a sheet of paper and only a half-inch thick. The top part was a screen; the bottom, a keyboard.
The Dynabook never left the lab, remaining only a dream. Yet the desire to take a computer on the road wouldn’t go away. For the next three decades after the Dynabook concept fizzled, many attempts were made to create truly portable computers.
The first successful portable computer was the Osborne 1, created by computer book author and publisher Adam Osborne in 1981. Adam believed that in order for personal computers to be successful, they would have to be portable.
His design for the Osborne 1 portable computer was ambitious for the time: The thing would have to fit under an airline seat – and this was years before anyone would even dream of using a computer on an airplane.
The Osborne 1 portable computer, shown in Figure 1-1, was a whopping success. It featured a full-size keyboard and two 5¼-inch floppy drives but only a teensy, credit-card-size monitor. It wasn’t battery powered, but it did have a handy carrying handle so that you could lug around the 24-pound beast like an overpacked suitcase. Despite its shortcomings, 10,000 units a month were sold; for $1,795, you got the computer plus free software.
Figure 1-1: A late-model Osborne.
The Osborne computer was barely portable. Face it: The thing was a suitcase! Imagine hauling the 24-pound Osborne across Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Worse: Imagine the joy expressed by your fellow seatmates as you try to wedge the thing beneath the seat in front of you.
Computer users yearned for portability. They wanted to believe the advertising images of carefree people toting the Osborne around – people with arms of equal length. But no