Gallery: Best Buy-designed HP and Toshiba notebooks
by Andy Smith | November 12, 2008 12:26pm PST | Image 12 of 12
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Is it because I claim a patent royality rights to this potentially hugely lucrative idea?
Just, "call my laptop" ! ..and thats it. WHY do we need a separate cellphone?
thanks.
Petr Buben
www.geek.nexo.com
Back in the days before laptops (1985), I was involved in a project to design a "briefcase computer"- which, at the time, was a revolutionary idea for the public. The unit contained a computer, keyboard, display, fax, printer and a cell phone, which was all new technology at the time. Our closest competitor was the somewhat portable IBM 5150. We made a very expensive (and heavy) prototype, but it all worked.
The problem then was cost. There weren't many people at the time who really needed all that in one box, and we couldn't get the capital for mass-production. I found out years later that the CIA already had briefcases like this long before we did.
On a similar topic, despite NEC being generally referred to as the inventor of the laptop in 1987, HP had a "laptop" MS-DOS machine as far back as late 1983 called the HP Portable 110. I had a Portable Plus which I got around 1988 and it was still in use by my sister's family a couple of years ago.
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