The Grid Compass (written ''GRiD'' by its manufacturer GRiD Systems Corporation) is one of the first laptop computers.

History

Development began in 1979, and the main buyer was the U.S. government. NASA used it on the Space Shuttle during the early 1980s, as it was powerful, lightweight, and compact. The military Special Forces also purchased the machine, as it could be used by paratroopers in combat. Along with the Gavilan SC and

Sharp PC-5000 The Sharp PC-5000 was a pioneering laptop computer, announced by Sharp Corporation of Japan in November 1983. It employed a clamshell design in which the display closes over the keyboard, like the earlier GRiD Compass and contemporary Gavilan ...

released the following year, the GRiD Compass established much of the basic design of subsequent laptop computers, although the laptop concept itself owed much to the Dynabook project developed at Xerox PARC from the late 1960s. The Compass company subsequently earned significant returns on its

patent rights A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

as its innovations became commonplace.

Competitors

The portable Osborne 1 computer sold at around the same time as the GRiD, was more affordable and more popular, and ran the popular

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initi ...

operating system. But, unlike the Compass, the Osborne was not a laptop and lacked the Compass's refinement and small size.

Models

The Compass ran its own operating system, GRiD-OS. Its specialized software and high price (–) meant that it was limited to specialized applications.

Compass

The initial model, the 1101, was introduced in April 1982; The 1100 model designation were never released commercially, but featured in some pre-release marketing material.. The computer was designed by British

industrial design Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advance of the manufactu ...

er Bill Moggridge.

Design

The design used a clamshell case (where the screen folds flat to the rest of the computer when closed), which was made from a magnesium alloy. The computer featured an Intel 8086

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

, a electroluminescent display, 340-

kilobyte The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix '' kilo'' as 1000 (103); per this definition, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes.International Standard IEC 80000-13 Quant ...

magnetic bubble memory, and a

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...

. Devices such as

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...

s and floppy drives could be connected via the IEEE-488 I/O (also known as GPIB or General Purpose Interface Bus). This port made it possible to connect multiple devices to the addressable device bus. It weighed (). The power input is ~ AC, , .

Compass II

The Compass II was released in 1984; known as 1121, 1129, 1131 and 1139 models.

References

External links

* * *
InfoWorld Aug 2, 1982

InfoWorld Nov 8, 1982
* * * * {{GRiD Laptops History of computing hardware RadioShack Products introduced in 1982