John Ellenby, British inventor of the first laptop, powers off

Ah good old Grids

I worked with several hundred Grid PCs. I was working in Commercial Union, the insurance company who bought a large number (I seem to recall them being about £3k each and this was in the early 90s). They were amazingly engineered as they were made in a magnesium shell, contained shock-watches and you could drive a car over them or drop them out of a third storey window (as our staff did) and they would survive. I believe the shuttle actually had two of them on board and they were used for navigation. US Miltary liked them too as they were so battle-hardened and used in M1 Challenger tanks as I recall. The battery lasted 30 minutes at a push and the machines we had came with a CGA, orange plasma screen, a whopping 20Mb hard disk and 1Mb of RAM. At the time, they were unique as no-one had invented a truly portable machine. Grid also came out with the world's first LCD laptop, the Lynx which was a thing of beauty, still very much a piece of quality engineering. Sadly Tandy snapped Grid up and they just disappeared (as they did not know what to do with them), whilst Compaq and Toshiba entered the market and developed the laptop into what we have now. RIP Mr Ellenby, you were a genius and a fantastic engineer.

The Grid still looks modern

and can be used in future Sci-Fi movies.They just need to put in a UHD colour screen and a new motherboard with a modern CPU.

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.

Aliens

The GRiD was in Aliens, but only in the Special Edition edit of the film that was released some years after the theatrical release. Should you be be scratching your heads and thinking "What drone guns?" it is likely you've only seen the TV broadcast version! :)

The director James Cameroon featured another strange portable computer, the Atari Portfolio, in his film Terminator 2 - a device developed in Surry, UK, and licensed to Atari. John Connor uses it to hack an ATM, and later a vault in the Cyberdyne lab.

Ahead of it's time

The GRiD was certainly well ahead of it's time. Introduced in 1982, just one year after the Osborne 1. It featured a bitmapped display and multitasking OS. There was also GRiD-Central, a dial up service where you could buy and download programs, kind of like a modern App store.

I think the GRiD's used in Aliens were Compass 1139's.

I was there when...

AFTER Tandy acquired GriD, and after it sold its whole computer business to AST Research, I got to work on FCC qualification of the GriD convertible, a clever laptop whose screen could be pivoted on its hinges to cover the normal keyboard and allow operation with Microsoft Windows for Pen. A number of them were sold, too. An RF-emitting pen device could be detected by electrodes in the screen, and it was a decent enough laptop for its time, if a bit of a power hog. I'd worked on worse GriD's, tho..

A color version was in development when AST was taken over by Samsung and basically imploded.

Sic transit etcetera ...