When I was a co-op student employee at IBM in the late 80s, I was given a desk in what was otherwise a storage room piled with stuff that had been used and then set aside. One box contained a 5140 convertible laptop with one of each peripheral "slice" -- printer, modem, expansion ports -- and the full set of technical manuals.
I was allowed to take that beast home with me. I learned so much tinkering with that machine. Eventually, I sold the whole set at a ham fest and I have regretted it often.
Nice to see an appreciation of it, though I would never have looked at it as alligator-like.
That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tech manuals (as opposed to the hardware reference book I had for everything else), and I got lucky and the lab had requisitioned a Model 2, so the screen was nice and they'd gotten the full 640Kb RAM.
I had one. Great little system. Built like a tank, and just as heavy.
Incredibly forward-thinking modular architecture. Keyboard, memory, drives, serial port, parallel port, even the screen could be replaced just by the turn of a lever or a push of a button.
Fantastic keyboard, even by today's laptops standards.
Ate batteries like M&Ms. I almost always kept it plugged in.
At the time, running it off the pair of 720k floppies was fine. I believe there was a hard drive option, but I never saw it.
Its biggest weakness was the screen. There were backlit and CRT options, which were better and you could just pop off and in.
The screen was grayscale CGA, but there was a TSR called SimCGA which would translate, so you could run EGA programs.
It's interesting but I remember seeing Radio Shack TRS80 Model 100 Laptop at the RadioShack store and wanting it, but mom said no. I had to settle for the Color Computer, since it was somewhat cheaper. People usually remember IBM PC but don't realize that there were many other brands out there. In my high school days, we had access to Apple I & IIs as well as TRS80 Model III machines. TRS80 machines came with DOS, BASIC & Editor Assembler, which were taught at our high school digital class.
Back in the early 80’s, Radio Shack made the TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. It ran for 20+ hours on 4 AA batteries.
A few years later, Psion came out with a series of small devices that ran on 2 AA batteries and got 30+ hours of runtime.
With modern electronics and displays, could something like a model 100 be made that could run for hundreds or even thousands of hours on 4 AA batteries?
I taught myself Turbo Pascal on a friend's IBM PS/2 P75 [1] around 1990, also a briefcase-style luggable that came out a couple of years after this one.
The P75 had a delightful orange plasma screen, and the keyboard was wired and could be unhooked from the case, and since it was a 486 chip, it could all of DOS, OS/2, and Windows (and apparently it was able to run Windows 95 when that came out).
My main machine at the time was the Amiga 500, and the PS/2 felt like a step down in terms of graphics and so on, but Turbo Pascal was just too magical for me to care.
And BTW, I regret that WindowsCE is not the thing anymore. IMO it has the best development infrastructure out there backed with MSVC IDE.
I classify OSes into two major groups: "writer OS" (all desktop OSes primarily) and "reader OS" (all mobiles). But there is a void in between for palmtop form factor devices.
See also: “IBM Made the Longest Laptop Ever” by Cathode Ray Dude, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htl_JbZIcUU. There is, per the title, some discussion of its (somehow simultaneously inspired and silly) expansion system, but also of its other features as well, such as (spoiler alert) the fact that it may be the first personal computer to have suspend to RAM.
(So I guess—expanding on a sibling comment[1]—aesthetics is not the only axis on which “this beats about 75% of the current laptop market.”)
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I was allowed to take that beast home with me. I learned so much tinkering with that machine. Eventually, I sold the whole set at a ham fest and I have regretted it often.
Nice to see an appreciation of it, though I would never have looked at it as alligator-like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible has all the details on that machine you could want.
Incredibly forward-thinking modular architecture. Keyboard, memory, drives, serial port, parallel port, even the screen could be replaced just by the turn of a lever or a push of a button.
Fantastic keyboard, even by today's laptops standards.
Ate batteries like M&Ms. I almost always kept it plugged in.
At the time, running it off the pair of 720k floppies was fine. I believe there was a hard drive option, but I never saw it.
Its biggest weakness was the screen. There were backlit and CRT options, which were better and you could just pop off and in.
The screen was grayscale CGA, but there was a TSR called SimCGA which would translate, so you could run EGA programs.
Dead Comment
Piccy: https://cdn.social.linux.pizza/system/media_attachments/file...
(Link to post in case that doesn't work: https://social.linux.pizza/@theodric/115256647992228538 )
TRS80 100 https://www.oldcomputers.net/trs100.html
TRS80 Model III https://www.oldcomputers.net/trs80iii.html
COCO https://www.oldcomputers.net/coco.html
Would love to see some genuine creativity / cyberdeck type builds from laptop makers
Back in the early 80’s, Radio Shack made the TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. It ran for 20+ hours on 4 AA batteries.
A few years later, Psion came out with a series of small devices that ran on 2 AA batteries and got 30+ hours of runtime.
With modern electronics and displays, could something like a model 100 be made that could run for hundreds or even thousands of hours on 4 AA batteries?
The P75 had a delightful orange plasma screen, and the keyboard was wired and could be unhooked from the case, and since it was a 486 chip, it could all of DOS, OS/2, and Windows (and apparently it was able to run Windows 95 when that came out).
My main machine at the time was the Amiga 500, and the PS/2 felt like a step down in terms of graphics and so on, but Turbo Pascal was just too magical for me to care.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad
I miss that form factor really.
And BTW, I regret that WindowsCE is not the thing anymore. IMO it has the best development infrastructure out there backed with MSVC IDE.
I classify OSes into two major groups: "writer OS" (all desktop OSes primarily) and "reader OS" (all mobiles). But there is a void in between for palmtop form factor devices.
Sigh, probably its only me who needs this ...
(So I guess—expanding on a sibling comment[1]—aesthetics is not the only axis on which “this beats about 75% of the current laptop market.”)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45478692