My book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, is in part a popular history of portable computing. (The other element is a blow-by-blow chronicle of designers, engineers, and marketers at Lenovo conceiving and designing the ThinkPad X300 and bringing it to market.) The saga begins with Alan Kay's original concept of portable computing, in the fall of 1968, and continues through the luggables, the laptops, the handhelds, the smartphones, and the latest concepts for mobile computing devices in mid-2008, when the book will be published by McGraw-Hill. I interviewed dozens of portable computing pioneers when I was researching the book, and I packed many of their stories into its pages. But there were many people who played roles in this history that I didn't speak to and many threads of the story that I didn't have time to explore. With this wiki I aim to do two things. First, I'm offering up two of the key chapters of the book for people to read. Hopefully, you'll find them entertaining or instructive, or both. Second, I want to invite others to submit their own recollections and observations. Hopefully, if others participate, this can become a living word organism. So, please, if you want to comment, start a thread. If you want to submit pieces of history (or photos) please send me an e-mail (to stevehamm31@hotmail.com) and I'll post your contributions. Please tell me who you are, and how you know what you know, and make sure I get a working e-mail address. If you'd like to buy The Race for Perfect, go to B&N.com, Amazon.com, or Borders.com.

About me: I'm a senior writer at BusinessWeek focusing on innovation, globalization, and leadership. My first book, Bangalore Tiger, about the rise of the Indian tech industry, was published in 2006 by McGraw-Hill, and is available for purchase at Amazon.com, B&N.com, and Borders.com. Check out my blog, GlobeSpotting; my Facebook page, Steve Hamm; and my Twitter tweets, at stevehamm31.