History of the Term "Laptop"

For my search, I decided on the term "laptop," which is something many of us use everyday and is very important to me personally in my everyday work. I began my search in the New York Times. The earliest use I was able to find was from November 5, 1985 in an article entitled "Big Gains in a Laptop, For a Price," by Peter H. Lewis. At the time this article was written, laptops were a fairly new technology, and improvements were constantly being worked on (as they are today). This particular article describes two different laptops models and how their technological components differ from one another, as well as comparisons in price. Moving on to the Chicago Tribune, the earliest use of the term "laptop" that I could find was November 16, 1984 in Christine Winter's article "'Laptop' Computers, Software Steal Show." Where she discusses new laptop models and software (both of which were on the rise in terms of popularity) that were present at a technology convention. The earliest use of the term that I was able to find in the Los Angeles Times was from June 9, 1986, in Richard O'Reilly's article "Computer File: Toshiba's and IBM's New Laptop PCs are both Attractive Compromises." In this article, O'Reilly discusses new laptops that were being offered by the Toshiba and IBM brands. All of these uses seemed to be from when laptop's were seeing a rise in popularity early in their development and were just beginning to become known to the public.

In my ProQuest Search, the earliest use of the term "laptop" that I was able to find was in an article from April 7, 1986 in Focus: Metropolitan Philadelphia's Business Newsmagazine. This article discusses IBM announcing a new laptop computer as pat of its product lineup, describing some of its specs. It is interesting to read, as some of the laptop characteristics that were praised back in 1986 would be laughed at by today's standards. From small memory capacity compared to today to the laptop's weight being "less than 13 pounds," all for the same price as a very high-quality laptop today, it is interesting to see how technology has developed over time. Searching Project Muse, the earliest use of the term "laptop" that I was able to find was from "Working on the Clinton Administration's Health Care Reform Task Force" by Nancy Neveloff Dubler in December of 1993. This simply made a passing reference to the use of laptops to do work, though many people also carried a disk with the necessary files and used an on-site computer instead of carrying around their own laptops. When I did a search on JSTOR, the earliest instance of the term "laptop" was in "BioScience," published by the University of California Press in November of 1987. It occurred in a short section on page 700 entitled "Computers to Go." This was a brief response to an earlier mention in "Bioscience" of laptop manufacturers, stating that they in fact left out the what they author refers to as "the company that started it all."

In my search, I did not find any major differences from how we use the term "laptop" today. Each article used the term in reference to laptop computers and all of the articles I found were from some point in the 1980s, when laptops had just started to gain popularity in the public and had recently seen increases in public use. the most interesting thing to note is the advancements that have taken place over the years. Many of the articles I found contained images of old laptops as well as details of their specifications. Many of the traits would be laughed at today and considered simplistic at best. Memory capacities were small and weights were obscene compared to laptops today. In addition, the programs that laptops used then were far more limited in their functionality than laptops are today. the most interesting thing about this search was to simply see how far technology has come and get an idea of the major advancements that have taken place. In a relatively short amount of time, we have managed to make incredible technological leaps and bounds.