Fire in the Screen: The Flash Of Insight That Led Bill Moggridge To Design the Clamshell Laptop

Bill Moggridge, original designer of the laptop “clamshell” form, the one that has defined the portable computer since his GRiD Compass first entered the hands of NASA and U.S. Special Forces in 1982, passed away in San Francisco on September 8th at the age of 69 after his struggle with cancer. His vision of the laptop computer as an interactive device lives on and continues to shape the relationship between humans and machines.

The story of portable computer design is the story of how people fell down the rabbit hole of the screen. When IBM released its 5100 in 1975, this 55 pound chunk of change entered the market as the first portable computer. Here’s a commercial for it from 1977:

From the first menacing note of the trumpets, IBM announces this is no consumer product. This is a tool for people with things to do in the real world. Given that it doesn’t even have a handle, portable might only be an appropriate word if you’re carrying it around like Moses with the Ark of the Covenant. At 1:25, the narrator says the cost of the 5100 is “reasonable,” which is marketing code for its price tag of around $15,000 dollars at the time – roughly $60,000 dollars in today’s money.

The bottom line for the 5100 is that while it was a great machine for businesses needing on the spot computing power, it was first and foremost an output device, not an interactive one. As the commercial shows, people using this thing are trying to solve real-world problems, not lose themselves in any kind of digital play land. The tiny screen and clunky layout have no intention of engaging the user directly. It’s telling that none of the spokespeople in this ad are watching the screen for more than a split second.

Following the 5100, competitors released a series of similarly designed computers and marketed them as portable. One such successor, the Osborne 1 had a clip on keyboard that could be stowed so the whole thing looked like a suitcase, or a crooked sewing machine case. It was portable in the same way a big, heavy suitcase is portable, which is to say no one’s toting this bad boy to the coffee shop to waste a couple hours. Unless the computational needs are fairly significant, the Osborne is staying in one place.

While the 5100 and the Osborne and a few other aspiring portables were great innovations, they lacked the one thing that could take them off the desks of the few and into the laps of the masses. People don’t want clunky number crunchers – they want something to play with. The man who would transform portable computing from an ugly machine of utility into a fun interactive experience was Bill Moggridge.

Moggridge was born in London, England in 1943. He attended Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design and then the Royal College of Art in London, where he was in charge of the student mixer. He recalled how in the mid ’60’s he was looking to book a band for a party and he passed up the Rolling Stones in favor of another group called The Pretty Things. The man who patented the clamshell design that defines the laptop looked back on this rock and roll oversight as his saddest story.

Finished with graduate studies in design in London, Moggridge moved to Erie, Pennsylvania in 1965, where he worked for the American Sterilizer Co. designing hospital equipment. In 1969, Moggridge moved back to London and started his own design firm on the top floor of his house. He would work on an array of industrial designs, including a toaster, a space heater and something else with the funny name “Mini Computer.”

That first mini computer design back in 1972 would never get off the drawing board, but in 1979, something compelled the British rock and roll fan to move to a place called Palo Alto, California to open a design office. His company was called ID TWO, and one of its first clients was GRiD Systems Corporation (the lower case “i” was a tip of the hat to Intel, which helped GRiD get started). GRiD was a stealth company started by a group of silicon valley entrepreneurs whose purpose was designing and marketing truly portable computers.

In April 1982, things changed when Moggridge’s GRiD Systems brought the Compass 1100 portable computer to market. The compass was the first true laptop style computer with a “clamshell” folding screen. It featured a 320×200 screen, an Intel 8086 processor, 340 KB of magnetic bubble memory (a now obsolete, non-volatile memory type) and a 1200 bps modem. It weighed 11 pounds and cost $8-10,000. The New York Times wrote in July of ’82:

“At the top of the line in take-it-with-you computers, the 9 1/4-pound Compass from Grid Systems Corporation stands alone, by far the most powerful portable computer available. A black, magnesium-cased carry-on with a high-tech military design, the Compass boasts a high-resolution flat-panel display that gives a crisper image than the television type of video screen does. The fully integrated software bundle includes text editing, graphics, a project management package, data base management and a spread-sheet program.”

While the clamshell design did squeeze its way into the hands of a few American astronauts and soldiers, the Compass wasn’t a consumer blockbuster, particularly with its prohibitively high cost of $8500, or $19000 in current dollars. But as the early ’80’s rolled through the ’90’s and into the present, that basic clamshell design that GRiD and Moggridge patented in 1982 would emerge as the clear champion of portable computing. And it is still the standard for these portable things.

In his excellent 2009 documentary, Gary Hustwit, Objectified interviewd Bill Moggridge about his experience designing and using the Compass:

What Moggridge begins to tell us at 2:15 is that he is feeling the pull of the world beneath the screen. The older portables were all about getting the job done so you could get back to life in the world. Calculate costs so you can argue in person with somebody – the 5100 or the Osborne will let you crunch numbers quickly so you can get back to breaking rocks or trading pork bellies.

But when he gazed into his streamlined Compass, Bill Moggridge got a unique insight into the future of humanity. With a design that made sense the object itself became less important; he felt that wearisome world of physical objects and real world problems fade into the background as the little world behind the screen called out to him.

Steve Jobs would win Apple the world by twisting that formula, by turning computers into fashion accessories that you could care about holding and showing off. But it was Moggridge’s simple design that helped all computers that followed beat a trail to all the dashboards and the construction tables and the laps and the desks and the hands and the fingers. After Tandy Corporation, owner of Radio Shack, bought GRiD Systems in 1988, Moggridge taught design at Stanford and then in 1991 co-founded the design and innovation consultancy Ideo, where he worked until 2010. Since then, he had served as the director of New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design. It’s not known what he thought about the iPad or Google’s new face computer, but his own words offer clues as to how he approached the task of creating meaningful human-machine interactions. To paraphrase a lecture he gave at Stanford University in 2007:

“I like to think of myself as the designer who’s most interested in the subjective, aesthetic, qualitative aspects of the things I design. I think it’s a story of trying to understand what people do and making that the thing that drives the design, building prototypes and checking them with people. Things that are really successful are not successful on their own. They’re successful because of great design and great leadership and very patient systemic development.”

Today, the laptop computer still bears the clear mark of his inspired vision. Computer users around the world have heard the call of that world behind the screen. Whatever he was looking at when he booted up his prototype GRiD Compass, Bill Moggridge’s vision of the computer as a tool not just for task oriented problem solving but for open-ended, ubiquitious interactivity has changed the way humans relate to machines and the world outside of them too.