HP 97: The first "laptop computer"?

[Dave Britten]

(06-13-2020 04:24 PM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  I'd say the first laptop was the Epson HX-20. It was introduced a few years later than the HP-97, but it has capabilities that are more in line with what I usually think of as a computer, rather than a calculator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epson_HX-20

Yeah, the HX-20 is definitely the first laptop to resemble what we now expect a computer to look like, with a QWERTY keyboard and character display. But a PDP/8 mainframe has neither, and thus while it looks quite different from what we would expect a computer to look like today, there's no denying that it is one. So I think it becomes kind of a murky philosophical debate whether we can call something a "computer" or a "calculator".

(06-13-2020 06:00 PM)KF6GPE Wrote:  The MCM/70 is a candidate, too --- and came out much earlier. Didn't sell nearly as many units as the Epson.

The IEEE Annals of the History of Computing has a good article about it at The Making of the MCM/70 Microcomputer (this is in their library, and may not be available for free).

Oh yeah, that could certainly qualify. Though at 20 lbs, I don't know whether you'd want to use it on your lap very long. It would be better than a 40 lb HP 9100A at least.