In 1989, a British company made a laptop with a graphical user interface, a 60 hour battery life, SSD storage, and a touchpad.
The 1989 Laptop That Was Decades Ahead of Its Time
In 1989, while most "portable" computers were bulky beasts tethered to wall outlets, a British company called Psion released a laptop that looked like it had time-traveled from 2005. The Psion MC 400 featured a touchpad for cursor control, a graphical user interface with multitasking windows, solid-state storage, and a battery life that would make modern MacBook owners weep with envy.
Sixty hours. That's how long Psion claimed the MC 400 could run on eight AA batteries. Even the more conservative real-world estimates of 20 hours with alkaline batteries utterly demolished the competition. The secret? No backlit screen and solid-state storage meant dramatically reduced power consumption.
A Touchpad in 1989?
While everyone else was fumbling with trackballs and external mice, Psion built an integrated touchpad into the MC 400. This wasn't some experimental prototype feature—it was the primary navigation method. Apple wouldn't add touchpads to PowerBooks until 1994. Most PC laptops didn't standardize on touchpads until the mid-to-late 1990s.
The touchpad worked with a graphical user interface called EPOC, which supported multiple windows and multitasking. You could run several applications simultaneously and switch between them—functionality that seems obvious now but was revolutionary for a battery-powered portable in 1989.
Solid-State Storage Before SSDs Were Cool
The MC 400 used swappable 128KB flash storage modules. While tiny by today's standards, this was genuine solid-state storage at a time when most computers relied on spinning hard drives or floppy disks. These storage packs were:
- Completely silent with no moving parts
- Shock-resistant (you could drop them without data loss)
- Energy-efficient (no motor to spin up)
- Instant-access (no seek time delays)
SSDs wouldn't become common in laptops until the late 2000s—roughly 20 years after Psion shipped them as standard equipment.
Why Didn't It Change the World?
With specs this impressive, why isn't the MC 400 remembered as a revolutionary breakthrough? Price and software. At launch, it cost around £2,000 (roughly £5,000 or $6,200 in today's money). That's more expensive than a high-end MacBook Pro.
The proprietary EPOC operating system, while technically advanced, lacked the software ecosystem that MS-DOS and early Windows machines were building. Businesses weren't ready to invest in specialized software development for a niche platform, no matter how elegant the hardware.
Psion was a British technology company founded in 1980 by David Potter. They started as a software house developing games for Sinclair computers before pivoting to handheld devices. Their EPOC operating system eventually evolved into Symbian OS, which powered Nokia smartphones through the 2000s.
The Legacy
The MC 400 proved that the technology for modern laptops existed far earlier than most people realize. Touchpads, GUI operating systems, solid-state storage, and all-day battery life weren't invented in the 2000s—they were commercialized in 1989. What changed wasn't the technology but the manufacturing costs, software ecosystems, and market readiness.
Today, every laptop feature we take for granted—from touchpad gestures to instant-on SSDs—has roots in pioneering devices like the Psion MC 400. It was a laptop from the future that arrived 15 years too early.