The brainchild of
Manuel "Manny" Fernandez, the Gavilan was unveiled at
COMDEX/Spring '83 at the
Georgia World Congress Center in late April 1983. It was unveiled a year after the
Grid Compass, with which it shared several pioneering details, notably a
clamshell design, in which the screen folds shut over the keyboard. The Gavilan, however, was more affordable than the Compass, at a list price of around
US$4000. Unlike the Compass, it was equipped with a
floppy disk drive and had a built-in battery. An internal 300-baud
modem was standard. A compact
printer that attached to the rear of the machine was an option. The Gavilan was originally planned to ship with a proprietary,
GUI-based operating system, called the Gavilan Operating Environment (GOE) and preinstalled with a suite of productivity applications, branded Capsuleware. The machine's included software was a
terminal program, MS-DOS, and
MBasic (a version of the
BASIC programming language). An Office Pack of four applications—
Sorcim SuperCalc and
SuperWriter, and
pfs:File and
pfs:Report—was optional. It was far smaller than competing
IBM compatible portables, such as the
Compaq Portable, which were the size of a portable
sewing machine and weighed more than twice the Gavilan's 4 kg (9 lb), and unlike the Gavilan they could not run off batteries. Gavilan claimed the SC could run up to nine hours on its built-in
nickel-cadmium batteries. Jack Hall, an award-winning industrial designer, was chosen to work out the
ergonomics, mechanics and overall appearance of the Gavilan. An extremely compact printer module was the result of a collaboration between Hall Design and
C. Itoh of Japan. Additionally, several patentable features such as the unique display hinge and printer attachment mechanism were embodied in the design. The Gavilan sported an
LCD with an unusual resolution of 400×64
pixels (representing 8 lines by 80 columns of text). It included a pioneering
touchpad-like pointing device, installed on a panel above the
keyboard. It used static CMOS memory, and came with 64
kilobytes standard. Memory was expandable through plug-in modules, for which there were four slots available (each 32 KB "CapsuleRam" module cost and included a backup battery); these slots could also be used for software ROM cartridges. With standards for microfloppy drives still emerging, Gavilan was designed to accommodate both a 3.0-inch 320 KB
microfloppy drive as well as a 3.5-inch floppy drive. Gavilan originally planned to avoid the retail segment entirely, instead providing the laptop through corporate fleet sellers. In November 1983, however, the company pivoted to providing the laptop to individuals through retail outlets. Owing to a rigorous overhaul of the design of the laptop, the company missed its initial shipment deadline of December 1983, with the first several dozen units shipping instead in April 1984. Early units were fraught with technical issues, prompting more tweaks. Mass production and sales did not commence until June 1984. By this point, a major distributor of the Gavilan computer had filed for bankruptcy and was forced to pulled out of their deal with Gavilan. In late 1984, Gavilan Computer Corporation themselves declared
Chapter 11 bankruptcy with
cash flow problems. The company ceased operations in 1985, having only shipped a few thousand units of the Gavilan SC. ==Reception==