I should also add that the unit I was assigned to at the time when I was stationed at Fort Bragg, NC was able to acquire for the intelligence analysts (not my section) a quantity of
Grid Compass laptop computers. Being that these were to be used in a secure area (aka SCIF) and would contain classified data bases, the requirement was for each of these to have a perishable memory that was deleted when the machine powered off. On powering up the machines, the operating system would have to be loaded via 3.5"/90mm floppy diskettes. For what they were using the things for in the section that had them it was tedious and cumbersome. I do remember seeing an example of a Grid Compass laptop on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. at the Air and Space Museum. It was part of the display for the Space Shuttle and it was not much different from the Grid units we had in my unit. Images of this now "antique" can be seen via this link:
Grid Laptop Computers. I should also add that at the time these things were not cheap, running somewhere around $20K per unit not including the accessories. Also they were Tempest emission secured so you were okay to use them without worry about being monitored. My own section was less fortunate, being the imagery analysts, we were tasked with imagery related things and our first computer showed up in very large green plastic boxes that would have made the folks at
Pelican Products jealous. Opened at both top and bottom or front and back depending on orientation of the contents. We had what on the outside would have been an Apple computer not sure which model but it was rather limited. We also had some very clunky looking keyboards, a laser disk reader for the very old 11.0"/28cm laser disks that contained digital terrain elevation data. Apparently the computer had been originally designed for use by the Army Engineers (combat engineers or civil engineers not sure which) and one of the programs included with this Army Apple allowed you to calculate how many pounds of explosive would be required to address obstacles such as reinforced concrete or structural steel. Pretty neat and a lot of fun to use but at the end of the day it was still just an apple in a bunch of green boxes with serious limitations. The one thing that we could actually do with this pig of a rig was create terrain elevation models that could then be printed out on a dot-matrix printer. Very limited capability but it was better than nothing. For the part of the world we were focused on, it was useful tool that could be used to create views of the terrain at eye level looking towards the target or from the target looking towards the observation point. As primitive as that was, it pales in comparison to what we have now at our disposal.