Portable, or laptop, computing has come a long way since the first portable computers were introduced the mid 1970’s. Back then, the IBM 1500 was a state of the computer, even though it weighed around twenty three pounds, didn’t run off of a battery, and had a screen about the size of most calculators.
By the mid-1990’s, the laptop as we know it began sprouting up, but was still something of a novelty. Heavy power packs and short battery life kept the early Apply PowerBooks from being a truly mobile computer.
But mobile computing has made huge strides in the past decade or so. Today’s high end laptops are not much thicker than a manila envelope and have about the same computing power as a room full of NASA computers from the 1970’s. And with modern innovations like solar battery chargers and powerful WiFi cards, geography is no longer an impediment to computing.
In just the past three or four years, the laptop has been challenged for portable computing supremacy by two newcomers, the net book and the smart phone.
Net books are really nothing more than stripped down laptops. These bare bones computers have a long battery life, but might lack the processing power needed for streaming movies, or heavy duty number crunching. But with the advent of “cloud” computing, more and more computer users are storing a large number of their files and applications on remote servers rather than on their actual machine.
An even smaller replacement for the laptop is the smart phone. Today’s high end cellular phones aren’t really suitable for running applications like word processing or spreadsheets, but they can do almost anything else.
Unlike a net book, smart phones are optimized to run video and graphic applications. So while you can’t design a database from a smart phone, you can stream movies and update social media networks on the Internet.
The next generation of mobile computing devices will probably be a hybrid of the previous devices that looks a lot like an Apple iPad. And as portable power technology increases, it’s likely that many of the next generation devices will be powered by some sort of integrated solar powered battery charger that never needs to be plugged in to a wall.
The evolution of portable computing has been advancing rapidly over the past few decades and doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. In ten years, today’s cutting edge smart phones will probably look as silly to tomorrow’s children as the first laptop looks to us.
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