Ultimate Cool & Very Effective
Quite fortuitously I was at Comdex when the Grids were released.
I was looking for portable PCs for all the staff of the professional practice I was a member of, and sadly realised that these wonders were too expensive if I were buying over a 100 of them, but that they were perfect for putting on board the most competitive ocean racing boats.
Previously, we were using PDP11s on race boats, which were not ideal in a very difficult environment. The self contained Grids had a magnesium case, which struck a chord with the tech savvy yacht designers and crews, and fortuitously the best race instrument maker at that time had written software for use by the US's 12 Metre America's Cup racers, which, thanks to a bit editor from Norton, I was able to run on the MS-DOS Grids, which was a first.
The following year the first event in the World Chamionship was the Kenwood Cup in Hawaii, which was windy, hot and humid with big seas running, and inside a yacht hull built out of composites, the temperatures soared and the salt laden air was so corrosive, I had to strip down the computers and clean them as the salt was showing signs of eating into the boards.
The Grids were great, we won the regatta and the world championship later in the (2 year) series. from this time onwards computers became an integral part of racing offshore. I never knew that John Ellenby was British but we did know that some of his computers were used by the CIA.