IBM Made The Longest Laptop Ever

I'd prefer not to call myself a collector but I can't deny that I have a collection I mean my studio is packed with things that have very little relevance to my life and in some cases very little relevance to anything see a lot of it doesn't really have a purpose uh I used to collect stuff as a hobby I just saw things that were neat and I brought them home but it was all largely useless so it got tough to justify all the space it took up but then I started making YouTube videos and once again I was back to grabbing whatever I could because even if I didn't have a use for a thing per se maybe I could make a video about it as long as I found it interesting but even that hasn't really gone as planned I now own quite a few things that I've had for months or even years that have never shown up in a video because once I get off of the initial wow that's neat response I wasn't sure what to actually say uh for instance uh this telephone here a viewer offered this to me a few months ago and I gladly accepted because it made me go wow that's neat but now I have no idea what to do with it uh the design is certainly wacky it's got this rotating cover oh there we go uh and the handset is on a retractable cord a surprisingly long retractable cord uh so this this is pretty silly I've never seen any telephone set that looked anything like this these are ridiculous features um and it's not it doesn't work very well very unusual and you look at it you go oh I got to show this off to people but I mean what is there to actually say I've made the video about this telephone set you've just seen the whole thing it's a telephone with a weird cord it doesn't deserve a video it a JPEG would be good enough some things just speak for themselves and that's why I lamented in my last video about the IBM eduquest that there's very little to say about PC you turn them on they print a or C and you type dur and they all do the exact same thing the exact same way maybe you launched windows or even Mac OS but they all do that the same way too regardless of what kind of computer it is they're pretty much all going to behave the same way once they're running so once you've seen one PC you've seen them all so I was making the point that PCS are hard to cover as a YouTuber and on top of that most of the really unusual ones have been covered to death already so why do I keep collecting PCS what can I add to the conversation well it's mostly just wow that's neat well the machine I was holding up during that diatribe was this guy the IBM 5140 or more properly the PC convertible a portable PC from the mid 80s which I assumed was already the subject of 100 videos it just felt like the sort of thing that lots of people would have Acquired and done reviews of already but afterwards I got to thinking what exactly does everyone else have to say about this I couldn't think of anything so I went looking for one of those reviews and to my surprise I didn't really find any I don't mean to throw shade on the videos that are out there there's some good ones but the ones I found were either pretty technical or about specific aspects of the thing nobody seemed to have done a thorough overview and I wouldn't do so here I am somehow doing another video about a PC after complaining that there's nothing to say about PCS but as it turns out there actually are things to say about this one it has a couple very unusual quirks which I didn't know about until I began writing this script in fact one of them is the very rare case of IBM being first to Market with a feature we now take for granted so maybe my job won't be as hard as I thought let's see how I do the PC convertible as you may have guessed is a very early laptop although it's certainly not the first IBM didn't lead that pack as was typical big blue was behind the curve on many things and in fact their failure to innovate in terms of portability is what drove the PC clone as we know it into existence the earliest fully compatible Machine by most claims was the compact portable from 1983 which as the name suggests was a fully portable all-in-one machine which IBM didn't have and even then it was nearly a year before they put out a competing product which they very cleverly named the portable personal computer it was basically a clone of compacts clone even in name so IBM was not leading the mobility Market but that market did exist the Compaq and IBM Portables gave rise to more machines like them which were affectionately known as luggables since they were basically full size full weight PCS just in smaller cases with carrying handles and you know these are so well remembered and so comical in retrospect that they probably lead a lot of people to imagine this as a kind of stone age when PCS were built with technology so primitive that portable computers had to be oversized like clown shoes but that's only barely true or if it was it was only for a short period and it was never the computer's fault the actual circuitry in these machines took up a fraction of their volume most of the rest was in the CRT and the floppy drives CRTs were the preeminent display technology at the time and the five and a quarter inch disc was the lingua Franca of PC data exchange but a new generation of Technology was on the horizon so luggables were really only state of the art for maybe six or eight months IBM put out their enormous 30 pound portable PC in February 84 and it may have looked very impressive for a moment but just eight months later data General released the dg1 a machine that cemented what portable computers of the future would look like in pretty much one go it was fully PC compatible and nearly as capable as IBM's boat anchor but its display was a flat panel LCD and its storage was the 3.5 inch micro floppy we all know and love 1984 had brought a new era of storage and display Tech to the world and data General used it to nail down the portable computer of the future in one try the result was microscopic compared to a luggable I mean it was certainly no Contour Arrow you sure couldn't pocket the dg1 and it had a lot of design elements that would have looked truly alien even by 1992 standards if you were someone who bought one of these new then you might think a dg1 looked pretty strange whereas an owner of an M1 MacBook wouldn't find this 30 year old Gadget nearly as jarring but the dg1 is still light years closer to this than to a luggable so the future had already begun but the dg1 also definitely didn't get us all the way there its LCD screen in particular was miraculously tiny but also left much to be desired visually per One reviewer the data General was reportedly like reading pencil marks on slate one software vendor who tested the machine said they considered including a Miner's headlamp with their program in case someone was using it on a dg1 so the experience clearly still had some rough edges still I think you'll agree that if I hadn't told you you wouldn't have guessed that machine was from 1984 or that it was possibly the first PC laptop it's far more mature than it has any right to be a lot more similar to this than you'd expect and while it apparently wasn't a success for data General due to a few imperfect design choices I think we can safely assume that it heavily informed the machines that followed it although I seem to be the only person who feels that way it's nearly unmentioned in any other historical account that I found on the other hand most sources do seem to agree that the Toshiba t1100 was the first really successful laptop that came out a few months after the DG in April 1985 and at first it wasn't terribly popular either due to its own design issues but after a few months they replaced it with the t1100 plus and then finally the PC laptop was on the map but even when it first came out the t1100 wasn't alone there were enough similar machines entering the market for PC Magazine to do a whole shootout in time for Christmas 1985 and several were clearly built on similar principles to the dg1 although others clearly weren't there's always been some question of how many people actually used early laptops on their laps and maybe this illustrates why even by the late 80s they were often still Dreadnought sized and some even used lead acid batteries that was after a couple years of development the machines in PC magazines 1985 Roundup are mostly gigantic or have bizarre designs that were thankfully forgotten by time so yeah for the most part these were not laptops as we know them but certainly in a pinch several would fit on your lap at least you were sitting up in a hotel bed or something and you'd only look a little weird I mean people did this with typewriters after all so my point is that by 1985 and possibly a year earlier the laptop was a mature concept being made by multiple companies let's nail that down in fact IBM was working on one themselves at the same time they had announced it or at least the entire industry had heard about it Through the Grapevine by early 1984 months before data General's machine came out in fact info World claimed that IBM had delayed its release because they saw the dg1 and got cold feet although I can't find any corroboration of that they were calling it the clam shell at the time and while we don't know much about it we don't know if it resembled this machine very much even the name sounds like IBM was chasing the future for once instead of their usual Mo waiting for other companies to produce a product then moping about their growing irrelevance for a few months before pushing a pathetic forgettable also ran out the door PC Junior I'm looking at you so IBM may have been fairly early to the laptop Market but if data General's design was as seminal as I think then we can guess that everything that came out in 1985 including IBM's design started life on the drawing board long before anyone had seen the dg1 so by the time it hit the market it was too late for most companies to Pivot and give Chase and IBM certainly not the swiftest ship in the fleet would have been starting from the same disadvantage so it's to their credit that the 5140 well not exactly futuristic doesn't miss the mark As widely as some others did although in my opinion it does miss the mark so let's get acquainted this is the PC convertible and this is the PC convertible and this too is the PC convertible as is all of this as the name suggests the PC convertible is designed to be converted from a self-contained highly portable machine with a built-in monitor to a full fat home office system with external peripherals and in 1984 when this was first on IBM's drawing boards that probably seemed like a novel idea unfortunately it didn't come out for two whole years and by the time it did in August of 1986 that flexibility was old hat everyone else had the same idea even the dg1 with its built-in display had a video output as an option and the Toshiba t1100 had both options built into every machine so while IBM probably thought the convertibility would set their product apart in reality I don't think anyone found it the least bit remarkable and that really is a good place to start describing the 5140 not very remarkable take a spin around this thing look at the back the sides the top even the bottom and you'll find nothing it's a featureless off-white slab and while I wish I could say that I love its retro styling or something I feel like there's just very little here to love it's a brick the only details on the entire thing are a pair of phone jacks on the side there's a power jack on the other and then there's a handle on the front which I really wouldn't trust in this day and age it hasn't broken yet but it's going to so what's missing here well besides any kind of aesthetic considerations where are the ports even the oldest laptops were peppered with ports serial parallel video keyboard these were standard for 20 years even the dg1 had serial and parallel although I've read that the serial Port was in some way not PC compatible maybe the pin out wasn't the same I'm not sure the Toshiba on the other hand had everything under the sun built in on all models the 5140 has nothing other than the phone jacks which are for the optional modem so they're not even a guarantee this thing is utterly Barren now the Keen eyed among you have noticed the enormous multi-pin socket on the back and assume that I'm just being a hater here and I admit it sure looks that way most older laptops had a dock or Port replicator that exposed all the connectors I'm talking about and some were nearly useless without it so it looks like I'm just being petty here but this isn't just any machine and that's not really a docking port not sure does it even been invented yet we'll get into what it does in a bit but in short the 51 40 itself is austere and for the rip rowing Market it released into that wasn't a great look the machine itself is about three inches thick it's about a foot wide and a couple inches deeper than that and it weighs around 10 pounds so it's no feather weight but it's not as heavy as it could be I think I had a Dell Latitude that weighed this much now of course to see most of the action we need to open the display but we kind of get off to a bad start even there so there's two latches right here below the handle and you have to be careful to press both of them in fully because the plastic catches in the lid can snap off one of mine already has and the process itself is awkward you have to press both buttons then just squeeze your fingers against these smooth sides of the display to lift it it's not very comfortable now as we open the screen it reveals the keyboard and the floppy drives and there's a mechanism that lifts those into slightly more ergonomic positions which is a nice little touch I'm not sure anyone else did anything like this anyway here we are here's what the machine really looks like and okay it it looks a little better once you open it right but they could have put something on the outside whatever it doesn't really look that much like a laptop does it the screen hinges in the center instead of the back so it's got that badonka donk and the display itself is bizarrely short uh the floppy drives are tucked in between the screen and the keyboard instead of on the sides and the keyboard kind of resembles a cut down desktop model uh complete with full height Keys now uh let's not mince words this keyboard is phenomenal to the point where I worry that jerks are going to start buying these just to rip the switches out don't do that only villains do that these switches are in fact Alps and they are full height because nobody had invented a modern compact key switch yet and they are fantastic this feels wonderful to type on it doesn't miss any keystrokes my fingers fall right where they should and the only real complaint I have is the weird L-shaped Enter key that I consistently failed to hit other wise I think typing on this is a joy and I'm not alone the keyboard was the standout feature that every review mentioned if they had nothing else good to say they still praised it so if you have a chance to type on a 5140 go for it it certainly feels better than any laptop from the last 25 years needless to say the layout is heavily altered apart from the weird enter they also Shrunk the arrow keys deleted right control they moved print screen down next to shift and put an asterisk on it for some reason uh they lost f11 and 12 and they lost the whole right third of the keyboard the numpad page up page down etc those have all been moved on to overloads so you have to hold down function hit the arrow keys F1 F2 Etc and an interesting footnote about that is that IBM may have invented the function key um not the idea even the dg1 had a special key for this sort of thing but actually calling it FN seems to have been an IBM invention for whatever that's worth now weird layouts are completely normal now especially on super compact machines but it wasn't a known practice at the time um all keyboards pretty much had standard layouts so some reviewers did not react well to these changes and to be honest I find them pretty iffy myself especially since it has one of those miserable embed did numpads where the the numbers are mapped onto a bunch of letter Keys I've personally never been able to adapt to the skew but for the most part for General typing this is very nearly a top tier keyboard but as cool as it is to have a full height keyboard in a laptop the floppy drives are far more historically interesting see these are three and a half inch drives and those were not a thing on PCS at the time these are actually the first ones IBM ever shipped uh the Sony three and a half inch disc didn't even exist until about a year after the first PC came out and they stayed exotic for quite some time especially since there were several other companies with competing two and three inch formats the micro floppy Market didn't really shake out pretty much until Apple picked the Sony format for the first Macintosh in 1984. okay I made a few mistakes in this video which I'm only discovering while editing uh so here's the first of them that was not the first three and a half inch Drive IBM ever shipped they had an earlier one although not by far I was also about to say that IBM M didn't add three and a half inch support until 84 but in fact it was even later so they added support to Dos 3.2 in early 86 and they started selling the IBM 4865 three and a half inch drive at the same time and you could actually use that on the original PC as long as your dos was new enough so that's actually the first IBM three and a half inch drive but the rest of what I was going to say remains true up until a few months before the convertible came out you couldn't have used a three and a half on the PC even if you wanted to and by the end of the year it seems like still very few people wanted to and that makes sense because the five and a quarter inch disc was heavily embedded the three and a half inch disc offered twice as much capacity as the five and a quarter in half the space and a more durable package so they were great but by the time anyone could use one there were thousands of programs on five and a quarter inch and millions of people using them for data exchange if you had a three and a half inch Drive great but all you could do was store files you made yourself if you wanted to share them with anybody else you still needed a five and a quarter so three and a half was slow to gain popularity but putting a pair of five and a quarter inch drives in a laptop was a pretty tall order this machine would barely fit two of these side by side and even then there'd be no room for the screen hinge and plus the drive mechanisms were gigantic so it just really wasn't very practical to be fair Apple managed to fit a five and a quarter inch drive into their 2C but their drives were heavily cost and complexity reduced and even then they could only fit one disk into the machine itself if you wanted a second drive it had to be external now I don't know if Apple II's worked well with just one drive but it was pretty painful on a PC two drives were really essential and having to drag an external one everywhere mostly defeated the point so PC laptops took a different approach right from the jump even the dg1 had dual three and a half inch drives built in there was a five and a quarter inch option but it was an external and it cost an extra 900 from what I've read you were expected to copy any data or programs you needed to three and a half inch and that seemed like a lot of extra work but the trade-off was worth it this was the wave of the future three and a half inch was coming and that was good because it was a great format even at the original 720k capacity a laptop with two of these drives had nearly a Meg and a half of internal storage which was still a chunk of space in those days so this was the right decision and every laptop went this way but it's still important to recognize how unusual these were to most computer users at the time uh to illustrate I can only find one mention of a three and a half inch Drive in the entirety of the December 1986 issue of infoworld and it's an ad in the back for one to put in your desktop so you can interrupt with laptops so these were a very early step for IBM into the world of the future with all that said besides the very good keyboard and the by then expected three and a half inch drives opening the machine grants no startling Revelations there's a screen a keyboard that's it there's not even a power button that's over on the side this thing is minimalist even compared to machines from a year or two later eventually laptops would have more function keys access panels for Hardware expansion stuff like that the convertible doesn't even have a numb lock light or caps lock or scroll log or power you can't even tell when it's turned on although I suspect that's less due to austerity and more to save energy see the 5140 actually qualifies as a proper laptop it's not just easy to carry you can actually use it on the go see this uh little door I skipped over on the back here the broken off tab that is the battery compartment now uh this is not the original battery uh naturally all those are dead but since it was a symbol 9.6 volt nickel cadmium pack uh you can rebuild it or replace it without risking your life messing with lithium cells which I will not apologize for being mortally terrified of in fact someone has developed a process and a 3D printer model to make your own original battery pack which will fit and function complete within machine charging and you know I can't say that about much else in my collection I own very little that has an internal battery that can still charge so that's pretty cool I put a link in the description if you need one of those now I didn't have the time and patience for all of that so I just went to Amazon and picked up an RC car battery pack um since those are super cheap I botched a cable together um of course it's much lower capacity since the original used half C cells and this uses Double A's so there's gobs of empty space left over and it certainly won't run as long but it does run here check it out [Music] check it out ma no hands no wires Etc so this is um one of the very few laptops of this era that has ever run on battery in the last 20 years still it won't run too long so uh we'll turn this back on later when it's been plugged in nickel cadmium was the lithium ion of the 80s as it were at least compared to other Technologies but the energy density was nowhere close in absolute terms uh the original battery pack only had a capacity of about two and a half amp hours whereas a lithium pack that size would be like six or eight times that capacity so this machine needed to conserve power wherever possible and that may partly explain why it seems so stripped down at rest I found this pulls about 250 milliamps at 15 volts or around 4 Watts now considering contemporary PC power supplies were rated for 200 Watts that's an impressive accomplishment and the battery life was apparently over nine hours even under medium duty that was probably only possible because they trimmed away every milliwatt they could and maybe they left out the indicators to keep that generous run time so maybe it makes some sense that this machine would be really stripped down and you know as far as the other things like lacking special controls well you know laptops this era didn't have a lot of the features we have now there's no volume controls because there's no sound there's no media controls because there's no video um there's no screen brightness because well that's just a pair of Sliders under the LCD uh and you know it's probably a good time to turn the machine on and see what that LCD looks like camera number two has joined me on set because there's pretty much no other way to get a picture of the screen it's basically invisible if you're off access anyway like most IBM PCS of the era it doesn't print anything on Startup other than a memory test if something goes wrong it prints out just a cryptic error code you have to go look it up in the manual anyway it then looks for something to boot from and if it doesn't find anything uh then it shows you this cute little Amiga style animation telling you to put a disc in and you know they could have stolen this from the Amiga the timing was almost right but I don't think anybody at IBM had enough blood in their veins to go find out what an Amiga was now if you hit the button without putting in a disc the machine actually boots up into basic and this is a weird IBM thing pretty much every IBM PC prior to the aptivas in the 90s had basic in ROM and I've always wondered if anyone really used it I mean I don't know if basic was terribly popular on the PC given the enormous volume of quality commercial software but even if it was this particular version was useless this is the same interpreter included with the first IBM PC in 1981 which was the only model that ever had a cassette port for storing your data on tape that was common on other Home computers and IBM probably thought there would be Cheapskates who'd want that objectively miserable option but since every customer bought a floppy Drive IBM dropped the cassette port in the very next model the PC XT but they continued to include the original interpreter which they called cassette basic you could tell this is that because it's got the letter c there this chunk of code shipped in over a decade of IBM PCS despite none of them having cassette ports so since it doesn't know what a floppy disk is there's no way to load or save anything you can fire the machine up without a disk and write a program but it'll be gone as soon as you shut it off the solution was to boot from a Dos disk and run basic.com which was a version that did include floppy routines and I think the only reason they kept shipping cassette basic in ROM was that that executable could be a little bit smaller since it extends the built-in interpreter rather than replacing it but surely that wasn't necessary anymore by 1986. so this is purely a vestigial you're supposed to boot from a floppy and you can use any dos disk you want but the 5140 actually didn't come with a Dos disk instead it came with IBM's PC convertible startup diskette so we'll take a look at that foreign [Music] this is just supposed to be a welcome to your computer disk it's got three programs on it the first one is exploring which is basically just a tour of the machine an introduction to some PC Basics that sort of thing the second one is software setup we'll talk about that later and then Diagnostics which does what it says on the tin let's go ahead and fire up exploring foreign [Music] this is basically just a welcome to IBM pamphlet that walks you through the hardware Basics the software on the disk and some general PC information in case you're a total computer neophyte which wasn't out of the question in 1986 and that's all super boring really all the programs on here are I just want something to put on the screen before I finished talking about the hardware and since we have some text and Graphics to look at now let's talk about the screen it could be worse and it could be better the first thing you might notice other than it being an LCD is that the text looks pretty weird compared to what you're used to the PC's original graphics cards the MDA and CGA had fixed fonts that were burned into ROM and since those were cloned by everybody we're all very used to seeing the same fonts on every old PC the 5140 however had a more elaborate serif kind of font in ROM that's unique to this machine and I figure IBM did this because they felt the LCD allowed a more nuanced typeface than they could have gotten away with on a CRT especially with composite video since it's so blurry and I think they made the right choice this looks fantastic now if you don't like it there's good news the graphics chip in this machine was I think one of the earliest to support software to find fonts so there's probably a program out there that'll let you change it but regarding the screen itself so this is a monochrome bitmap LCD it's got no Shades of Gray pixels are just on or off and the resolution is 640 by 200 at this very strange aspect ratio we'll talk about that later at the end of the video it's kind of complicated but let's get the immediate questions out of the way yes this is standard CGA resolution yes it can display graphics and yes they will be extremely distorted because this screen is half as tall as a normal PC display would be that has the obvious effect of squishing everything I wrote a little basic program to demonstrate this so this program is supposed to draw a perfect circle but as you can see it's more of an egg now which makes sense the screen is half as tall so the image is half as tall it's a very weird choice but it makes sense from a certain perspective we'll we'll come back to that more later but the short explanation is probably that IBM simply expected the LCD to be used almost exclusively for text for which this Distortion is less of a problem see this font and the original IBM CGA font were actually Square they were eight by eight pixels and they looked just fine that way if you saw them in their original format of course CGA was usually displayed with a vertical stretch which made the text look more proportional but a square font can still look perfectly normal and legible so my guess is that IBM considered Graphics support a nice bonus something you could use in a pinch but since the text looked fine they didn't consider Graphics important enough to justify the cost of a full size panel with that said this will run any MDA or CGA app at low or high resolution just fine as long as you don't mind that Distortion this is dangerous Dave a 1990 CGA title apparently from John Romero and as you can see it's running it's playing it just doesn't look all that fantastic you can sort of make out what's going on but it's not exactly Nvidia the way it's meant to be played besides being squished it's also suffering from a severe lack of color cga's color was crappy but it was technically 4-bit while this monitor is one bit I thought that IBM had compromised by replacing each CGA color with a fixed pattern which some manufacturers in the past did but I now think that it's actually just taking a completely Barbarian approach to it uh here I've got a CGA test app it's for like calibrating capture cards that sort of thing and this is supposed to print all 16 colors in the palette but as you can see um there's far less in fact these uh horizontal lines I don't even think those are supposed to be there I think that's some sort of glitch so while this machine can technically Run games and other graphical apps you'd pretty much never want to the panel itself is also just not great by any Modern Standard it's what we now call a passive Matrix display and modern LCDs are almost all active Matrix or TFT that means that they have a transistor and capacitor attached to each Liquid Crystal cell to hold its state passive Matrix cells sort of hold their own state in the crystal itself or at least they try to this approach was common for a while but it was replaced by active Matrix in most applications decades ago because well it is more expensive it's also far superior in quality Clarity and speed passive Matrix panels especially older ones like this have poor contrast and terrible ghosting as a rule and this one's no exception there was still a gradient of quality though and this is towards the high end at least in my experience I've used laptops from a couple years later that weren't even this readable I would prefer something with better contrast but this is defensible for the time and of course we can't forget that it has a backlight which really apologizes for a lot but we also can't forget that this is not the 5140s original display I said earlier that CRTs were last generation technology and that's true they date back to the 20s so by the mid 80s it was time for something new but that doesn't mean LCD was ready for prime time and early laptop screens were all the subject of much criticism the original 5140 screen was no exception it wasn't backlit which wasn't too surprising at the time but it also wasn't just passive Matrix it was also the worst kind a twisted pneumatic or TN panel that was the first practical LCD technology and it worked about as well as you'd think the absent backlight meant that it had Game Boy syndrome much like the dg1 you had to pour gobs of light onto it to see anything and with the ancient ghosty TN Tech it's no surprise that it wasn't received well every manufacturer was fighting this in 85 and 86 because bitmap LCDs were basically brand new technology they all had to take a second stab at it and IBM's came nine months later in March 87 when they delivered a PC convertible model 2 which was almost the same machine but it swapped out the TN panel for stn or super Twisted pneumatic that offered much better contrast and speed as well as being more readable in lower light then a few months later in about September they released this machine the model 3 which finally gave us screen that was both stn and backlit so you can use it anywhere including the back seat of a limo or a very large phone booth PC Magazine's opinion was that IBM was finally where they should have been two years ago but I'm not sure if that's a fair take it seems like everyone struggled with this now certainly they should have been here six months earlier but still I wonder if there wasn't some logic behind it as luxurious as the backlight seems it has some problems for one it sucks up a ton of power about half an amp in my tests so it would cut your battery life by about two-thirds you'd prefer to run without that backlight whenever possible and you can do that you can adjust the intensity all the way down to off but that's not really a fix because as you can see um you can't really see anything I mean the adjustable brightness is silly anyway since it's an electroluminescent panel those were never too bright to begin with you need to have a really sensitive eyes to want to turn it down any but if you do turn it all the way off you'd need Superman's eyes because it's just illegible backlit screens just don't have the same kind of reflectors behind them as non-backlit ones do so they can't reflect enough room light to be useful and even if you add a bunch of artificial light it doesn't really help I mean you can't really make anything out this isn't because IBM chose a bad panel necessarily it's really endemic to all backlit LCDs they're just not designed for this and this came up in all the magazine reviews as a serious concern because it was actually a purchasing decision you had to make if you know that you're going to spend most of your time in low light or plugged into a wall outlet then the backlight is a slam dunk but if you expect to be using the machine mostly on battery then it makes sense to buy the version with the reflective screen instead of the backlit one it'll use less less power and it'll be readable in available light but neither one will do the other's job so you had to know how you were going to use the machine before you bought it or I suppose you could just get the other display and bring it with you just in case because they're actually interchangeable if you flip up this little clip and then pull the screen comes right off this was a common feature in early laptops since they were pretty much all convertible you could often remove the screen to make the system smaller when you're using it with an external display IBM even shipped it with this little dust cap you just slide that on there close the clip and there you go nice and clean plus it advertises the name of the machine in case you forgot this is cute and convenient but it also makes it easy to install Better displays so when IBM came out with these new screens they made them available as upgrades for the older machines for a few hundred bucks and you really could buy both of them if you wanted now bringing a whole second monitor with you everywhere is a goofy idea but it was at least possible and my impression is that nobody else really solved this any better in the 85 86 period because LCDs and batteries were just primitive technology so maybe IBM's sluggish response was because they didn't find any of the available Solutions satisfactory and they only settled for this compromise when they realized that they were being ruthlessly dragged in the market but that's typical IBM really so that's all I have to say about the screen uh but I should mention before moving on that there were a couple other minor changes between the models uh one was was pretty silly the original machine couldn't accept more than 512k of ram which is a wild limitation for 1986 which every review pointed out the model two and three bumped that up to 640k but the other problem was much weirder the sole built-in connectivity option as we discussed was the modem you could get that if you wanted uh but if you got one with the model one you'd be pretty disappointed IBM apparently couldn't find a vendor for a standard Haze compatible modem chip in time to make it to Market so the initial modems used a proprietary control language that IBM called control n so apparently used nowhere else as far as the magazine reviewers knew that meant that pretty much no software worked with it and while IBM claimed you could reconfigure most applications that was probably a lie fortunately they started shipping normal Haze compatible modems starting with the model 2 and as far as I know those are all the differences between the machines now I'd love to get back to that software I mean not really but let's be real IBM's improved display is still not good enough for our modern sensibilities it's tougher to make out the screen on camera than it is in real life but only barely and I'm sure none of you want to stare at that for the whole video we need a better picture and obviously this machine can output video or it wouldn't be called the convertible so IBM provided that option but of course in the weirdest possible way this is a box of PC convertible add-ons and yeah whatever good things I have to say about the 5140 IBM's decisions around peripherals were absolutely ass backwards and sadly to explain those I think we have to talk about the PC Junior I think it's fair to say that by 1986 IBM had already lost control of the PC market uh but I think they just lost their minds as well the PC Junior's catastrophic flop had happened only two years before this machine came out um but I don't think they learned much from The Experience among the Juniors many problems was its pointlessly limited expandability instead of internal card slots that could take the cards that were already available on the market IBM decided all upgrades should come in the form of plastic boxes that clipped onto the side and this wasn't new a few other computers had done it before some Japanese ones and also Texas Instruments ti-994 from 1979 and from 10 000 feet this made a lot of sense instead of selling bare circuit boards that you had to put inside your computer they sold you finished plastic boxes that plugged into an external Port that in itself was reasonable but there were problems particularly with the junior uh one was that again you couldn't use any of the existing Hardware on the market which was probably on purpose but still obviously a dumb idea by 1984 IBM couldn't deny the importance of third-party vendors and sure enough when the PC Junior got cloned by Tandy as the extremely successful Tandy 1000 they put ordinary Isis slots in it because duh now that problem wouldn't apply to a laptop which mostly didn't have room for isoboards anyway although a couple made room for them but the other problem was more relevant and that's simply that the modules made the machine bigger I mean it wasn't as bad as the ti-99 with that thing if you installed a modem and a printer adapter your machine wouldn't fit on your desk anymore it was like this wide the PC Junior's side cars were much thinner they were like this big but it still absurd that if you want to add a parallel port or some Ram your machine has to get physically larger I've always thought this approach while extremely funny was obviously very bad but imagine applying it to a portable machine it's bad enough in a home computer how unhinged would you have to be to do this this with a laptop you are now looking at almost every upgrade ever sold for the 5140. the only thing I'm missing is the voice synthesizer did it make any sense to sell a voice synthesizer for a business laptop absolutely not but IBM had already made it for the PC Junior and I think they were just proud of it for some reason as you can guess these plug in on the back I mean where else that's the only port on the entire unit and to install one we take it and tow it in at one end there we go and then swing the other and click it into place I say it's a click but it's more of a gradual unpleasant mushing into place since the contacts are sort of sliding across one another I IBM didn't didn't really think this one through I was actually only halfway in the slot I just discovered the top was in but the bottom wasn't that's a new failure mode uh but anyway uh there we go the machine is now deeper by almost two inches and heavier and what is all this extra size and weight gotten us cereal and parallel ports that's it all this module ads are serial and parallel ports one on either end uh which as every review pointed out were included as standard equipment on every competitor the dg1 had them the t1100 had them I think everything had them because they were old hat at that point every PC needed a Serial and parallel port no one disagreed with that the Toshiba in fact went further it had a built-in video output not the IBM you need another module for that which they call the CRT adapter this guy here the add-ons each have their own pasu port fortunately so you can install this one and then it presents another upgrade slot and you can then tow this guy in there ah there we go installing these is miserable so now we can connect a printer and a monitor and a modem but to get there we had to make the machine 18 inches long imagine trying to carry this by the handle you'd be scraping it on bushes it's the size of a suitcase uh but of course you wouldn't do that right you know I said the connector on the back isn't for a dock but let's be real this is a dock isn't it you're not supposed to take these with you you plug them into your monitor your modem your printer and then when you want to leave your home office you unclip the whole mess with the cables still plugged in and leave it there so it can all be reconnected at once when you get back home that's a dock I'm being petty all right and this is a reasonable design in a vacuum if nobody else had done better than this then this would make a lot of sense Unfortunately they all did the t1100 with all this stuff built in was still two inches shorter than the 5140 by itself and even if IBM wanted or needed to make these separate modules for some reason why are they so big they shouldn't be this big the t1100 had add-on modules for video and whatnot and they weren't nearly this big I opened up the CRT adapter to try and and find out what was going on in there but it's a pair of sandwiched boards that I don't want to pull apart might break them so I can't quite figure that one out but it sure looks over complicated uh however I did open up the serial parallel adapter and we can see that it's just one board with very low component density and a whole bunch of through-hole components and at this point in the investigation I got upset I mean come on this is primitive this is like Bronze Age design at best this many dip chips in a portable in 86 I mean who was doing that come on look at the t1100 plus here okay it's nearly all surface mount other than like the CPU and some RAM chips and the board is a mess there's just components stuffed everywhere they can fit with no room to breathe and that says it should be this is a portable gadget it should be dense inside I mean did anybody at IBM ever opened up a calculator before I don't think they had because if you look inside the convertible it's empty there's nothing in here the motherboard is nearly bare it's eight big chips and then a yawning expansive unused PCB it's mostly air inside I have to ask what the hell was IBM thinking if they were going to make the convertible the base unit this simple then they could have made it 20 smaller than their competition or they could have just packed it full of all the technology they could which is what everyone else did because it was so obvious I mean surface mount Graphics chips were available why not put one in there it just doesn't make sense when the alternative is something this enormous how did this happen I mean even more ridiculous is the fact that they took up this much space for cereal and pair parallel most of the chips on this board are vlsi which is a term from the era for basically a custom IC if IBM was having custom chips made surely they could have packed serial and parallel port controllers into them that couldn't have cost them hardly anything compared to making this Behemoth on top of that the complexity of these modules would probably have been a lot lower if they put a normal Isa interface on the back and when I wrote this script I had miscounted the pins and thought they couldn't find a connector with enough but I checked again and it turns out this connector has 72 pins and Isa only needs 62. so they could have made this a standard bus interface but instead they decided to take up a bunch of those pins with custom logic signals specific to the 5140 and the ISA bus is multiplexed the data and address lines share the same pins and you need encoder and decoder chips on both sides to handle it all which is why this module has this great big Square vlsi chip in it so look I don't want to be Petty Here If IBM invented the dock before anybody else then okay that cool and this seems like a neat idea on its face but they must have realized pretty early in development that this wasn't really working out and the proof is in the pudding any ee of the time I think would have realized this was silly because nobody else did this or anything like it the other machines had this stuff built in and they usually had internal expansion slots their expansion boards were little tiny things and you know just just to make it even clearer how pathetic IBM looked here by the time the convertible came out Toshiba was already selling their t1100 plus which fixed some problems with the initial machine particularly the keyboard um and it just happened to upgrade the CPU from a 4.7 megahertz 8088 to a full 16-bit 8086 running at nearly 8 megahertz just for fun IBM selling a portable that's two years out of date and toshiba's over here overclocking their chip as an apology for an iffy keyboard this was a joke let it not be said that I had nothing but praise for the 5140. anyway with these add-ons installed the machine is now converted so what's it like well I mean the serial in parallel I mean there's cereal in parallel I could plug in a modem and a printer if I wanted but otherwise there's nothing new there uh the CRT adapter is uh also very straightforward it's basically just a CGA except not really we're back to the PC Junior again this has an RCA jack for composite video output which is normal for CGA but then uh well you probably won't recognize either one of those unless you're a pretty big IBM nerd I don't know what big blue was on in 1984 but I guess they didn't want to put a standard de9 connector on the PC Junior for whatever reason so instead they used basically a motherboard pin header like what you'd plug a ribbon cable into but on the outside of the computer uh they use them for all the ports in fact so the connectors on the back all look identical and they have meaningless labels they're keyed but the key is a thin plastic Ridge deep inside the socket where you can't see it frankly it looks like a contemporary Eastern block machine like a like a Soviet ZX Spectrum clone it really does so I don't know what IBM was smoking but they hadn't run out of it by the time they made the 5140 because it uses the same damn plugs for some reason as far as I can tell uh the other two plugs here are exactly the same as what's on a PC Junior uh the upper one is for an RF modulator so you can plug this into a TV on like channel 3 or whatever which is actually pretty cool I can imagine using that in a hotel or something like that uh the lower one is for a TTL color monitor like the junior used and the manual even says you can use a PC Junior monitor if you have one but since this is a standard CGA TTL output if you already had a normal PC monitor they would sell you this little cable that adapts this to a normal de9 plug if you can figure out which way to plug it in there we go so now it's normal just like it could have been to begin with this monitor was sold by Tandy but it's a PC CGA compatible so it'll work just fine now that is a Site for Sore Eyes this display looks fantastic but we now just have a normal mid 80s PC with CGA works just like any other this is what that test card from earlier should have looked like there's all the colors nice and bright and sharp a friend actually gave me this monitor recently and it was new inbox zero hours on the tube so this is pretty much as good as CGA is going to look and here's my basic app drawing a circle instead of an egg so yeah let's take a moment let's take 15 minutes and talk about that whole aspect ratio thing that I brought up earlier I originally had about 40 minutes of technical details in the script here but I've tried to trim it down it's just too interesting to leave out entirely the reason that this isn't an egg and the LCD was is largely because CGA monitors were double struck and the LCD isn't and some of you know what the hell I just said uh but for the rest here's the best summary I can manage in 1981 when IBM sold the first PC they wanted to include a color video card but they wouldn't have wanted to commission a custom monitor both because that would have cost a fortune and because they wanted people to be able to use a normal television as a display if they didn't want to Shell out for that custom Monitor and so the original PC color graphics card the CGA output video that had the same specs as American ntsc television and you could either plug it into a normal TV with a composite cable or buy a special computer monitor like this Tandy but these were also pretty much just normal television sets they just had digital inputs instead of analog ones which made it look much crisper but it didn't change anything about the resolution or the timing an ntsc television signal for the purposes of our discussion is about 480 pixels tall that's not quite true but we're not spending half an hour explaining why in short you need to send an analog American television 480 lines of video or it won't function but since the CGA card had extremely limited video RAM it couldn't store that much data the same problem was faced by virtually every video game and home computer manufacturer and they all solved it the same way television is interlaced which means the picture is sent as a set of even lines followed by a set of odd lines it's a way of saving bandwidth and by sending a slightly incorrect signal you can force a TV to only draw one set of lines skipping over the rest and reducing the resolution from 480 lines to 240. that's great because you don't have to generate as much video data but it leaves all the odd lines blank which is why we all remember video games having very pronounced scan lines while normal TV usually didn't CGA worked the same way might be a little hard to see since Shadow mask CRTs are kind of blurry but if I expand this image vertically you can see that each visible line of pixels is separated it by a blank line now you can make any TV look like this if you crank the vertical size high enough it'll make the beam actually a trace too wide a path between retraces but that'll also make the image spill off the top and bottom of the screen and you know it is spilled off a little bit here but even if I adjust this to fit within the frame you know this is clearly the right aspect ratio but those blank lines if you look closely are still visible and since all those blank lines are being inserted between all the actual lines of my image that effectively stretches our Circle vertically see check this out this is a 640 by 200 bitmap that's the resolution of CGA and I've drawn a perfect circle on it which your monitor will display with a one-to-one aspect ratio if I insert blank lines to make that a 640 by 400 image well there's our vertical stretch and we can demonstrate this on the computer itself here's my program again drawing a circle and it's pretty circular at least a lot more than the LCD was but here's the thing we know the LCD is showing us a perfect one-to-one image of what's in the frame buffer because the program's resolution is set to 640 by 200 and that's the exact number of cells that this panel has if you look up close you can see that each dot is a single perfect square with the same dimensions so this is a one-to-one match to what's in video RAM and that means that the circle qbasic Drew can't possibly be circular if it was then it would look perfect on that screen but it doesn't because basic is lying to us quick basic was written with the knowledge that CGA is usually displayed with this vertical stretch so when you ask basic to draw a perfect circle it does what you meant instead of what you said it knows what screen mode you're in so it distorts the circle by a known ratio to make it look right you can actually defeat this if you go in and put a aspect ratio statement at the end of the command then it'll draw one that genuinely is a perfect circle this is what A Perfect Circle in the frame buffer looks like when displayed with the typical CGA Distortion what all this means is that to make the LCD on the 5140 display this image properly IBM would have needed to buy a 400 line LCD panel and just leave half the lines blank which would mean paying for a bunch of useless Liquid Crystal or they'd have to draw every line twice which would have looked weird and still cost more I think some vendors did that but I can see why they chose not to now ideally someone would have made a custom LCD panel with pixels that were twice as tall as they were wide but I would guess that instead the cost of 400 line panels came down after a year or two and the whole thing became moot everyone just started putting them on there and then line doubling and having said all that I'm gonna admit that this whole business really twists my brain into knots and I probably got something or all of it wrong so check out those comments for the person who's explaining what I missed anyway with that mystery hopefully solved let's move on since this is CGA on a CRT as originally intended we now have a perfect PC experience so again there's now nothing to say about it any ordinary CGA app will run like normal here's 10 seconds of dangerous Dave if you don't believe me so if you bought a cheap third-party monitor with your 5140 or if you had one from your PC or your PC Junior then you were ready to go uh but if you didn't have a display then IBM offered a 13-inch rgbi display for this machine uh very similar to the Tandy one here in specs although much less aesthetically pleasing if you ask me I don't have one of those unfortunately but suppose you wanted a monitor that was easier to tote around with you for the power user on the go IBM offered a 9-inch monochrome display and I do have one of those remind you of anything say one of those tiny monitors Apple sold for the 2C the ones that everyone seems to want six or eight hundred dollars for I've always wanted one of those but never found a good deal this is pretty much the same thing though just a with an IBM logo in fact it even works great with the 2C a fantastic picture it even looks the part if you don't mind a little blasphemy this uses green phosphors typical for the time and it only accepts composite video input which means you won't get the cleanest possible picture which is a bit of a shame if it accepted MDA or ttlcga you could get an incredibly crisp image since monochrome CRTs have virtually infinite resolution with composite it's always going to be a little blurry but still with a monochrome signal like this it's pretty dang clean even in 80 column text mode now I didn't realize when I first got this that the front cover is optional IBM calls it a high contrast filter it's basically just a piece of smoked acrylic that you can just pop off and I think the motor looks aesthetically much better without it it's like a early PS2 display or like a 85 14 or something however as you can see in a heavily lit room like this one it does make it much harder to read this was probably intended for like massively over lit 1980s offices and that sort of thing in which case the high contrast filter really does make a big difference so don't throw this away if you've got one honestly um this little monitor is kind of wonderful and the whole setup closely resembles Apple's serving suggestion for the 2C like very closely and I think if you were doing word processing or spreadsheeting even at home this was a really cute pairing I'm not sure if anyone else in the market was selling a tiny PC and CRT that went together this well so I guess point point to IBM maybe before we move on there's one more benefit of owning this monitor that I'd be remiss not to point out and I did in the studio and discovered later that I had so much dust on my shirt that I couldn't bear to look at myself and had to delete the clip out of self-preservation what I was going to say is that since this monitor takes composite video you can use it with anything else you have that outputs composite other Old Computers video game consoles or even video cameras I'd seen some pictures before of Amber or green displays hooked up to ordinary camcorders and I thought they looked cool but I wasn't prepared for how otherworldly it would look in real life everyone knows that you can't photograph a CRT it just doesn't render the same way if you want to see what phosphor looks like you have to see it with the naked eye so even if you're not into old computers at all if you come across one of these displays or one of the green phosphor apple displays with a composite input snap it up you won't regret it now when you're using a CRT the LCD stops working or at least it seems to certainly it no longer displays anything except the blinking cursor but that's actually normal PC behavior when you have two graphics cards installed the LCD controller normally emulates either CGA or MDA Graphics but with the CRT adapter installed it gets forced into MDA mode only because you can't have two cards the same type so the CRT becomes the primary card and the LCD no longer receives any output by default but you can go into the system setup and switch it to LCD mono and it'll swap over and run that way with the CRT dead and text mode running on the LCD until you switch it back all attempts to enter Graphics modes will fail and I'm not sure why you would ever want to do this but it is available a more interesting capability though is that CGA and MDA cards occupy different memory spaces which means that if you have software specifically designed for it you can actually run both at once there aren't a whole lot of programs that were ever written to do this and what's out there is a huge pain to get running I've tried everything I could find uh lotus123 for instance could supposedly display graphs on the CGA while showing you the underlying data on the MDA which is pretty cool but I spent two hours trying to get it to work with no luck so I just wrote another basic program um this one is a little app that writes to both screens simultaneously it's using the basic Graphics routines uh for this one the CGA and it's writing raw data into MDA memory for the other and as you can see both screens are updating simultaneously albeit very slowly this could actually work on an original IBM PC if you had a CGA and an MDA or Hercules card this program would actually be able to drive two monitors simultaneously I find this interesting because well probably very few PC owners were willing to buy and install two separate monitors and video cards just to make this possible IBM could have sold software that took advantage of this specifically on the PC convertible since they can safely assume that every user had the LCD then anyone who got the CRT module could be sold software to take advantage of this dual monitor capability without needing to buy a whole separate CRT they could have partnered with somebody at least you know marketed lotus123 or something but I think that would have required a degree of imagination that nobody at IBM had left at least after the PC exited their Skunk Works in 1981. it feels like they just got rid of everybody who had interesting ideas and okay I admit maybe I'm being a little harsh ripping on IBM is easy what with all the rakes they stepped on but their clock was still right at least once a day and I should give credit where it's due for the things they actually did come up with for instance uh this if you can believe it is the PC convertibles printer um you never guess it from looking at it but if you open it up there you go it's clearly a printer uh now suffice to say that by 1986 it was not remarkable to see a tiny portable printer they were all over the place um the dg1 had one as well but I don't think anyone but IBM made one that integrated this well see unsurprisingly this Clips on to the back of the machine although it doesn't do it like the other modules it's like a different team designed it or something instead of just clicking into place uh you have to lift this latch here and swing this out instead of just having a spring catch it's actually got this little Paul here on the end it has to swing open it's real weird uh so you pop that in there and then it sort of swings into place but it doesn't really latch securely until you push this down so that doesn't feel too great but it does seem to hang on just fine now this actually isn't an isobus device the expansion port on the back of the machine has four pins dedicated to a proprietary serial interface just for this printer which is kind of wacky uh and it's also keyed it has to be the first thing plugged into the back of the machine you can connect the other modules but they have to go on after it I have no idea why that is but you can at least put them all together and it makes the machine absolutely gigantic to the point where I don't think it would really fit on most people's desks but IBM actually thought about this for once uh so instead of clipping it to the machine if you're using it at home you can set it over here and you just clip uh the rest of your add-ons onto the back of the machine itself and then IBM provided a little cable which you plug in to the expansion port and then you plug it into the printer and now you can have the fully Decked Out machine uh with the printer sitting off to the side here so you can actually fit it on a normal work surface uh the strangest thing about this is that now the printer is after the other two add-on modules so why exactly did it need to be the first thing in the chain IBM the mechanism in this printer is a kind of a pleasant surprise it's not an impact type like you might expect it's not a dot matrix or a daisy wheel it's not a plotter nothing like that it's actually a thermal printer and that means you can actually still use it see that right there is a thermal print head very simple design uh just has little tiny heating elements now thermal printers like these were a popular option for low-cost printing throughout the 80s they were used with a lot of Home computers and portable computers and such and one of their best features is that they support two types of media um one is thermal paper like this roll here that came with it this is just paper that turns black when it's exposed to heat so the thermal print head as it passes across the page heats up in the shape of characters and they just appear on the page now there's downsides to this it's more expensive than ordinary paper it rarely comes in single sheets it fades in heat and it just Fades over time but if you want something that's simple and quick and you just need little temporary printouts to hand to people then this is fantastic because you can't run out of ink or toner or anything the paper is all you need and it came with this really obnoxious holder that sort of slots on to the sheet feeder here you got to fiddle with this bail and whatnot now if you didn't want to deal with all that or if you wanted prints that would last a little longer then you could install a thermal transfer ribbon this guy goes in here and the ribbon goes in front of the head and now you can feed a plain sheet of paper in here and instead of heating up the paper the head heats up the ribbon and the ink delaminates and sticks to the paper instead so you have an indelible permanent print so this is a neat versatile option you can have either long-term plain paper prints or just quick simple thermal prints and of course it fits in a nice compact package which you can't say about most other printing Technologies so this was the right choice I don't know whether they were durable or not this was actually broken when I got it some little bit of plastic had snapped off in the head lifter mechanism which I had to rip out entirely to get it working again but now it does seem to print just fine on either thermal or plain paper although it doesn't feed very well and I gotta say it's slow and noisy which is funny because one of the advantages of thermal printers is usually a low noise level but either due to further mechanical failures or just cost cutting this one unfortunately makes quite a racket foreign [Music] but the print quality is still quite good and I think this is the one clip-on accessory that really makes sense uh for a laptop at home this printer would have been lacking to say the least there were much better options but suppose you were say walking around a business complex you know working in several different locations in the same day you wouldn't want to carry a whole separate printer with power and data cable so you have to set up and break down over and over like the way the dg1s printer worked but with this clipped onto the machine you actually have a fairly compact system considering that it has a printer built in so yes this is big for a laptop but the fact you can just pick up the whole shooting match and go is pretty neat there's no cables there's no extra anything it'll even run off the PC's battery you still have to figure out where to carry your paper but this is still pretty neat I'm going to give this one to IBM Big W here and you know they actually earned one other genuinely huge win with this machine so now that we've pretty much finished with the hardware let's go back and finish looking at the included software because it will nicely segue us to the denim wall now that we're on a CRT do you notice how the graphics look a little vertically stretched I hadn't actually noticed that until now I don't think IBM expected you to run this program on an external monitor they figured you'd run it on the LCD to start with so they designed their Graphics to fit that aspect ratio probably the only program in existence that actually made that adaptation the Explorer app is as noted utterly unremarkable so we'll exit that the Diagnostics program is also an exciting uh you might hope it would do weird graphical tricks when testing the video output but it just prints the character set and a couple screenfuls of rectangles to be fair it's a pretty thorough test of the video chip and the screen since it has to compare each image to a reference screenshot in the manual although I imagine if any of the tests fail it just tells you to go back to your dealer since this machine has no user replaceable parts that us at the third option software setup this has you insert a blank disk to which it writes a copy of what they call the application selector I baked one of those before the show so let's fire that up appsell as IBM sometimes calls it is not a terribly sophisticated piece of software but it does offer two interesting features and it's the experience IBM wanted us to have apparently so here we are it's a lightly graphical program launcher which provides function key shortcuts to a help file some utilities some bundled apps and a screen and a half of customizable shortcuts obviously most experienced users would scoff at this and close it immediately but stick with me for a minute the help file is just for help on appsell itself and we'll look at utilities later the Dos shortcut on the bottom drops you into a command prompt of course and the ProCom plus is actually a shortcut to a program the previous owner installed so apparently more than zero people used this menu as intended shocking also uh ProCom pluses splash screen goes way harder than it has to the rest of the icons however are for a very basic uh productivity Suite so for instance we have notewriter which is obviously a simple word processor this is probably included mostly so you'll never be without something to drive the printer with so it's pretty minimalist and that isn't surprising since serious word processing packages were still an expensive and competitive market at the time still it's got a couple unusual features it doesn't support Rich text at all but it does have adjustable margins and visible tab stops which is nice and it offers the very interesting option to type outside those margins and in fact if you do that by accident you can use F6 to Reflow text into paragraphs inside those margins it's actually a pretty unusual feature but besides that this pretty much just saves loads and prints of course uh while we're here obviously we want to see that keyboard perform foreign ly it's delightful the next app is scheduler which is exactly what it sounds like it's just a simple date book where you can write down what you're doing at different times of day and see a summary of your week or month there's also a simple phone book where you can Store contact names addresses numbers and the only special feature that offers is the ability to dial those numbers automatically if you have the modem hooked up and the final app is a calculator whose only special feature is a paper tape style history so you can see what calculations you've made these are all completely unimpressive I've seen software like this bundled with a few other PCS including the Tandy 1000 and the Head Start Explorer some of it was even better than this but there are two unusual features here one is the alarm which you can set for a specific time and it'll go off and pop up a reminder which is no no big deal except that it works even if you're in another program obviously an alarm that can only go off if you have the calendar open is useless but given that dos has no multitasking it seems like it should just be an unfixable problem this seems like an impressive achievement it actually isn't though there was a whole class of utilities sometimes called pop-up apps that added very rudimentary multitasking to the PC by leveraging a feature called terminate and stay resonant or TSR TSR alarm clocks weren't uncommon and that's what IBM has provided here as long as you boot the machine with the app selector disk it'll put itself in memory and stay there even while you're running other tasks periodically when the system clock updates the program gets woken up to see if it's time for your alarm to go off and that or use the system timer feature I'm not sure exactly how it works at any rate if it's time then it goes off and it takes over execution to print the message on the screen but when you clear it you go right back to whatever you were doing before this is a cute minor feature not particularly remarkable but it's neat that IBM included it however appsell has one more interesting feature up its sleeve suppose I'm over here in quick basic editing my little circle routine and I need to do a quick calculation I can hit function Escape quick basic goes away an app cell comes back now I can't do much from here like if I try to launch ProCom plus it says multiple applications cannot be loaded but it knows how to load the four apps it came with safely so if I hit F6 I'll get the calculator and I can do some quick calculations and then all I have to do is exit this and hit dos again and I'm right back to Quick basic again this is cute although not actually unique there were several programs both free and Commercial they could do this and more but I think it was a nice move to include it with the Machine new users in particular people who didn't have experience with computers before would be pretty impressed by this ability and it is useful uh now I don't think it's very compatible I found that if my basic program is running that the shortcut doesn't work so there's probably a lot of software it would also have that problem but I figure most things like lotus123 would probably work fine there's the bigger problem that you can't copy and paste anything under dos there's no clipboard for it so you can't copy numbers into or out of the calculator or text in and out of notewriter but that's just a universal problem with DOs now if you're a power user these little tricks probably don't hold your attention at all and you'd like to just throw this disc out but you shouldn't because it contains one essential utility which is in the tools menu there's not much of use in here this is where you can set the shortcuts in app selector but then the rest of this is like copying files formatting disks just in case you forget the commands I suppose so nothing you'd ever use but F2 take you to the system profile which most of us know as CMOS setup in this era a lot of PCS including everything IBM made lacked a built-in setup program you couldn't press delete on boot to set your startup options system time Etc you had to load a special program from disk and this is that of course there weren't that many options in the CMOS in this era especially on this machine boot order wasn't applicable since there's no hard drive and certainly there's no age GP speed or overclocking so instead we just got the date and time video mode settings and a couple power management options there would actually be a few more settings here if the CRT adapter wasn't installed there's a couple things like having the machine shut down if it's been idle for a while or turning certain peripherals off when it's on battery that only show up if you don't have this docked for some reason the display mode is here for compatibility because when you're running in text mode on a normal PC you might have an MDA video card or a CGA and the CGA could be in either 40 or 80 column mode you would normally select between those with dip switches on your motherboard or a program would select the right one during run time but if you don't have either of those things and this machine doesn't have any dip switches then you've got to select them in software so none of that is at all special except for this last setting here power on option resume or IPL IPL is an IBM term I guess they hated the word boot so instead they use the term initial program load although I suspect it came from mainframes and they just hadn't gotten rid of it even though the rest of the world had anyway if you set the machine to IPL on every startup then whenever you power it on it'll start from scratch but if you have it set to resume then every time it powers on it'll try to pick up where it left off when you last powered it down very simply IBM invented standby this is such a subtle thing you'd you'd never notice it if you weren't looking for it it looks like one of those meaningless options you had on your Pentium 3 back in 1999 like disable AGP memory hole you would never guess that this represents a feature that IBM invented almost two years before anyone else that later became a linchpin of mobile computing let me show you so here I am playing dangerous Dave or at least trying to on this atrocious LCD uh and now I'm gonna shut it off in fact uh let's go ahead and unplug it for good measure and now let's turn it back on [Music] and it picks up right where it left off even in mid jump it's as simple as that it takes about 10 seconds IBM called it resume and nobody else had it to be accurate uh you're not actually powering it down at all there is no power switch on this machine when you have resume enabled uh hitting this button will always put it in standby the only way to truly reboot is to either crash the system unplug the battery or hit control alt delete curiously you can also hit Control Function delete which is sort of a harder reboot I suspect that it uses like a hardware Watchdog to let you reboot the machine even if it's hard Frozen because otherwise you just have to open up the battery compartment and pull the cable so this was tremendous and completely unprecedented in the PC World uh because the architecture had no support for it in modern computers standby is baked into the CPU and chipset the acpi standard added Rich features that let the CPU voluntarily go to sleep until woken by the power button a mouse click an alarm or many other things but nothing like that existed until the mid 90s so IBM had to invent this solution from scratch I won't pretend to fully understand the implementation details but from reading the technical manual I believe that when you press power it triggers an interrupt that freezes the machine and saves some critical State into of all places the LCD controller apparently IBM found a few bytes of spare memory in there and decided to store the CPU registers and whatnot hashtag just 80s things I'm guessing that's why you have to have the LCD installed to use resume because it physically is where it stores the data anyway once that's all written out the machine then mostly shuts off and this is where it gets a little hazy for me I'm not sure how much of the hardware actually gets powered down at this point the CPU has a halt feature and I'm sure that gets engaged but if you recall the alarms I mentioned earlier in the scheduler app they actually work even when the machine is suspended [Music] which means either that they're being programmed into some dedicated Hardware timer or that the CPU wakes up periodically during suspend to check if any of them have fired those are pretty radically different approaches and both could be wrong so that's a big question mark for me I do know however that the memory stays active the whole time because this is one of the very few computers in existence that I'm aware of that has static Ram one of the few PCS anyway is an incredibly unusual decision PCS both then and now normally use Dynamic RAM and the big difference is that dram has to be refreshed if you don't rewrite the data periodically it degrades so the machine has to periodically walk over all the memory rows and sort of top them off as it were SRAM on the other hand will hold the same data as long as it has power it requires more energy to run and it costs a lot more but since it doesn't require any special support circuitry the only thing the convertible has to do is to keep the ram powered when it's asleep then when it wakes up all your data will still be when you press the power button again the machine Powers up checks the LCD finds that it was suspended does a couple quick checks and then jumps right back to where you were in memory and I could have some of that wrong but however it works it works so this may not be quite the same as a modern standby feature but it has mostly the same effect and more importantly nobody else had done it yet in fact as far as I can tell it took at least a year for anybody else to do it at all the earliest mention I can find of a similar feature is on the Toshiba T1000 in March 88. the reviews of the convertible both in 86 and 87 all call this an IBM exclusive feature and if that's true then that's a truly massive W we're so used to having standby that probably very few of us have ever imagined how much things would suck without it so try to picture this suppose you're working on a document and you keep getting interrupted uh people keep talking to you you keep having to put your work down for 15 minutes at a time here's what that looks like without standby you're working you're working and someone walks up to you you go to file save you wait for the floppy to finish writing and the light to go out you power the machine down you do whatever you need to do you turn the machine back on you wait for it to check the ram because you couldn't skip that in those days wait for it to take the disc to boot from the disk start your word processor wait for it to load go to file open select your file wait for that to load and finally you're ready to work again here's what it looks like if you have standby you're working you're working and someone walks up to you you press power when they're done you press power again and five seconds later you're back to work [Applause] uh so for almost the first time since they released the PC in 1981 IBM brought something really important to the market that maybe just maybe nobody else would have thought of doing for a long time and that's a remarkable accomplishment for a company that in my observation had failed to keep up with the realities of the industry for half a decade in fact even with toshiba's fast compact feature-packed machines to compare to I wonder how many people were able to ignore every missing port and weird limitation of the convertible solely because of this resume feature and maybe the Fantastic keyboard there's no way to know but I'll tell you this much unless you plan on writing the Next Great American novel in bed with the lights on and half numb legs there are probably better choices for your next foray onto retro Computing eBay I'd like to just add some disclaimers before I wrap up here so I don't get a variety of comments this video was far longer and more complex than I was ready for and I'm going out of town next week so I have no time to do reshoots and that left me with some problems uh for one I apparently forgot to finish writing the end of the script which is why I pretty much just cut off in the middle of explaining the resume feature I also found a couple serious factual errors that forced me to delete some segments and the LCD screen turned out to be far harder to photograph than I expected so some of those shots do less explaining than I had hoped plus the second angle camera and my fake office plant were much further in frame than I expected which made fitting all the on-screen elements in really tough so if I had the time I would have reshot this video and if it feels disjointed or cramped now you know why it also turns out to be much harder to find pictures of the dg1 and t1100 than I expected all the ones I'd found before shooting turned out to be mislabeled and I finally had to ask some generous people on Twitter to take new photos for me without which I couldn't have made this video so thank you both even still the t1100 pictures I have are actually incorrect they're the plus model and that's because there just aren't any good images of the 1100 to be found that aren't extremely copyright encumbered now the record suggest that the original model hardly sold and all the features I described seem to have been identical on both but it's still dirty pool to hold up one thing and call it another for that matter many of my release dates might be wrong this isn't exactly Nintendo we're talking about here Street dates weren't reliably recorded and products were often announced long before release and then reviewed months afterwards so some of the comparisons here might not be quite right still I think my conclusions are correct both on the feature sets of these machines and how they were perceived at the time if I had bothered to write an outro it would have just been restating the obvious the 5140 was a disappointment then and now it's not a machine I'm likely to do much with in the future and it's too big and plain to make a good display piece so maybe the reason I didn't finish the script is that once again I found that once I'd explained the specifications there just wasn't much left to say I wasn't wrong PCS really do just speak for themselves anyway I get that this video might be a little confusing and I will try to make clarifications in the comments but if you're still here it must mean you enjoyed yourself enough to stick it out so why not stick around for another minute and watch the credits for now thanks for watching uh and if you enjoyed this video then consider subscribing to my channel so I know you're into this sort of thing and remember to turn on notifications if you want to find out when I upload new stuff but if you really enjoyed this then consider it supporting me on patreon like these people here are doing I couldn't afford most of the stuff I show off on here um well not this somebody sent this to me but most of the stuff I show off I couldn't afford without their support as well as the studio itself and uh the cameras and the mics and so on so I'm incredibly grateful to all of them for their support thank you all so much and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]

Views: 209,734

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: htl_JbZIcUU

Length: 87min 37sec (5257 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022