Comment by spotman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spotman | Hacker News Reader

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"Whatever happened to the the laptop computer?" may be the HN headline here, and the 1st sentence of the article, but if you read to the end you'll see the following:

"Sales representatives, service managers, field auditors of all varieties have not been adequately served by the computer industry in pushing laptop computers. As the technology of these machines, particularly of their displays, improves, and as their price declines, a lot of briefcase computers will probably be sold. And as the software that is capable of turning them into true satellite offices becomes refined, they will probably even be used - in fact, profitably so."

I'm hearing another prediction, that "a lot of briefcase computers will probably be sold." if things like displays and software improve.

Not sure who is calling this a wrong prediction, but the article leaves us with more than a gist of laptops weren't working out for the common business in 1985, but they did not explicitly state that they were never going to work out.

Not really. The author's main idea was that even people who were already using word processors and spreadsheets would by and large not be interested in using them anywhere but at their office and at home, and that technical or price improvements to laptops would not change this. He returns to that thesis immediately after the excerpt you quoted. He really was just far wrong in this.

I suspect he would have been far less wrong were it not for the rise (much later than the article) of near-ubiquitous (in terms of places one might want to work) high-speed wireless networking. Not having to either to lug your data from desktop to laptop on physical media or to find a phone line to dial in to where the data lives via modem makes laptop use a _lot_ nicer than it would have been otherwise.

No doubt Wi-Fi helped to push laptops to a new level of popularity. But the laptop became a big mainstream success—as a fraction of the total size of the business PC market, which is roughly the yardstick the author held up—even before dial-up Internet and the WWW became popular. The Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE came out in 1989, and by the end of 1992 the ThinkPad and PowerBook were both with us.

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