• client: Nexsys
  • project name: Classic Laptop Kit
  • designer credits: peter solomon design

Nexsys Classic Laptop Kit

When Nexsys hired Peter Solomon it was the start of a historical idea which unfortunately did not come to production. The premise was fantastic, as the Macintosh Classic was getting replaced by a newer model, a plethora of Macintosh Classics were going to go into the garbage, instead Nexsys was going to offer a do-it-yourself laptop kit. You would gut your classic removing the motherboard, the keyboard, the hard drive and a few other elements, and put it into the Classic Laptop Kit which additionally had a battery, energy management system, and an early LCD screen by Kyocera.   The interesting thing was; in 1991 there was no miniature mouse for travel, we heard Logitech was working on a mini trackball but it still was not available, so we found a pressure sensitive film which was being developed for soda dispensing machines and tested and wrote code to enable its use in place of the mouse. Although it didn’t make it to market this was the first track pad ever used on a laptop. The company had financial difficulties and had to discontinue the development of the project before production. The cardboard models were early ergonomic studies created well before 3D printers.

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