The Osborne I was the first popular portable computer, coming out in 1981. "Portable" was a relative term, for it weighed 23.5 pounds and was the size of a large suitcase. It came with a 5" monitor and ran the CP/M operating system. It had two 91K 5.25" drives built-in, could run on an optional battery pack, and used the Zilog Z-80A processor with 64K RAM. The screen was too small to show a full 80 columns of text at a time, so it displayed a "window" of the screen. Alas, Adam
Osborne's efforts went for naught as his corporation, after a very successful start, collapsed within two years due to superior competition.
From Landmarks In Digital Computing: A Smithsonian Pictorial History :
Adam Osborne, an engineer who had taken on a second career writing documentation for computers, surveyed the booming and chaotic personal computer phenomenon (around 1980) and decided to enter the fray with a product of his own. He envisioned a compact appliance, light enough to be carried as luggage and
small enough to fit under an airline seat. It would be just cheap enough to be purchaed with one's credit card, thus encouraging impulse sales ($1795). For that price one would get everything needed to begin computing right away: system software as well as programs for word prcessing and a database.
In March 1981 he announced the Osborne computer. It was an instant success and the company grew fast. Osborne later named the phenomenon "hyper-growth":
growth too fast for a company's own good. By late 1983 the company was bankrupt. It had made a number of mistakes, nearly all related to its inability to manage such a fast pace.
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