Innovation Gallery

The Integral was the first major computer with an electroluminescent display. At 25 pounds and 7 inches by 13 inches by 16 inches, the Integral was a transportable workstation. (It wasn't truly "portable," because it was not able to run off batteries.) Large liquid crystal displays (LCDs), so common today, did not exist yet, and the electroluminescent display was expensive and fragile. Introduced as a business computer, the Integral was expandable up to 5MB RAM.

The Integral was a product of HP's Portable Computer Division in Corvallis, Oregon. It featured a built-in ThinkJet personal printer, a full-size keyboard and a 9-inch electroluminescent display that had "windows" of adjustable size for viewing several different activities at once. It had a Motorola 68000 16/32-bit processor and a 16-bit HP graphics processor. The Integral ran HP-UX UNIX. Users could plug in such devices as a mouse, bar-code reader or graphics tablet.