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Great, now I want a Grid Compass!

• DonHopkins 5y ago
  Me too! I can't find a citation and don't know if it's true, but decades ago I heard a rumor that a Mossad agent's magnesium alloy GRiD stopped a bullet! Try that with a MacBook Air. The GRiD was so well built, and they were so popular with the military, that rumor was totally believable. This has some stories about spooky GRiD users, like Admiral John Poindexter, who was a bit of a hacker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQgoAQq7bP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQgoAQq7bP4 >Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD compass >Introduced in 1982, the GRiD Compass 1100 was likely the first commercial computer created in a laptop format and one of the first truly portable machines. With its rugged magnesium clamshell case (the screen folds flat over the keyboard), switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and built-in modem, the hardware design incorporated many features that we take for granted today. Software innovations included a graphical operating system, an integrated productivity suite including word processor, spreadsheet, graphics and e-mail. GRiD Systems Corporation, founded in 1979 by John Ellenby and his co-founders Glenn Edens and David Paulsen, pioneered many portable devices including the laptop, pen-based and tablet PC form factors. >Key members of the original GRiD engineering team -- Glenn Edens, Carol Hankins, Craig Mathias and Dave Paulsen -- share engineering stories from the Wild West of the laptop computer. Moderated by New York Times journalist John Markoff. (At 32:37 they mention an external 5 1/4" floppy disk peripheral that was returned for service with a bullet hole, and the "Scrubbing Bubbles" software they wrote for the government to erase the bubble memory in case of emergency.)
• amelius 5y ago
  It looks like a normal size laptop but with a screen the size of an iPhone.