MobilePC has posted a five-page article on the history of notebook computers with this interesting piece about the PowerBook’s place in history:
ThinkPads were red hot, but IBM was still a corporate brand for corporate users. College kids and aspiring hackers wanted portables, too: They bought the Apple PowerBook.
Apple had just come off one of the worst beatings in computer history: The Newton had bombed miserably, and the 16-pound Macintosh Portable (see “The Worst Notebooks of All Time”) was a laughingstock of computing.
Apple rebounded from both. Apple designer David Levy, who worked on the groundbreaking 1991 Apple PowerBook 100, notes, “The Macintosh Portable was a black eye for the company. We were Apple! There was lots of pressure to do something that set the world straight on Apple’s ability to design a great product. And we did.”
The Apple PowerBook 100 spawned countless innovations, the most notable being moving the keyboard to the back of the machine and making room for a trackball front and center. In 1995, the PowerBook 500 offered the first true touch pad, expansion bay, PC Card slot, and more. But it was the PowerBook 500’s curvy case that really turned heads, proving that portable computers needn’t look like shoe boxes any more.
In its early ’90s heyday, the PowerBook owned a crushing 40 percent of the portable computing market, until the rest of the industry figured out how to do the same thing.
Read the rest of the article at Mobile PC Magazine.
MobilePC has posted a five-page article on the history of notebook computers with this interesting piece about the PowerBook’s place in history:
ThinkPads were red hot, but IBM was still a corporate brand for corporate users. College kids and aspiring hackers wanted portables, too: They bought the Apple PowerBook.
Apple had just come off one of the worst beatings in computer history: The Newton had bombed miserably, and the 16-pound Macintosh Portable (see “The Worst Notebooks of All Time”) was a laughingstock of computing.
Apple rebounded from both. Apple designer David Levy, who worked on the groundbreaking 1991 Apple PowerBook 100, notes, “The Macintosh Portable was a black eye for the company. We were Apple! There was lots of pressure to do something that set the world straight on Apple’s ability to design a great product. And we did.”
The Apple PowerBook 100 spawned countless innovations, the most notable being moving the keyboard to the back of the machine and making room for a trackball front and center. In 1995, the PowerBook 500 offered the first true touch pad, expansion bay, PC Card slot, and more. But it was the PowerBook 500’s curvy case that really turned heads, proving that portable computers needn’t look like shoe boxes any more.
In its early ’90s heyday, the PowerBook owned a crushing 40 percent of the portable computing market, until the rest of the industry figured out how to do the same thing.
Read the rest of the article at Mobile PC Magazine.
