Inventions are incredibly helpful to mankind. They help us in numerous ways and make us rethink how we lived before the invention. When taken away from us, we truly realize how significant the invention was and how daily life is affected by its disappearance. One invention which changed our lives is the laptop.
The first laptop computer was invented by American author Adam Osborne on April 3, 1981. He named it ‘Osborne 1’ and it came with a price tag of $1,795. It came with programs worth $1,500. It weighed 10.7 kg and ran the CP/M 2.2 OS. Its CPU was a Zilog Z80, which ran at 4.0 MHz and it had 64 kilobytes of RAM (Random access memory). It had a tiny 5” monochrome CRT display. At the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980, Adam Osborne approached Lee Felsenstein with the idea of starting a computer company that would not only produce an affordable, portable computer, but would offer bundled software with the computer. Osborne asked Felsenstein to develop the hardware of the personal computer.
Laptops are made of several different components, such as:
A display
A central processing unit (CPU)
A graphic processing unit (GPU)
Memory (RAM)
Internal storage (ROM)
A removable media drive
Inputs such as a touchpad or keys
Expansion cards
A battery
Cooling fans
Modern day laptops are extremely different from old laptops such as Osborne 1. A lot of things have improved on modern day laptops. For example, laptop displays are a lot bigger and brighter, with 13″ to 15″ inch screens and their brightness typically being usually between 200 and 300 nits, compared to the Osborne 1’s tiny 5” screen. Modern laptops are lightning fast, with their speed measured in GHz(gigahertz), compared to the Osborne 1, which had a top speed of 4 MHz(megahertz).
Like everything else, the laptop evolved. From the Osborne 1 to many modern laptops, a lot of improvements have been made. For example, better graphics cards or more RAM or more internal storage. Comparing Osborne 1 to Asus ProArt Studio Book One, the world’s fastest laptop-for now, you truly get to see how things have changed on a colossal margin.
For example:
The speed of the Asus ProArt Studio Book One can hit speeds of up to 4.8 GHz. If you compare that with Osborne 1’s top speed of 4 MHz, you can see a percentage difference of 119,900%.
The RAM of the Asus ProArt Studio Book One is 64 GB compared to Osborne 1’s 64 KB, giving us another percentage difference of 99,999,900%
Seeing these numbers as percentage differences gives us some sort of idea of how enormously vast laptops have progressed.
There are various brands of laptops, with the top brands being ASUS, Dell, HP, MSI, Lenovo, Acer, and Apple. All the brands are slightly different from the others, for example:
Apple has a different operating system (OS)
MSI is a laptop designed for gaming
However, with every pro, there is a con. Laptops have countless advantages, but they also have some major disadvantages, such as:
Laptops can easily break when dropped from medium heights, such as from your hand
Laptops can limit learning and encourage dependency
Laptops can be used for hacking into other people’s accounts
If you accidentally break your laptop, there might be no way to get all your applications, data, and files back unless you have cloud storage, are signed up and know how to work it.
Laptops have improved daily life tremendously, but it also makes us wonder how we ever survived without it. Before laptops were invented, a lot of things had to been done manually. For example, a teacher might have needed to write down her student’s grades and work out the average by herself, which would have taken some time. Companies might have found it hard to keep track of data without a laptop, computer, or some form of storage device.
In conclusion, laptops are extremely essential to daily life. Whether you spend most of your time doing homework or office work on the laptop, you still rely on the laptop. Laptops have assisted humans, and it is inevitable that they will continue to do so.
