MacBook

Apple engineer Bill Atkinson often inspired Esslinger to dream up concept devices that utilized technologies such as a flat-screen touch interface, or a telephone. This early vision of a MacBook proposed something truly radical: a large touch-screen display. According to a passage in "Design Forward," Steve Jobs showed this conceptual laptop to the Mac team in 1983 and said the company needed to build the device -- drawing audible gasps from the group. Apple finally introduced its first portable computer – the gargantuan Macintosh Portable -- in 1989, and later debuted an actual laptop computer series known as the PowerBook in 1991.