The brainchild of Manuel "Manny" Fernandez, the Gavilan was unveiled at COMDEX/Spring '83 at the Georgia World Congress Center in early May 1983.

[1] It was unveiled a year after the Grid Compass, with which it shared several pioneering details, notably a clamshell design, in which the screen folds shut over the keyboard.

The Gavilan sported an LCD display with an unusual resolution of 400×64 pixels (representing 8 lines by 80 columns of text).

Gavilan originally planned to avoid the retail segment entirely, instead providing the laptop through corporate fleet sellers.

[7] Owing to a rigorous overhaul of the design of the laptop, the company missed its initial shipment deadline of December 1983, with the first several dozen units shipping instead in April 1984.

[9] BYTE in June 1983 called the Gavilan "a traveling professional's dream come true ... [it] promises to set new industry standards, not only for truly portable computers, but also for integration of applications software".