The New York Times has an article about mini-notebook computers. The one shown (made by Everex) is markedly similar to one that Rico made as a class project when he was in the design department at Carnegie-Mellon University, decades ago now. Of course, his was a little more limited at the time, since at the time there weren't any computers smaller than a PDP-11, but his at least had a dot-matrix printer inside it, as its principle function was to act as a checkbook and print out your checks after you entered the data on the keyboard. (There weren't any touch-sensitive screens in those days, either, so you'd've had to manually sign the check after it came out.)Rico says he's still sorry he didn't push this notion a little farther (given the technology available at the time, he couldn't even build a working model, though Ted Kaehler, later of Xerox PARC, gave good advice on what might be possible someday), because history might've been different...
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