Take a look at the item pictured on the right. What exactly is it?

That is the Obsorne 1, the world's first ever (commercially successful) portable computer.

Comparable in size to a sewing machine, weighing 24.5 pounds (11 kilos), and costing a cool $1795 (over $5000 today, accounting for inflation), it was released all the way back in 1981. Can you see the fancy dual disk drives? (We might need to explain to our younger readers what disk drives are.) Each held a massive total of 90 KB! And check out that screen! What, you can't see it? It's right there, in the middle, a whole five inch display with two colors: black and not black. Behind the scenes, a 4 MHz processor, 64 KB of RAM...

We make light today, but this really was revolutionary 40 years ago. The Osborne was designed by Lee Felsenstein, one of the original members of the Homebrew Computers Club, a hobbyist group that led the microcomputer revolution. Perhaps we need to put "micro" in quotes.

Alas, the Osborne didn't survive the test of time. The Obsorne Computer Company went bankrupt after prematurely announcing a better model that was not yet available. In 1983, the IBM-compatible Compaq Portable was released, and that was that.

If JONJ is still here 40 years from now, feel free to make fun of computers from 2022, future editors!