With a price tag of US $8,150 (about $23,000 today), the Compass wasn’t intended for consumers but rather for business executives. Floppy drives and hard disks were available as peripherals. The Compass also included a 16-bit 8086 microprocessor and up to 512 KB of RAM. The metal case added to the laptop’s reputation for ruggedness. Indeed, sales representatives claimed they would drop the computer in front of prospective buyers to show off its durability.īut bubble memory also tends to run hot, so the exterior case was designed out of a magnesium alloy to make it a heat sink. With no rotating disks or moving parts, solid-state bubble memory worked well in settings where a laptop might, say, take a tumble. The computer had 384 kilobytes of nonvolatile bubble memory, a magnetic storage system that showed promise in the 1970s and ’80s. Some people call the Compass the first truly portable laptop computer. But compared with, say, the Osborne 1 or the Compaq Portable, both of which had a heavier CRT screen and tipped the scales at 10.7 kg and 13 kg, respectively, the Compass was feather light. About the size of a large three-ring binder, it weighed 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds). Its 21.6-centimer plasma screen could display 25 lines of up to 128 characters in a high-contrast amber that the company claimed could be “viewed from any angle and under any lighting conditions.”īy today’s standards, the GRiD was a bulky beast of a machine. The Graphical Retrieval Information Display (GRiD) Compass had a unique clamshell design, in which the monitor folded down over the keyboard. The GRiD Compass Was the First Laptop to Feature a Clamshell Design The Commodore 64 came to market in the United States. The BBC Micro was introduced in the United Kingdom, as was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The year 1982 was a notable one in personal computing.
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