GRiD Systems Corporation was founded in January, 1979 by John Ellenby, who left his job at Xerox Parc and joined Glenn Edens, Dave Paulsen and Bill Moggridge

Bill Moggridge

William Moggridge, an industrial and interaction designer, is co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based design firm IDEO and the current director of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He designed what was the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass...

 to form one of Silicon Valley's first stealth companies. The company went public in March 1981.

The "GRiD" name with the unusual lowercase "i" in the middle was the result of discussion between John Ellenby, Glenn Edens and John Ellenby's wife, Gillian Ellenby, who pushed for the final choice. The lowercase "i" was a note of thanks to Intel for helping in the early days

GRiD developed and released several pioneering ideas:

• First Portable computer. Marketed almost exclusively to CEO's
• The GRiD Compass 1100, the first clamshell laptop computer
• Patented the "clamshell" laptop design
• First portable to use non-volatile bubble-memory
• GRiD-OS was a multi-tasking graphical user interface and operating system
• First use of electro-luminescent displays in a portable
• First use of magnesium for the case
• First use of the Intel 8086 and 8087 floating-point co-processor in a commercial product.
• Pioneered the concept of a "bus" for connecting peripherals (using GPIB)
• First computer that included a fully functional telephone and telephone handset
• The first commercially available tablet-type portable computer was the GRiDPad, released in September 1989. Its operating system was based on MS-DOS
  MS-DOS
  MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
  
  .
• A GRiD Compass
  GRiD Compass
  The Grid Compass was one of the first laptop computers when the initial model was introduced in April 1982 ....
  
   1101 was the first laptop in space. Required special modification to add a fan to pull air through the case. Subsequently a GRiD 1530 flew on STS-29 in March 1989.
• OldComputers.net called the 1982 GRiD Compass 1101 the "grand-daddy of all present-day laptop computers". It had 256k RAM, an 8086, 320x240 screen, and 384k of internal 'bubble memory' that held data with power off.

In 1988, Tandy Corporation

Tandy Corporation

Tandy Corporation was a family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas. Tandy was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store, and acquired RadioShack in 1963. The Tandy name was dropped in May 2000, when RadioShack Corporation was made the official name.-History:Tandy began in 1919...

 purchased GRiD.

Edens co-founded Waveform Corp and in 2003 joined the board of F5 Networks

F5 Networks

F5 Networks, Inc. is a networking appliances company. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and has development and marketing offices worldwide. It originally manufactured and sold some of the very first load balancing products...

 Inc.

John Ellenby went on to co-found the companies Agilis and Augmented Reality

Augmented reality

Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is...

 pioneer GeoVector

GeoVector

GeoVector Corporation began conducting research into augmented reality in early 1990s. The company, co-founded by John Ellenby who also founded laptop pioneer GRiD Systems Corporation, devised a method to use sensors in a device to associate relevant digital information with places on earth.The...

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External links

• GRiD history 1979-2008 (on the website of GRiD Defence Systems, UK)
• Pioneering the Laptop - The GRiD Compass