• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

History of portable computers book

E

EvanK

VCFed Founder
Joined
Aug 14, 2003
Messages
1,017
Location
New Jersey
Hi all,

I'm going to release "version 1.0" of my book in a PDF edition this Friday night. Then in a couple of weeks from now I'll release a Kindle e-book version and a print edition.

The PDF version is only $8 and can be ordered right now at the very primitive web site: http://www.abacustosmartphone.com.

There's nothing to stop people from sharing or posting the PDF, other than me asking nicely: please do not do that. I am releasing the book early because I need the money.

So what's in the book? It is the story of the evolution of mobile/portable computers -- how we got from the abacus to the smartphone. I wrote it in plain English for general and mildly technical readers. There aren't a lot of tech speeds-and-feeds; it doesn't explain how the computers worked or how to program them. It is almost entirely about who made them, why, and how they all improved on each other to incrementally move the ball forward. I think it's interesting. Some parts are very funny. Most of all, it's a story that until never was never told.

- Evan
 
I made my purchase, and I received my receipt. Now I'm anxious to get my hands on it and jump in.

Will any updates or errata be made available for the initial purchasers?

smp
 
smp said:
I made my purchase, and I received my receipt. Now I'm anxious to get my hands on it and jump in.

Will any updates or errata be made available for the initial purchasers?

smp
Click to expand...

Thanks for doing so!

The short answer to your question is "yes" but I haven't yet figured out exactly how.

For starters, I'm going to make a real web site for the book, rather than the lame single page which currently exists.

I like the site that Phil Lapsley made for his book "Exploding the Phone" (which is a fantastic book!) so I'll probably do something similar.
 
EvanK said:
For starters, I'm going to make a real web site for the book, rather than the lame single page which currently exists.

I like the site that Phil Lapsley made for his book "Exploding the Phone" (which is a fantastic book!) so I'll probably do something similar.
Click to expand...

And... presto-chango, now www.abacustosmartphone.com is a real web site (per the limits of HTML4, CSS, and my primitive coding ability).
 
I am humbled. Lee Felsenstein sent me a quote tonight:

This book presents the history of personal, portable computing from the abacus to the present day in a remarkably thorough, accessible fashion. Not only the winners are described but the also-rans and almost-made-its. Koblentz has done an admirable job of research and description in covering the field.

I've always been careful to claim that my Osborne-1 design was only the "first commercially-successful portable computer" because I knew that a book like this would be forthcoming to show the time lines, descriptions and designers of earlier efforts. By nature a survey of the field, it is thoroughly researched and can provide pointers to more in-depth investigations.
 
Funny Halt and Catch Firs should be mentioned in the same post about the history of the portable. When I was doing some research on the Compaq portable after getting one recently, I found out that the storyline of the show was based around Compaq and their creation of the Compaq portable.
 
Is there an index? (My main criticism of Marty's Atari book is that there is no index and no print version, which makes searching the book for information nearly impossible.)
 
Trixter said:
Is there an index? (My main criticism of Marty's Atari book is that there is no index and no print version, which makes searching the book for information nearly impossible.)
Click to expand...
Surely you know how to search an electronic document. :)

What PDF reader are you using that doesn't have a search feature?
 
Stone said:
Surely you know how to search an electronic document. :)
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm not an idiot.

There are benefits to indexes over a full-text search, primarily the fact that the author curated and added context to the index entries. If I am interested in a search term that is used hundreds or thousands of times in the text, it is much faster to go to an index and see what (the author thought were) relevant uses of that term.

(Marty's book is not available in electronic form, so the omission of an index is particularly egregious.)
 
tkc8800 said:
Funny Halt and Catch Firs should be mentioned in the same post about the history of the portable. When I was doing some research on the Compaq portable after getting one recently, I found out that the storyline of the show was based around Compaq and their creation of the Compaq portable.
Click to expand...

Interesting idea. I'll see about working that into the next point version (which will be the first print edition).
 
JDallas said:
Though its not a personal computer, the MDTs (Mobile Data Terminals) used in areas like police and fire vehicles may be interesting to add someday. Most people have a subliminal knowledge of them from movies and TV shows.

I ran across them first around 1978 at E-Systems. That early unit was a card rack of TTL boards and probably limited to a special market.

In 1984/5 I joined the project at their commercial spin-off company, Electro-Com Automation (ECA) in Arlington Tx. By then it was a single piece terminal with an 8085 driving it inside. These are the MDT-800 series that most people have seen in movies and TV shows; mostly because the MDT-850s won the Los Angeles police and fire contract and thus they were handy for Hollywood to film.

Motorola was a competitor in that market (we had to beat them TWICE in the L.A. contract when the test was redefined - nonsense like that happened a lot). There was another lesser competitor in Kansas, I don't recall their name.

The MDT-800s were a single piece assembly using a small CRT mounted along the vertical axis and viewed through a portal with a mirror behind it. It gave that extended depth impression of the old arcade games (if you know the ones I mean). It had status LEDs and function keys with them for quick task selections and a keyboard at the base of the unit.

They communicated over audio police and fire bands using zero-crossing timed synthesized half-wave audio range tones. You could hear them "sing" on radio scanners. They used an effective 2400 baud data rate when I got there but I bumped it to 4800 just by changing the firmware to do di-bit timing of four periods instead of bit timing of two periods.

I left to work for Tandy around '87 and I heard ECA sold off that division about 6 months later. Over the years I've heard of an MDT-860 but I don't think they had time to finish up the 64180 design we were working on in the lab with new high-resolution flat panel displays. By then the dawn of laptops made it clear that the products in this market were going to be more like re-tasked laptops.

It was cool stuff; I've got a MDT-850 sales-poster still hanging in my office.

I probably should have compiled a list of movies/TV showing MDTs but they seemed omnipresent in the 90s-2Ks so a list didn't seem to be necessary. It think the TV series "COPS" saturated exposure to the the police mobile data terminals.
Click to expand...

There is some discussion of mobile terminals in the book.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top