After a stint at Xerox, Ellenby was the founder of Grid Systems, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company that produced the Compass, a thick black clamshell computer with an orange electroluminescent display. It was released in 1982 for $8,150 – more than $20,000 in today’s money. That price didn’t attract the average consumer, but the government bought it up. A number of security advisors and government agencies flocked to the mobile computer. An interesting tidbit from the Times: “NASA also used one as a backup navigational device in its space shuttle program. One was aboard the Challenger on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, when a rocket-booster failure destroyed the craft shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The Compass, which had been attached to a dashboard with Velcro, was recovered from the debris and found to be still working.” Ellenby is survived by his sons, Thomas and Peter, as well as a granddaughter. According to CNN Money, laptops surpassed desktops in sales for the first time in 2005, confirming Ellenby’s vision for computing.
