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A Northumbrian computer engineer who helped create the laptop has died aged 75.

John Ellenby founded Grid Systems in the late 1970s and was part of a team which made the Compass - a clamshell style computer released in 1982 which is widely considered to be the first laptop.

According to the New York Times, the Compass retailed at US$8,150, or $20,325 at today’s prices, and was largely bought by American Government agencies, including NASA.

A Compass laptop was on board the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle, which broke apart seconds after launching from Cape Canaveral in 1986. The crew all died, but the laptop was recovered from the debris and still worked.

John was born in Corbridge, Northumberland, on January 9, 1941. The son of a zoologist and biologist, he moved to London to study economics and geography at University College London, and later enrolled at London School of Economics, where he came into contact with computers.

After working for the Ferranti computer firm, he lectured at the University of Edinburgh, before moving to Palo Alto, near San Francisco in California’s Silicon Valley, to work for Xerox Corp.

He died in San Francisco on August 17, his son Thomas said.

An obituary in the New York Times reads: “At the time, Xerox was designing a desktop computer, known as the Alto, which would become an inspiration for the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, and for Microsoft Windows.

“Inside Xerox, the Alto was known as an “interim Dynabook,” a reference to the prototype for a portable machine envisaged by the Xerox computer scientist Alan Kay.”

John left to found Grid in 1979, before launching the Compass three years later.

The size of the portable computer was a game-changer, as it was much slicker than it’s clunky sewing machine sized rivals.

According to the New York Times, he and his colleagues’ invention surprised competitors.

The New York Times’ obituary says: “One was Adam Osborne, the developer of the Osborne 1, an early portable computer – a “luggable” in industry parlance – about the size of a sewing machine.

“Appearing with Mr Ellenby on an industry panel, Osborne was startled to realise that the device sitting flat on a table nearby was, when it was opened, a portable computer.”