The NoteTaker was developed by a team that included Adele Goldberg, Douglas Fairbairn, and Larry Tesler.[5] It drew heavily on earlier research by Alan Kay, who had previously developed the Dynabook project. While the Dynabook was a concept for a transportable computer that was impossible to implement with available technology, the NoteTaker was intended to show what could be done.
The NoteTaker fitted into a case similar in form to that of a portable sewing machine; the keyboard folded out from the bottom to reveal the monitor and floppy drive. The form factor was later used on the highly successful "luggable" computers, including the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable. However, these later models were about half as heavy as the NoteTaker, which weighed 22 kg (49 lb).
^ abAlan C. Kay: The Early History of Smalltalk. In: Proceedings of HOPL II. "ACM SIGPLAN notices", Vol. 28, No. 3, March 1993, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp. 69