Laptop
A laptop is a portable personal computer. Laptops typically have a clamshell form factor with a flat-panel screen on the inside of the upper lid and an alphanumeric keyboard and pointing device on the inside of the lower lid. Most of the computer's internal hardware is in the lower part, under the keyboard, although many modern laptops have a built-in webcam at the top of the screen, and some even feature a touchscreen display. In most cases, unlike tablet computers which run on mobile operating systems, laptops tend to run on desktop operating systems, which were originally developed for desktop computers.
Laptops are used in a variety of settings, such as at work, in education, for playing games, content creating, web browsing, for personal multimedia, and for general home computer use. They can be powered using either continuous wall power or a rechargeable battery, and can be folded shut for convenient storage and transportation, making them suitable for mobile use. Laptops feature all the standard input and output components of a desktop computer in a single compact unit, including a display screen, speakers, a keyboard, and a pointing device. Hardware specifications vary significantly between different types, models, and price points.
Design elements, form factors, and construction can also vary significantly between models depending on intended use. Examples of specialized models of laptops include 2-in-1 laptops, with keyboards that either be detached or pivoted out of view from the display, and rugged laptops, for use in construction or military applications. Portable computers, which later developed into modern laptops, were originally considered to be a small niche market, mostly for specialized field applications, such as in the military, for accountants, or travelling sales representatives. As portable computers evolved into modern laptops, they became widely used for a variety of purposes.
History
The history of the laptop follows closely behind the development of the personal computer itself. A "personal, portable information manipulator" was imagined by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968, and described in his 1972 paper as the "Dynabook". The IBM Special Computer APL Machine Portable was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the IBM PALM processor. The IBM 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype.As 8-bit CPU machines became widely accepted, the number of portables increased rapidly. The first "laptop-sized notebook computer" was the Epson HX-20, invented by Suwa Seikosha's Yukio Yokozawa in July 1980, introduced at the COMDEX computer show in Las Vegas by Japanese company Seiko Epson in 1981, and released in July 1982. It had an LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a calculator-size printer, in a chassis, the size of an A4 notebook. It was described as a "laptop" and "notebook" computer in its patent.
File:Epson-hx-20.jpg|thumb|The Epson HX-20, the first "notebook computer", was invented in 1980 and introduced in 1982.
Both Tandy/RadioShack and Hewlett-Packard also produced portable computers of varying designs during this period. The first laptops using the flip form factor appeared in the early 1980s. The Dulmont Magnum was released in Australia in 1981–82, but was not marketed internationally until 1984–85. The GRiD Compass 1101, released in 1982, was used at NASA and by the military, among others. The Sharp PC-5000, the Ampere WS-1, and Gavilan SC were released between 1983 and 1985. The Toshiba T1100 won acceptance by PC experts and the mass market as a way to have PC portability.
From 1983 onward, several new input techniques were developed and included in laptops, including the touch pad, the pointing stick, and handwriting recognition. Some CPUs, such as the 1990 Intel i386SL, were designed to use minimum power to increase the battery life of portable computers and were supported by dynamic power management features such as Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! in some designs.
Some laptops in the 1980s using red plasma displays could only be used when connected to AC power, and had a built in power supply.
The development of memory cards was driven in the 1980s by the need for a floppy-disk-drive alternative, having lower power consumption, less weight, and reduced volume in laptops. The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association was an industry association created in 1989 to promote a standard for memory cards in PCs. The specification for PCMCIA type I cards, later renamed PC Cards, was first released in 1990.
Displays reached 640x480 resolution by 1988, and color screens started becoming a common upgrade in 1991, with increases in resolution and screen size occurring frequently until the introduction of 17" screen laptops in 2003. Hard drives started to be used in portables, encouraged by the introduction of 3.5" drives in the late 1980s, and became common in laptops starting with the introduction of 2.5" and smaller drives around 1990; capacities have typically lagged behind those of physically larger desktop drives.
By 1992 the laptop market was growing about three times faster than that of desktops. By 1994 laptops were also more profitable than desktops, and accounted for one sixth of the personal computer market, up from one twentieth in 1990. They was so important that Dell risked, experts said, "second-rate status" in the industry for not having a strong laptop product line.
Optical disc drives became common in full-size laptops around 1997: initially these were CD-ROM drives, and these later included writable and higher capacity formats like DVD and Blu-Ray. Starting around 2011, the trend shifted against internal optical drives, and as of 2022, they have largely disappeared, though are still readily available as external peripherals.
Resolutions of laptop webcams have climbed over time, from VGA-resolution to 1080p or even higher on some newer models. The earliest-known laptops with 1080p webcams, like the Samsung 700G7C, were released in the early 2010s.
Etymology
The word laptop, modeled after the term desktop, refers to the fact that the computer can be practically placed on the user's lap., in American English, the terms laptop and notebook are used interchangeably; in other dialects of English, one or the other may be preferred. The term notebook originally referred to a type of portable computer that was smaller and lighter than mainstream laptops of the time - approximately similar in size to a paper notebook - but has since come to mean the same thing and no longer refers to any particular size.The terms laptop and notebook trace their origins to the early 1980s, coined to describe portable computers in a size class smaller than the mainstream units but larger than pocket computers. The etymologist William Safire traced the origin of laptop to some time before 1984; the earliest attestation of laptop found by the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1983. The word is modeled after the term desktop, as in desktop computer. Notebook, meanwhile, emerged earlier in 1982 to describe Epson's HX-20 portable, whose dimensions roughly correspond to a letter-sized pad of paper. Notebooks emerged as their own separate market from laptops with the release of the NEC UltraLite in 1988.
Notebooks and laptops continued to occupy distinct market segments into the mid-1990s, but ergonomic considerations and customer preference for larger screens soon led to notebooks converging with laptops in the late 1990s. Now, the terms laptop and notebook are synonymous, with any preference between the two being a variation in dialect.
Types of laptops
Since the 1970s introduction of portable computers, their forms have changed significantly, resulting in a variety of visually and technologically differing subclasses. Excepting distinct legal trademark around terms, hard distinctions between these classes were rare, and their usage has varied over time and between sources. Since the late 2010s, more specific terms have become less commonly used, with sizes distinguished largely by the size of the screen.There were in the past a number of marketing categories for smaller and larger laptop computers; these included "notebook" and "subnotebook" models, low cost "netbooks", and "ultra-mobile PCs" where the size class overlapped with devices like smartphone and handheld tablets, and "Desktop replacement" laptops for machines notably larger and heavier than typical to operate more powerful processors or graphics hardware. All of these terms have fallen out of favor as the size of mainstream laptops has gone down and their capabilities have gone up; except for niche models, laptop sizes tend to be distinguished by the approximate size of the screen, and for more powerful models, by any specialized purpose the machine is intended for, such as a "gaming laptop" or a "mobile workstation" for professional use.