Chuck Colby

Chuck Colby was an electronics engineer and chief-inventor, founder and president of Colby Systems Corporation (later Colby Computer, Inc.), a company that created the first DVR-based video surveillance systems but is also very notable as a pioneer in portable computing, being the first to market both DOS and Macintosh portable computers, as well as a remarkable number of other technological firsts.

[citation needed] Colby's first invention was the Colby TR-2 transistor radio, which he designed at the precocious age of 12 and sold to family, friends and customers on his paper-route, and is possibly the first pocket transistor radio.

As a college student, his passion for radio and inventing brought him attention in the LA Times when he and a friend built their own TV stations to broadcast video to each other over the airwaves.

Chuck Colby also helped design the "Syzygy" original prototype of Atari Pong that was built into a suitcase so that it could be carried around and demonstrated to potential investors.

Colby Systems would continue this trend by producing some of the very earliest[3] and, for a time, only Apple-sanctioned vendor of Macintosh-compatible portables[4] such as the ruggedized "luggable" MacColby and the WalkMac laptop, which could be purchased with a 68030-based SE/30 motherboard[5] which generated sales even after Apple's first laptop hit the market because Apple's Macintosh Portable was only available with the considerably slower 68000 microprocessor as used in the original Macintosh, the Macintosh 128K.