November, 1975 Portable Computer
May 11th, 2008
Here’s what the IBM 5100 Portable Computer looked like:
From the look on that guy’s face, I bet that thing was damn heavy. I scanned this from the November, 1975 issue of Scientific American. Here are the specs:
I just received a whole box full of Scientific Americans from the 1970s. I’ll scan and post some of the Apple and Radio Shack ads in coming days.
The March, 1979 issue looks really cool — it features detailed descriptions of ancient catapults with lots of diagrams showing their construction. The whole magazine had a distinctive hands-on feel back then.
That’s not a computer… it’s a calculator! The “Over 100 often-used analytical routines in mathematical, statistical and financial calculations” is a dead givaway. Also, that guy looks like he’s wearing a dress!
“it features detailed descriptions of ancient catapults with lots of diagrams showing their construction”
That computer looks like it was designed to be launched from a catapult! I bet you could do some major damage with that thing. ^_^
I actually worked on the HP competitor to this model in an Engineering firm in 1977-1978. If you stack two of those on top of each other, you’ll have the correct size. And the screen was the same size. Reverse Polish Notation, numbers in scientific notation (9.36 * 10^4), green text on black…. Ah, memories.
Much prefer my MacBookPro.
I used to love Scientific American in the 70’s. I was in high school and had a subscription. It was great back then. It’s a shadow of its former self now, IMHO (or maybe I’ve changed).
Too funny. I learned to program on a Compaq “Portable” 286 which was the same size and released in 1986: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=870&st=1
I used one of these in the late 70’s to program some queueing theory routines in APL. Yep, it was heavy. It the time I worked for a large state government computing center and IBM loaned me one for four weeks so I could learn APL (”A” “P”robramming “L”anguage = APL). We then installed APL on one of our mainframe computers, and I used an Anderson Jacobson typewriter terminal equipped with an APL typeball (think “Selectric”) and APL keyboard to actually do the calculations.
I didn’t get my first PC at home until December of 77 … it had assembly language, a variant of Basic, and later had Microsoft Basic and Microsoft Fortran (once I added two floppy disk drives @ $550/each). But the 5100 was a class act. But I was stronger then and didn’t have much problem lifting things. An altogether neat experience.