On September 20th, 1989, Apple Computer released the Macintosh Portable - their first attempt at a battery-powered computer. The Macintosh Portable was released for a retail price of $6,500 (roughly $16,500 today), but if you wanted a model with a 40MB hard drive, the price rose to $7,300! The computer famously weighed 16 pounds, roughly the same as a large bowling ball or six modern MacBook Airs. The Macintosh Portable was famously used by the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-43) to send the first ever email from space on August 28th, 1991. The message read: "Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew... Hasta la vista, Baby.... We'll be back!" It was also the first portable computer to feature a built-in trackball, which could be moved to either the left or right side of the keyboard. The Mac Portable was a market failure. Sales were so poor that Apple was forced to replace it just two years later, when they released the PowerBook 100 in 1991 which became an instant $1 billion hit.
