Xerox NoteTaker

The Xerox Taker was one of the first early portable computer. The computer was developed at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto in 1976. Although the computer never went into production and only about ten prototypes of the computer were produced, the model had a strong influence on the later published computer Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable computer.

The Taker was implemented by a team led by the developers Adele Goldberg, Douglas Fairbairn, and Larry Tesler. The basic concept of the computer leaned heavily on its Dynabook concept by Alan Kay. While the Dynabook was a concept for a portable computer, which could not be implemented at that time with the existing technology, the Note Taker should demonstrate what then could be implemented realistically with existing technology.

The computer contained for that time very high-performance technology: a housing built into the monochrome monitor, a floppy disk drive and mouse. The computer was equipped with 128 kB of RAM, which was a very large memory to damamligen time. The main processor was clocked at 1 MHz. The Xerox Taker used a version of the Smalltalk operating system, which was developed for the Xerox Alto computer.