Bill Moggridge

Bill Moggridge, inventor of the first laptop computer, passed away

     British designer, William Grant "Bill" Moggridge, co-founder of the IDEO design firm, has died of cancer at the age of 69 on September 8, 2012.Bill Moggridge came up with the clamshell format for the GRiD Compass laptop when attempting what seemed impossible in 1980: design a real computer that would fit in an executive briefcase.

Ø  Moggridge designed the GRiD Compass laptop (1982) around an early flat screen produced by Sharp. This was a yellow-on-black electroluminescent panel that could display 80 characters of text and 320 x 240 pixel graphics.

Ø  The GRiD Compass 1101 was innovative in its use of storage, too. It didn't include a floppy drive — something that IBM's Think Pad 240 also dispensed with in 1999 — or a CD drive, because the CD hadn't even been invented. Instead, it included 384K of non-volatile electronic "bubble memory" developed at Bell Labs. It seemed a promising idea at the time, but rotating hard drives rapidly took over.

Ø  The GRiD Compass was a powerful machine for its day, with an Intel 8086 processor running GRiD OS in 256K of memory. Today's users might find it a bit heavy at 4.9kg (10.75lbs), but it was less than half the weight of an Osborne 1, an  early portable computer, at 10.7kg (23.5lb), and incomparably smarter.

Ø  The GRiD Compass made Moggridge briefly famous to a generation of geeks, but he spent his life outside computing. He said his career had three phases: first as a designer, then as a manager of design, and then as a communicator. In the final phase he was a writer, graphic designer and video-maker. He wrote two books published by MIT Press: Designing Interactions, published in October 2006, and Designing Media, published in November 2010.