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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 th
by leoc 12y ago
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.
- bzbarsky 12y agoI 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.
- leoc 12y agoNo 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 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.