We live in an, um, golden age of Apple gossip. Thanks to the blogosphere, a surging sea of sites cover an endless array of rumors about the company, from ones that are right on the money to ones that are partially right to ones that aren’t right at all. The conversation spawned by the scuttlebutt has helped many a site fill time during slow news days: No other company can set off a frenzy of speculation about matters as mundane as the quantity of USB ports a new machine might sport.
The sheer quantity of Apple scuttlebutt has never been higher. But the company has been a powerful engine for the rumor mill for as long as there’s been an Apple and tech journalists to cover it. And Google Books’ recent addition of the entire run of InfoWorld provides us with the opportunity to revisit the first golden age of Apple rumors–which, uncoincidentally, ended when Steve Jobs was forced out of the company he cofounded in mid-1985.
Today’s InfoWorld may be a Web site for IT professionals, but in the early 1980s it was a weekly publication for microcomputer users, and its pages are as good a record as you’ll find of the era’s industry chatter–including lots and lots of stuff about Apple. So in this second installment in our once-in-awhile series on Apple rumors and predictions, we’ll check out tidbits from InfoWorld stories (1980-1985). My goal is not to mock, but simply to see what folks thought Apple would do, what they thought it meant…and whether any of it came to pass.
Today, September 20th, marks the twentieth anniversary of the first truly mobile Mac, the Macintosh Portable. (For 1980s computers, all the 
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There aren’t many pieces of technological design that simply can’t be improved upon, but the clamshell-style laptop computer case–introduced by Grid Systems in 1982–may be one of them. That’s why the vast majority of the portable computers built ever since have used it. But for more than a quarter-century now, inventors have been trying to top it, with folding screens, screens on stalks, folding keyboards, two-screen clamshells, tri-fold clamshells, and more. Most never even get off the drawing board. Herewith, a gallery of designs from 
If you’re as fascinated by the prehistory of personal computing as I am, the early issues of Computerworld at Google News are hugely entertaining. They date from a time before there were such things as personal computers, but there are hints of what was to come everywhere in their pages. I wrote about a