Reaching Anew: the Story of the First Portable Computer

Even with a development organization, it was an uphill battle to get Xerox executives to accept a product. One example was the Notetaker computer, conceived by Adele Goldberg, a researcher in the Smalltalk group who is currently president of the Association for Computing Machinery and who is still at PARC. Poor Adele," Tesler said. The rest of us got involved and kept redefining the project."

The Notetaker ended up as an 8086-based computer that could fit under an airplane seat. It was battery-powered, ran Smalltalk, and had a touch-sensitive screen designed by Thornburg. We had a custom monitor, we had error-corrected memory, a lot of custom engineering that we would normally only do for a real product," said Fairbairn, the Notetaker's chief hardware designer. The last year before I left PARC," Tesler said, I spent flying around the country talking to Xerox executives, carrying Notetaker with me. It was the first portable computer run in an airport. Xerox executives made all sorts of promises: we'll buy 20,000, just talk to this executive in Virginia, then talk to this executive in Connecticut. The company was so spread out, they never got the meeting together. After a year I was ready to give up."

While Xerox may not have been ready to run with a portable computer, others were. The Osborne I was introduced in 1981, about nine months after Adam Osborne reportedly toured PARC, where pictures of the Notetaker were prominently displayed.